Alex Paton (physician)

His memoirs are included in the 2005 book After Daybreak: The Liberation of Belsen, 1945 by Ben Shephard. He was portrayed in the 2007 feature-length drama titled The Relief of Belsen in which he quotes "in my hut there were no deaths today, sir".

In 1987, he retired and for the next three years worked at the addictions unit at the Warneford Hospital, Oxford.

In 1981 he returned to London and became postgraduate Dean for North-West London hospitals. He took up consultant positions at the St Ann's Hospital and the Prince of Wales Hospital in North London, and became the first chairman of the medical committee of Alcohol Concern.

In 1973, he took a one-year sabbatical as a visiting professor of medicine in Baghdad.

One son, Charles, died in 1973 and his wife Ann died in 2008. They had two other sons, Alex and Anthony, and two daughters, Clare and Rachel.

Paton was one of the first intake of doctors into the British National Health Service and later became a registrar to Sheila Sherlock, a recognised authority on liver disease. In 1959, he was appointed consultant physician to Dudley Road Hospital, Birmingham, where he taught medical students for the MRCP, established an endoscopy service and began a 20-year study of the effects of alcoholic liver cirrhosis.

He completed his MD at Yale University on the topic of neurology in diabetes mellitus. In 1959, he was appointed consultant physician to Dudley Road Hospital, Birmingham, where his main focus was on emergency medicine, internal medicine and the liver. Here he taught postgraduate medical students who were preparing for the MRCP examination, established an endoscopy service and began a 20-year study of the effects of alcoholic liver cirrhosis.

Paton qualified in 1947 and was one of the first intake of doctors into the new NHS. After house officer posts he spent two years’ doing national service in the Royal Army Medical Corps in Trieste. Following a post in Salisbury in 1950, and another at St Helier Hospital in 1951, he became registrar to Sheila Sherlock, an expert in liver disease, at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School, part of the Hammersmith Hospital. At his interview with Sherlock, she asked Paton "are you prepared to push patients in a bed to the laboratory? You are? The job is yours". During this post, he kept a private diary in which he wrote about the research into liver disease, saying... "we and anyone else at Hammersmith use subjects for experiments who will not necessarily benefit by them" and quoted his South African houseman as saying "the beds are nothing more than an annexe to the medical laboratories".

In 1947 he married Phyllis Ann Jennifer Pepys, better known as Ann, a nurse and descendant of Samuel Pepys' cousin and Sir Lucas Pepys. They later retired to rural Oxfordshire together. Margaret Tempest became his step-grand mother in 1951, when she married his grandfather.

In 1945, while studying medicine at St Thomas's Hospital Medical School, he was one of the London medical students who were sent to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp shortly after its liberation by British troops, to assist in administering the "starvation diet" to the severely malnourished and dying inmates.

He was one of the London medical students who were sent to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945, shortly after its liberation by the British troops, to assist Arnold Peter Meiklejohn in administering what was known as the "starvation diet" to the severely malnourished and dying inmates. Many of these inmates had such advanced malnutrition that they were intolerant of large, highly nutritious meals and the diet comprised small, frequent, bland meals which were much better tolerated.

In his memoirs, published in the British Medical Journal in 1981, he described how on 4 April 1945 there was a proposed trip to Holland for 12 St Thomas's students. He put his name down and on 12 April was at the Hotel Grand Central at Marylebone collecting his kit. After a briefing by Richard Doll, explaining how they were to feed the starving Dutch with an experimental mixture, they were asked to "keep detailed records".

On 28 April, they were informed that the destination had changed to Belsen and they were rushed to Cirencester, where they spent three “frustrating” days. He recalled how the newspapers had already announced that “100 students from nine London medical schools are being rushed to Germany”. They arrived in Belsen on 2 May 1945 and on the following day began to clean up the huts in the camp and supervise feeding of inmates.

Upon return, he landed at Croydon on 29 May 1945 “with feelings that are too complicated to analyse at the moment”.

Alexander Paton (2 March 1924 – 12 September 2015) was a British gastroenterologist, writer and postgraduate dean for North-West London hospitals, who was a specialist in alcohol misuse.

Alexander Paton was born on 2 March 1924 in Allahabad, India. His father, also called Alex, was an army colonel who had been awarded the Military Cross. His mother, Isabel Sybil Emma Grimwood Mears was the daughter of Sir Edward Grimwood Mears, chief justice of the High Court of Allahabad.