Before he became a world renowned immunologist, William Frankland played a critical role in saving the lives of many PoWs, that of my father, Geoff Munton, included. As a camp doctor he worked with rudimentary resources and at risk of punishment beatings while he cared for and protected his most vulnerable patients from the cruelty of the Japanese regime.
He encountered my father at Kranji hospital after the liberation of Singapore, lying on a pallet and weighing less than 32kg (5st). From the local hospital ship he secured the blood transfusion that ultimately saved Dad’s life. Bill later recounted that he was never sure of my father’s fate until years later he was walking down Piccadilly and he bumped into “Sapper Munton” and his daughter Sally.
Her portrait of Bill was presented to, and still hangs at, the Frankland allergy clinic at St Mary’s hospital in Paddington, London.
Andy Munton
In 1973, when I was 13, the progressively severe asthma that had forced me to give up athletics, and turned every cold into nights wheezing for breath, saw me referred to the allergy clinic at St Mary’s hospital, Paddington. The consultant, Pierre Buisseret, asked my mother for my medical history.
When I was born she had been unable to breastfeed me, so I had been fed cow’s milk, which made me seriously ill with what the hospital thought was a gastric infection. I was sent to the isolation ward, and was not well enough to go home for many weeks.
The door of the office was ajar, and a silver-haired man in a pinstriped suit who had been walking down the corridor entered to sit down beside Dr Buisseret. Leaning forward like a keen heron, chin on hand, he began to interrogate my mother.
When he had all he needed to know, Buisseret leaned back in his chair beaming: “Mrs Coster, what we have here is a classic case of milk allergy, and during the early 1960s [so just too late for me] the person sitting beside me did the research to first prove the link between symptoms like your son had and milk allergy.”
That was William Frankland, and his research and that diagnosis changed my life. Three months later, on a cow’s-milk-free diet, I was well again.
Graham Coster
