Hello I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co. UK slash radio 4. My My castaway this week is the cardiologist Jane Somerville, now an emeritus

professor in her discipline at Imperial College London, she has gained a worldwide reputation

for her pioneering work on congenital heart disease. She began studying medicine in the early

1950s when only a very few women were admitted through the

doors of med school. It's really just as well they let her in. She's been

responsible for groundbreaking advances in cardiovascular treatment and founded the hugely successful World Congress of Pediatric Cardiology.

She had something of a role model in her mother, a hard-working, very clever successful woman too.

And her early years as a pupil at a boy's school in Wales must surely also have prepared her

for making her way in such a heavily male-dominated profession. She has a reputation for being

straight talking and her late husband used to urge her to be more prudent, but she

says it wasn't fun to be prudent it's much more fun to be

mafioso and naughty now mafioso and naughty Jane probably not the two words that people

would associate with somebody in your profession. Tell me more about that characteristic.

Oh, well I think those who know me well

would know the naughty part because I think that I've always been

rather anti-establishment and also rather blunt because I never

thought I had much time to make my point so I did it quickly and as my children say rudely.

You had to be very naughty if you were with naughty boys at school.

If you weren't naughty too, you didn't get noticed or you certainly didn't get your points

over.

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