Dr John Marks was one of 120 medical students who qualified on July 5 1948, and one of 941 who qualified in the year that the NHS was founded. He went on to have a colourful and distinguished career in the NHS.
Born in Hackney, east London, to Lewis Marks, a poulterer, John Henry Marks studied at Tottenham County School before reading medicine at Edinburgh University, where he was "into all the mischief under the sun".
He clearly recalls the day he qualified as a doctor. "I remember listening to the wireless in the morning when the newsreader said, 'Today is a great day for British medicine'," he says. "Then, at 6pm, the university authorities put up our exam results on the notice board. I had passed and Rosemary Davey, the genius of the year, looked at me and said, ‘I suppose you’re going to get drunk?' and I replied, 'Too bloody true’, and I did."
Dr John Marks, 1948
Nine days later, John Marks registered with the General Medical Council and went straight into a locum job in Shoreditch, east London at a salary of £250 a year. "The demand when the NHS started was unbelievable. Before the health service started there was guaranteed treatment through National Health Insurance for low-paid workers (the panel system), but even then their families were excluded. There was an enormous demand for surgery for previously untreated conditions. Also, for things like wigs and, in some places, cotton wool because it was free."
After a two-year stint in the Royal Army Medical Corps (October 1949-1951), Dr Marks returned to find there were "more doctors than jobs" and that many of his contemporaries were emigrating. "I stayed in Britain and drove a lorry for three weeks. On April 19 1954, I eventually got a job in Borehamwood, where I stayed until I retired from general practice in September 1989 at the age of 64."
In May 2008, Dr Marks published his autobiography, The NHS: Beginning, Middle and End?, in which he reflects on his life as a GP, his six years as Chairman of Council of the British Medical Association (August 1984-July 28 1990) and on the NHS as a whole. His final assessment of his time in the National Health Service is borne of frustration. "It was always starved of money and if we’d had the sort of money then that is being thrown at it now, we’d have had the best health facility in the world bar none," he says. "But it remains the greatest social experiment in history."
- The NHS 60 content, including this article, was written in 2008 to mark the 60th anniversary of the NHS.
