Bergen-Belsen 1945: A Medical Student's Journal. Imperial College Press (2014)
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After graduating in medicine in 1947, Hargrave took a house job at Westminster Hospital after which he completed his national service with the Royal Air Force in Egypt and Kenya. Upon returning to Wootton Bassett in 1950, he became a general practitioner and a clinical assistant to the ear, nose and throat clinic at the Princess Margaret Hospital, Swindon. By 1956, he had a purpose-built surgery with an appointment system and radiotelephone.
Hargrave had, until May 1945, spent the Second World War at school and studying medicine.[4] In April 1945, he was among eleven medical students from Westminster who volunteered to help relieve a famine in Holland, a part of the Netherlands still occupied by the Germans but awaiting liberation.[5] On the day of departure, the students were informed that they were instead being sent to help at the recently liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany.[6][7]
At Belsen, army medics were trying to prevent the spread of disease and save those they could. Hargrave described in his daily journal the process by which the huts in Camp One were cleaned, disinfected and turned into basic temporary hospitals, after which its inmates were cleaned, disinfected and then moved out. He led this process in hut 210 and performed treatments including the excision of eyelid cysts and tuberculous glands in the neck. He became accustomed to seeing boils, gangrene, diarrhoea, typhus and severe malnutrition. Supervision and briefings were given by nutritionist Arnold Peter Meiklejohn, Brigadier Hugh Glyn-Hughes and Colonel James Johnston. Hargrave also taught a Polish girl, Zosia Wiśniowska, how to speak English.[2]
Career
In 1947, Hargrave graduated in medicine and took up his first house job at Westminster Hospital.[2]
Hargrave married nurse Joy Thompson in 1948, a year after qualifying as a doctor. They had a daughter, Sally, and a son, David. Both developed polio in 1953, two years before the first injectable Salk vaccine. David made a full recovery, but Sally, who was nine months old at the time, was left with a paralysed leg. She became a secretary and David a GP in Portland, Dorset.[2]
Death and legacy
Hargrave was diagnosed with a brain tumour, and died on 25 July 1974.[2]
Hargrave, David (2014). "Dr Michael John Hargrave and Acknowledgements", in Bergen-Belsen 1945: A Medical Student's Journal. Imperial College Press, London. pp. xv-xx. ISBN9781783262885
This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Michael_Hargrave, and is written by contributors.
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