COMMENT It has been the misfortune of every chief medical officer for the past 30 years to have had to follow in the footsteps of Sir George Godber who has died at the age of 100. With his death has gone one of the last living links to the foundation of the National Health Service.
A monocled, barrel-chested, buccaneer of a man, he was the son of a successful market gardener in Bedfordshire who put all seven of his children through university long before the days of state-funded higher education. Godber qualified as a doctor at the London Hospital and New College, Oxford, in 1933. For much of his early career he worked amid the poverty of London’s East End.
