appreciate to this day – including doing house calls. In fact I probably had many of the women, small children and the elderly patients in the practice requesting my care. The geriatric patients often seemed to gravitate to me as I was the only woman doctor in the practice.”

Dr Stanley Moonsawmy worked as a locum at a local hospital in Edinburgh, but “in those days sometimes it was difficult for foreign graduate students to get the top posts as young junior doctors in the teaching hospitals. You often had to go peripherally to the country hospitals miles from Edinburgh. I was a houseman in medicine in Galashiels, which is about 40 miles from Edinburgh and that was a six-month post followed by six months of a surgical houseman’s post at Bangour Hospital in West Lothian, which was about 10 or 12 miles from Edinburgh. Thereafter I moved back to the teaching hospital as a senior house officer and slowly rose to being a registrar in the main teaching hospital, which was the Royal Infirmary, Edinburgh, where I spent two or three happy years while doing my postgraduate training in my chosen speciality, respiratory diseases. I continued to practice in the hospital system in this area until about 1973 and then found it difficult as I had reached what was regarded in those days as the ceiling for non-white doctors. In that it was very difficult to get the young registrar grade.”

Dr Moonsawmy was advised to emigrate but,

having married, he decided to go into general practice in the UK. Of that time [1973] he says: “there were a lot of stories in tabloid newspapers about foreign doctors in Britain often in a stereotypical, rather derogatory way … Most of us had to go into single-handed practice which was much more strenuous and much more difficult but enjoyable at the same time. That is how I ended up a single-handed practitioner since 1973 to the present time … In this area of Edinburgh, there were no non-white consultants at all when I was a student and young doctor, and the first non-white student appointed in Edinburgh had to be in the specialities where white doctors did not want to go into, such as the venereal diseases clinic, psychiatry or geriatrics. None of these attracted me as I wanted to specialise in respiratory diseases.

I ended up in a village just on the edge of Edinburgh, which was a mining community … I did encounter problems in my first one or two years here … Quite a few of my patients heard that it was a foreign doctor and disappeared completely by registering with other practices. So that meant I had to inherit a practice with less patients and therefore of course with less income, but over the years I’ve built it up and won the respect of the local population by hard work, extremely excellent work and the word spreads around very quickly in communities if you set certain very high standards and you keep to them. Difficult at times, but one has learnt how to survive.”

Dr Franklyn Jacobs had always intended to return to the Caribbean. “I was offered a partnership at every practice where I worked. My answers were always the same: ‘No, I will be going back home.’ That was, until I was ‘bitten’ by a surgery in Hornsey Road, North London, not too far away from here. In fact, I have never roamed far and Hornsey has remained my medical constituency. The principal of the surgery where I did locum work had advertised for a partner. He

A framed picture of Dr Eddie Adams