Reilly 312.


493. STAFFORD-CLARK, David. AUTUMN SHADOW, AND OTHER POEMS. 1941. Shakespeare Head Press, Oxford. Inscription on front end paper. Paratrooper in RAF and a psychiatrist.
£12.00


During the war he served as a doctor in the RAF, attaining the rank of Squadron Leader. His wartime career included being one of the last members of the British Expeditionary Force to leave France, in a collier, one jump ahead of the Wehrmacht. He returned to Bomber Command, where his work on morale in air crews stimulated an interest in psychiatry which had started in his student days, when he was appalled by seeing mental hospital patients paraded in front of medical students like freaks in a circus in the name of ‘teaching’. In addition, he became a medical parachutist. He volunteered and flew as a doctor, was mentioned twice in dispatches, and inhaled poison gases at Porton Down. The legacy from this was asthma, from which he suffered for the rest of his life, culminating in a near fatal attack which led to early retirement on health grounds, at the summit of his career.

He had returned to Guy's after the war, and later started his postgraduate training in psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry,