Robert Edgar Hope-Simpson - Working Life

Working Life

His first post was in the Dorset County Hospital in Dorchester in Dorset as a Resident Medical Officer. He had heard that the hospital was friendly but busy. In those days he could expect one afternoon off in an otherwise seven day working week. He would be on call for the other 156 hours. And do everything. He would live in a hospital room, and a major perk of the job was the slate outside his door on which he could chalk up his morning request for tea. And his shoes would be cleaned. A year later, in 1933, he answered an advertisement for "an assistant with a view" to help in Beaminster in the practice of Dr. Herbert Lake. Hope-Simpson was prepared for questions about his Quaker views, especially as he’d discussed them with his disapproving father the year before. However Hope-Simpson was very surprised at the brevity of his interview with Dr Lake. And Dr Lake didn’t care whether his clever young assistant was a vegetarian teetotalling pacifist providing he didn’t hunt on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. Edgar and Eleanor settled down at Gable End on Hogshill Street in Beaminster. In 1939 the war started. Edgar maintained his pacifist views. He was in a reserved occupation, so probably would not have been called up but insisted on registering as a conscientious objector. By the end of the war Edgar was getting restless, and so was his practice. He had established a pioneering home nursing service amongst his rural patients, as well as outside surgeries in the Marshwood Vale, Salway Ash, Toller Porcorum, West Milton and Powerstock. And he had developed a fledgling note keeping system linking patients, where they lived and their diseases. So Hope-Simpson left Beaminster in 1945 for Cirencester. Four years earlier his wife had given him Wensleydale general practitioner William Pickles' then new book Epidemiology in Country Practice, detailing the epdemiological research of common diseases which could be carried out by a general practitioner. Hope-Simpson modelled his approach on this, and he exchanged visits with Pickles. Only a year after starting at Cirencester, he transformed his practice (housed in an eighteenth century cottage in the high street) into Cirencester Research Unit which was funded Public Health Laboratory Service 1947-1973 and the Department of Health and Social Security 1973-1981. His research activities, as well as a post as pathologist at the Cirencester Memorial Hospital never stopped him practising as a popular general practitioner . The bulk of his interest was in infectious diseases. He was self taught and without any formal epidemiological or research training, but he learnt fast. He started to write papers, particularly on chickenpox and herpes zoster, in the 1940s and 1950s, which were published in the Lancet and the BMJ, overall he produced a series of publications (while being a GP) of which many professors would be proud.