How amazing to open the Guardian and find a summary by Liz Reason of a letter from me you published in 1970 (Letters, 11 September) suggesting that conservatism could be classified as a degenerative disease. I had no idea that my letter would have been pinned to anyone’s wall for years! Sadly I have mislaid my own copy.
When I wrote the letter I was a clinical medical student at Guy’s Hospital Medical School. I received various personal responses to it – mostly negative, including one in green ink which told me that my “soul read badly” and that I had been reported by its (anonymous) author to the Prince of Wales.
More significantly, the Guardian published a letter of disagreement from a surgeon at Guy’s, dissociating the institution from my views, though the Guardian – true to form at the time – managed to obscure his argument by misprinting “synapses” as “synopses”! To be fair, others at Guy’s congratulated me on the letter and no action was taken against me for writing from that address – nor did it harm my future career.
Do I still agree with my core argument? I have remained a Guardian subscriber to this day, but I disagree with its political stance more often than I did in 1971. I put this down to my own life experiences, but I do realise that others may think I am proving the point I made 44 years ago!
Dr William Jackson
Harwell, Oxfordshire
