Ron Bradley: developed the world’s first mobile intensive care unit

bmj;381/jun27_7/p1461/FAF1faCredit: modbiomed/QMULRonald Bradley was the UK’s first professor of intensive care—and a modest, gentle man whose reputation as an outstanding innovator has been blurred by popular misconception. Said to have worn his brilliance lightly, he is credited with developing in the early 1960s the world’s first mobile intensive care unit—a vast, lumbering trolley carrying equipment for catheterisation and blood gas analysis. But his then senior registrar, Margaret Branthwaite, said, “It was actually a mobile intensive diagnostic unit.”Bradley and Branthwaite became known as “the death watch beetles” as they trundled the trolley from bedside to bedside at St Thomas’ Hospital, London—death rates among their critically ill patients were inevitably high.Bradley’s emphasis on diagnosis and underlying pathology extended the concept of intensive care. It had been largely synonymous with ventilation after the 1952 polio pandemic when patients in Copenhagen were hand ventilated, in some cases for weeks, by hundreds of medical and…
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