Alex Sakula

Sakula published many articles in the Journal of Medical Biography, including those relating to John Keats, Thomas Henry Huxley, Sydney Coleman, and Lord Joseph Lister. In 1978, he wrote a book, Auenbrugger: Opus and opera. The most widely held works by Sakula include The portraiture of William Osler and Portraits, sculptures and statues.

Sakula was fascinated with lung cancer and occupational respiratory diseases. In 1961, he published a study linking pneumoconiosis and workers handling Fuller’s Earth. In 1967, he described mushroom grower’s lung which was caused by the inhalation of actinomycete spores. It led to the use of protective clothing and the elimination of the disease. Other contributions included antitrypsin deficiency in lung disease (psittacosis) and various aspects of bronchial carcinoma.

Sakula's career in respiratory medicine spanned from 1956 to 1982, in Redhill General Hospital, Surrey, Crawley Hospital and Horsham Hospital. He described his ambition in medicine to have begun with what he saw around the vicinity of the London Hospital when he used to walk to school. Sakula was awarded a Meyerstein Scholarship after admission to Middlesex Hospital medical school from school.

Sakula married Rene in 1951 and lived in Reigate, Surrey, from 1956 to 1989, moving to Hove after retirement. They had three sons and a daughter.

Upon return after the war to England in 1947, he was appointed to the Brompton Hospital, London, to train in chest medicine, eventually becoming chest physician at the Kingston Hospital, Kingston-on-Thames. He wrote a considerable number of articles on tuberculosis and founded chest services for East Surrey and West Sussex.

In 1942, he published an article in the Lancet, on how sulphapyridine was used to treat a child suffering from pneumococcal meningitis.

Sakula became house physician to Alec Cooke at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford, after receiving a distinction in medicine in 1940. It was here that Sakula witnessed some of the first patients to receive penicillin by Charles Fletcher.

Alex Sakula, (26 June 1917 - 27 December 2003), MD, FRCP, published more than 200 papers and was a British respiratory physician with a fascination in history of medicine.

Sakula was the third child of Polish immigrants who came to the Jewish East End of London in about 1900. Growing up in Whitechapel, his father was a master tailor working in the attic of the house they rented. At age 13, Sakula was awarded a scholarship to Davenant Foundation School.