pshaft was therefore erected in the courtyard outside each of the three blocks of wards which formed three sides of the square, the administrative block and the kitchens forming the fourth side. One of the interesting features of the hospital was its chapel, situated just to the right of the entrance gate; this was a church of quite considerable size and had been built as a thanksgiving after the Great Plague.
Nearly all the staff lived outside the hospital and at first I took up residence in Woburn Place near Tavistock Square, where the British Medical Association has now built a magnificent home for its headquarters. This is the district just north of the British Museum, where the London University was engaged before the present war in erecting some wonderful buildings in connection with its re-organization. Of these perhaps the most notable was the Library which has unfortunately fallen victim to Nazi brutality. Bloomsbury no doubt has an atmosphere of old-fashioned distinction but I am afraid that, as a stranger in war-time, I found it a little depressing; the long lines of terraced houses seemed so unending and the homes of strange cults which faced one at every turn seemed so bewildering and comfortless. Some of us went once to a vegetarian restaurant and our reaction was typified by an athletic Australian hockey-player who exclaimed with feeling, "Well, I call it a process of semi-starvation!" Getting tired of Bloomsbury, to the I scandalized some of my old-fashioned friends by my bad taste in moving nearer to the Parks, to a new, scarcely finished hotel behind Selfridges, which has now been incorporated by that octopus as its Provisions Department. Later
^ I returned to Bloomsbury, while studying for the Diploma of Public Health, and was very happy there, sharing a flat opposite the Foundling Hospital with a lady named Shrapnel, a descendent of the famous ammunition expert.
The hotel near Selfridge's had the advantage that the manager owned a farm so that our own food was passable at a time when supplies generally were rather low before rationing had begun. Among interesting guests at the hotel was Sir Patrick Manson who had discovered the embryos of filaria in human blood, he also showed that mosquitoes caused the disease and
who had proved that the embryos of filaria are caused by mosquitoes and suggested to Sir Ronald Ross that this might also be the way that
