Horace Joules

He passed his medical degree in 1925, and in 1928 he achieved Membership of the Royal Colleges of Physicians and was awarded a Medicinae Doctor (MD) with a gold medal from the University of London.

[4]  While at the Middlesex Hospital, Joules had been inspired by Somerville Hastings, surgeon in charge of  the Ear and Throat Department,[5][6] who was also chairman of the London County Council and subsequently became a Labour MP for Barking.

[10] During and after the war he was a strong supporter of the creation of a National Health Service (NHS),[11] and in 1948 he was appointed member of the North-west Metropolitan Regional Hospital Board and chairman of its medical committee.

[17][18] The unit was dissolved upon Morris's retirement in 1975 but by that time it had assembled a very influential team of epidemiologists and undertaken extensive research into chronic diseases and social medicine.

Sir Hugh Beaver, chairman of Guinness Brewers and a member of the management committee of the Central Middlesex Hospital, was appointed to lead a parliamentary inquiry into the problem.

[28][29] In 1952 an anonymous civil servant in the Ministry of Health wrote that:[Joules] ‘is as you know the main protagonist against smoking - on the CHSC, on the SAC(CR) and in the Press.’[29] Nevertheless, despite opposition from Sir Ernest Rock Carling, chair of the SAC(CR),[29] he persuaded the Central Health Services Council to make the first official statement in Britain on the harmful effects of cigarette smoking.

[29] It is likely his contacts with the Labour Minister for Health, Hilary Marquand, and the recent death in February 1952 of King George VI, a heavy smoker, from a heart attack after an operation for lung cancer helped his case.

[2] In 1953 Joules was quoted in Parliament by the Labour MP, Harry Hynd as saying that: 'by 1965...unless something is done [about smoking], the number of deaths per annum [from lung cancer] will reach 25,000.

[2] Joules was replaced by Janet Aitken, who admitted to the Health Minister that: ‘I am not really an expert from a medical point of view in cancer and radiotherapy.’[33] Nevertheless, although Joules had been dropped from SAC(CR), he was still a member of the SMAC and he persuaded it to advise the Minister that it was ‘desirable that appropriate action should be taken constantly to inform the public of the known connection between smoking and cancer of the lung and of the risks involved in heavy smoking’.

[35] Nevertheless, the tide of opinion was turning and in March 1956 the CHSC yielded to a further recommendation from the SMAC and advised that: 'Propaganda on smoking and lung cancer was becoming urgent...There was already sufficient evidence of a causal  connection ...to justify a centrally directed propaganda campaign, for example through schools and general practitioners'.

[38] Eventually, following a special report on smoking and lung cancer in June 1957 by the Medical Research Council, the government conceded the issue, and the Minister of Health expressed unambiguous support for the conclusions reached by Doll and Hill, while at the same time saying that everyone would have to 'make up his mind, and must be relied upon as a responsible person to act as seems best'.

Joules followed this by speaking to more than 250 children at a Croydon school and screening a film which showed a surgeon conducting an operation in which a cancer of the lung was removed.

[43] Following its election, in 1965 the new Labour government passed a law prohibiting cigarette advertising on television[44] and the public health campaign against tobacco entered its modern phase, but by this time Joules had retired.

In 1962 he took early retirement due to poor mental health and moved to Colchester, Essex;[51] Joules had suffered from bipolar disorder since the second world war.

On 24 April 1968 the Central Middlesex Hospital opened a residency, teaching laboratory and lecture theater, named Horace Joules Hall in his honour.

[54] A one-day conference on 'Progress in the prevention of chest disease in memory of Horace Joules' was also held at the Avery Jones Postgraduate Centre of the Central Middlesex Hospital, London, on 27 January 1978.

'A Patient at Home'. A painting by Dorothy Mary Barber commissioned by Horace Joules. The old man in the painting was a bronchitic and arthritic patient of the hospital: he lived in Harlesden . He was painted in his hospital bed, but the room was painted from outside the window of his dwelling, as the artist was deterred from entering by the smell.