Dear Sir,
With reference to the article by Peter Ould in the August issue of en, the first Professor of Experimental Surgery in the UK was James Calnan who carried out so-called ‘sex change’ operations at the Hammersmith Hospital in the late 1960s when I was a student nurse there. This multi-talented surgeon retired around 1981.
Professor Paul McHugh was not born until 1958 so cannot really be described as a pioneer in this field. However, his opinions, in the context of your article, are interesting and show how one can change over a working life. The operations in the 1960s were barely legal, so experimental that as a very young, naive Christian it never occurred to me to question the ethics of it. We worked under a system of paramilitary discipline under which unquestioning obedience was required. How times have changed!
