The world has transformed since Averil Mansfield, the UK’s first female vascular surgeon, graduated from the University of Liverpool.
In 1960, The Beatles had just formed and the Royal Iris sailed the Mersey. Hospitals had no ultrasounds, MRI or CT scans - doctors just cut in and explored. It was also the year Averil first saw an operation on an aneurysm, a bulge where blood passes through a weakened blood vessel.
By the time she retired in 2003, Averil had helped save thousands of lives by playing a key role in developing surgeries to prevent stroke. Despite the cover of her new book - Life in Her Hands - describing Averil as a "pioneering female surgeon", she shrugs off the title.
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Averil, 85, told the ECHO: "I don't think of myself as a pioneer, I just think of myself as a surgeon, end of story. That's what I wanted to be and that's what I was. I didn't see myself as anything out of the ordinary, although of course I have to recognise that I was pretty unusual. Very unusual, in fact."
She'd wanted to be a surgeon since she was an eight-year-old fascinated by medical books she found in a Blackpool library. She said: "Somebody was opening up the chest and nobody knew if you could actually survive having your chest opened.
"It was the advancing edge, and I've always wanted to be on that advancing edge of medicine. That's the bit of it I've most enjoyed, trying to push back the barriers a little bit."
It was an unlikely path for a working-class girl born in the 1930s. The thought of her going to university and becoming a doctor was unfathomable for her welder dad and housewife mum. Averil said: "My parents were always supportive but they just couldn't put their minds into that set of having somebody go to university.
"Nobody had gone into higher education, let alone university. I think pretty well everybody in the family had left school at 13 or 14. Just wanting to pursue education alone was a bit pushing the boat out. But I wanted to and it never really crossed my mind that that was something I couldn't or shouldn't do."
When Averil arrived in Liverpool for university, she could catch a tram from her halls on Edge Lane to the medical school on campus, where she was one of 20 women in a class of more than 100. Such high numbers were "fairly adventurous" for 1956, she said.
Although she felt isolated by the confidence and camaraderie between her overwhelmingly male classmates, she didn’t feel her gender was a particular obstacle in Liverpool. Averil said: "One of the things I've often said about Liverpool is that I think Liverpool was important in my early days of development for lots of reasons.
"One of them is that they have a very open attitude of mind towards things that are new and different. They'll say, 'Well okay, you want to be a surgeon? That's fine, come along, we'll help you'. It was a very nurturing environment to be growing up in. I was lucky to be there."
Except for two years in the US, Averil spent her time as a junior doctor at each of the Liverpool hospitals. She cherished the bond formed with other junior doctors as they worked "silly hours", more than 100 a week, describing them as "like a family really".
She became a consultant in vascular surgery in 1972. At the time, just 2% of consultants were women and the society for vascular surgeons had no female members.
Averil was told her application to join generated more discussion in the boardroom than any other topic. She said: "Of course they were going to let me in, but they would tease me about it on the way."
Six years later, in 1978, Averil walked through the door of the newly opened Royal Liverpool Hospital, an amalgamation of previous hospitals, on Prescot Street. Averil told the ECHO: "It gave us a space that none of us had ever seen before.
"Normally, you'd get a filing cabinet to yourself, if you were lucky, but I got a whole office to myself, I got a teaching room, I got space to do things. The opportunities were wonderful, there was a great row of operating theatres and intensive care, all this stuff that you really want.
"The fact that maybe the architecture wasn't the most beautiful thing in the world didn't matter a bit to me. The fact that it was a brand new hospital and everything was working and everything was modern,was what really mattered."
Averil never wanted to leave Liverpool, but wanting to be closer to her husband who worked in London, they both started applying for jobs. Averil secured one first, starting work at St Mary's Hospital, London in the early 1980s before becoming its professor of surgery in 1993.
The first woman in the UK appointed to that position, she stayed until her retirement in 2003. During her career, Averil helped prove the safety of life-saving operations like an intricate procedure to unblock the carotid artery, and a surgery to repair a thoracoabdominal aortic aneurysm.
There was a time she thought she knew all the operations she needed to know but "of course it changes out of recognition". People live longer, and medics have access to technology that didn't exist when Averil started her career, but she worries the NHS isn't getting the funding it needs.
She said: "I'm very concerned about the NHS, it's been central to my working life, even my personal life. I've wanted the NHS to be of the very highest quality, I have wanted to work in a good quality NHS, giving the highest standards. I couldn't imagine how awful it would be to be lying in the back of an ambulance or on a trolley in A&E for hours on end."
Averil had never thought of her life as book-worthy until the pandemic when, nearly 20 years into retirement, she decided it was time to write her story for her grandchildren, one of whom is now applying to study medicine in Liverpool.
She said: "My only intention was to write down facts, because facts get distorted very quickly and very easily, so I thought it would be sensible just to write it down. And then, lo and behold, I got invited to be a castaway on Desert Island Discs and that led to some person contacting me and saying, 'You should write a book about your life', and one thing led to another."
Her book - Life in her Hands, published by Ebury Publishing - was released on February 23. You can buy it online here.
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