Dr Bill Frankland
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 9 August 2015
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Dr Bill Frankland.
Frequently referred to as the "grandfather of allergy", his achievements include the introduction of the pollen count to the British public and the prediction of increased levels of allergy to penicillin.
Born in Cumbria in 1912, Dr Frankland turned 103 in March. He studied medicine at Oxford and worked at St Mary's hospital in Paddington, London, before war intervened. He signed up to the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), but spent over three of the six years he spent in the army as a prisoner of war in Singapore.
After the war, he began work in the dermatology department at St Mary's, but quickly switched to allergy which became his passion. During the fifties he served as a registrar to Alexander Fleming who had discovered penicillin back in 1928. In 1954 he published a seminal research paper about a double-blind randomised trial proving that pre-season pollen injections greatly reduced the symptoms of hay fever sufferers.
He has treated high profile patients including Saddam Hussein and given evidence in court - possibly the oldest expert witness to do so. He continues to work in a private practice and has remarked, "I really don't know what people do when they retire at 65.".
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:06.0 | For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast. |
| 0:10.0 | For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk. |
| 0:17.0 | Radio 4. My castaway this week is the allergy specialist Dr Bill Franklin. |
| 0:38.6 | Known as the grandfather of allergy, it's not just his significant contribution to medicine that's worth |
| 0:44.0 | celebrating, but also the mind-boggling length of his life and career. Born in 1912, the |
| 0:50.7 | year Titanic sunk, he was a clinical assistant to Alexander Fleming. |
| 0:55.2 | He introduced the pollen count to everyday life, and his wide-ranging research has revolutionized |
| 1:00.9 | the treatment for hay fever and asthma sufferers. He was nearly a |
| 1:04.6 | hundred years old when he was called as an expert witness in a court case involving a |
| 1:08.9 | careless driver, a wasp sting and a smartphone. Brought up in Cumbria his childhood was happy and privileged and he went on to study medicine at Oxford and then came |
| 1:18.8 | what he describes as three and a half years of hell as a prisoner of war at the hands of the Japanese. |
| 1:26.0 | The starvation and relentless cruelty he suffered left him close to death. |
| 1:30.0 | On one occasion his life was literally saved by the toss of a coin. |
| 1:35.0 | His memories of those wartime years were so searing they remained unspoken for decades. |
| 1:40.0 | We don't have time to list all the awards and the plaudits he's received. |
| 1:43.7 | Suffice to say his standing is such that St Mary's Allergy Unit in Paddington in London is named after |
| 1:49.9 | him and that he continues to publish academic articles, travel the world and occasionally even see patients. |
| 1:57.0 | He says, |
| 1:58.0 | People ask me how I've reached 103. I say, |
| 2:02.0 | I've been so near to death so many times, but I've always just missed. That's why I'm still alive. So we welcome you, Dr. Bill Franklin. It is very nice to be talking to you today. |
| 2:13.0 | I know that you've been practicing since the 1940s and I know you keep up to date with all the |
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