Julian Tudor Hart
Born in 1927, Dr Julian Tudor Hart became a physician and epidemiologist and was a long-term General Practitioner in the NHS in the South Wales mining village of Glyncorrwg. He was the son of Alex Tudor-Hart, the Chief Doctor at Motoro Hospital during the Spanish Civil War (see separate entry) and his first wife, Alison McBeth, a radical doctor.
Like many Communists involved in medicine in the post-war period, in his own practice, he early on introduced the concept of all-round localised medical care. Concentrating on studying how his patients' lifestyles (diet, smoking, and exercise) caused their illnesses, he then worked with them to make their lives healthier.
He is an honorary fellow of the universities of Swansea, Cardiff, Glamorgan and Glasgow and was the inaugural winner of the Royal College of General Practitioners international Discovery Prize for research in primary care in 2006. Dr Julian Tudor Hart works in retirement as a research fellow at Swansea Medical School and is an active member of the Welsh Labour Party.
In the 1960s, he was a Communist candidate for Parliament three times and a well-known GP He pioneered community control of hypertension and other chronic conditions and is the author of `The Political Economy of Health Care – a clinical perspective' (2006; Policy Press).
Be the first to comment