Medical Career
During World War I Cronin served as a Surgeon Sub-Lieutenant in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve before graduating from medical school. After the war, he trained at various hospitals including Bellahouston and Lightburn Hospitals in Glasgow and Rotunda Hospital in Dublin,he undertook general practice work in a small village on the clyde called Garelochhead which he later based GP novels on before taking up his first practice in Tredegar, a mining town in South Wales. In 1924, he was appointed Medical Inspector of Mines for Great Britain, and over the next few years, his survey of medical regulations in collieries and his reports on the correlation between coal dust inhalation and pulmonary disease were published. He was involved in the disaster at Ystfad Colliery in Pengelly, where thirty-eight miners were drowned and the remaining twenty-three were rescued after eight days. Cronin drew on this haunting experience and his research of the occupational hazards of the mining industry for his later novels The Citadel, set in Wales, and The Stars Look Down, set in Northumberland. He subsequently moved to London, where he practised in Harley Street before opening his own thriving medical practice at 152,Westbourne Grove, Notting Hill. Cronin was also the medical officer for Whiteleys at this time and was becoming increasingly interested in ophthalmology.
Read more about this topic: A. J. Cronin
Famous quotes containing the words medical and/or career:
“Mark Twain didn’t psychoanalyze Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer. Dickens didn’t put Oliver Twist on the couch because he was hungry! Good copy comes out of people, Johnny, not out of a lot of explanatory medical terms.”
—Samuel Fuller (b. 1911)
“John Brown’s career for the last six weeks of his life was meteor-like, flashing through the darkness in which we live. I know of nothing so miraculous in our history.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)