Any long-time users of the Duke's Avenue medical practice (now Muswell Hill Practice) may remember it's founder Dr Bill Smith. Bill died on 4th of January at the age of 97 in Ipswich hospital, after a brief time in a care home in Suffolk. Until then he had been living at his house in Muswell Hill, extraordinarily vigorous, cheerful, sociable and keen to talk.
Bill Smith at his front door, 2018
Medicine was not Bill's original choice of career. He only considered becoming a doctor in his early thirties, and as he had no scientific background he had to go to technical college and acquire the basic school scientific qualifications to apply to medical school. His initial ambition had been to become a sculptor. When he was demobilised from the RAF - where he had been a weather-reconnaissance pilot - in 1946, he went to the Slade School of Art, then went on to become a monumental and architectural stonemason, and worked as assistant to the sculptor Eric Kennington, whose best known work is probably the memorial to Lawrence of Arabia in Wareham, Dorset.
By his late twenties Bill was finding this life unsatisfying, and felt he was unlikely to get very far with it. Partly on his brother's suggestion, he decided to take up medicine. (His father had been a GP, but that had not inspired him to follow suit.) He studied at the London Hospital Medical School, then joined the Caversham Practice in Kentish Town as a trainee. At that time, Kentish Town was a fairly deprived working-class area, and the Caversham had been set up there by a couple of left-wing doctors, Hugh Faulkner and Anthony Ryle, specifically to bring a good quality of medical service to the area under the newly-formed National Health Service. (According to Tony Ryle, one patient described it as 'the poor man's Harley Street'.)
As an art student Bill had joined the Communist Party, mainly as a way of working for the peace campaign against the threat of atomic war, in much the same way as people had joined the Party before the war as it seemed to be the only effective force against the threat of Fascism. Also great public enthusiasm had grown up for the Soviet Union as a result of its war-effort. Later on, it was through Party contacts that Bill met Hugh Faulkner and was eventually taken on at the Caversham. Methods at the Caversham were radical for those days: they held regular practice meetings at which all the staff could discuss their work and offer suggestions to each other, and also took a broad view of the family and work circumstances of their patients and the effect these might have on their health. In particular, Tony Ryle started to take a close interest in the mental-health issues which his patients' social circumstances could arouse. These ways of working appealed to Bill and in his later career he tried to contribute to their implementation and development.
In the 1970s Bill was at the Highgate Practice where group-working and concern to see people's medical issues in their social and family context were developed further. They had important links with the Tavistock Centre, which were as much about the doctors themselves and their ways of working at the practice as about the mental health issues raised by their patients. They also attached special importance to making sure all levels of staff could have their views of the practice's work, and what they knew about the patients, taken into consideration. A paper written in 1980 by Bill and other colleagues at Highgate gives a very interesting account of how their integrated way of group-working worked, and how successful it could be in awkward cases. Bill moved to Duke's Avenue in the 1980s because Muswell Hill was poorly served for GPs. Socially, it was then fairly different from what it has since become. He continued his interest in family-centred medicine, and after retirement was chair of the Open Door counselling service for young people in Crouch End.
He retired, he said, because he no longer felt he had anything very much to contribute to medicine, suggesting he saw it as a creative activity rather like art. He took up art again, painting, often scenes in his garden, and sculpting, latterly with a rasp on found stones of interesting shape, rather than hammer and chisel. He had always enjoyed the company of artists, and had many as his patients - along with a good many distinguished medical practitioners - and he valued the sense of a creative community that he found amongst the people around him. People who knew him will miss a very engaging and interesting man.
Bill's sculpture garden at his home. The piece in the foreground and insert were exhibited in the Young Contemporaries exhibition, London, in 1949, which he helped to organise. Queen Elizabeth, later Queen-mother, visited. Bill said she had a good eye for art and bought work by a number of young left-wing artists.
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