William Frankland (allergist)

In March 2020, in an interview for his 108th birthday during the COVID-19 pandemic, he recounted some memories of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. Frankland died on 2 April 2020 at the age of 108 of COVID-19.

In June 2015, at the age of 103, he was awarded an MBE for services to allergy research. In July he was the oldest recipient of the badge of the Order of Mercy. Also that year he appeared in an episode of the BBC 2 television series Britain's Greatest Generation, and was the oldest ever guest on Desert Island Discs.

In February 2012, Frankland appeared as an expert witness in a British court. The accused had claimed that a vehicle crash in which he was involved was caused by his losing control following a bee sting. Although Frankland agreed with the defence that such a scenario was possible, he gave an opinion that delayed-response reactions to bee stings only occurred after there had been initial symptoms following the sting. In this case, there had not been such symptoms, and the accused was found guilty.

In 1979 Frankland treated Iraq's then-president Saddam Hussein. Contacted to visit a VIP in Baghdad having trouble with asthma, Frankland advised Hussein this was not the case and to give up his habit of 40 cigarettes a day. Frankland said that "To my lasting regret, I told him that was his trouble and that if he carried on, in another two years he wouldn't be head of state. I heard sometime later that he had had a disagreement with his secretary of state for health, so he took him outside and shot him. Maybe I was lucky."

Frankland was a founding member (in 1970) and president.

Frankland was also a supporter of the idea of desensitisation, a technique that aims to reduce the level of immune response to allergens by repeated low doses of the substance to which the patient has an allergy. In 1955, Frankland experimented on himself by being bitten each day by the blood-sucking insect Rhodnius prolixus. He was assisted in this work by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, which was able to supply insects that Frankland could be sure he had never previously been exposed to. The bites eventually provoked a severe anaphylactic reaction.

In 1954, Frankland published "Prophylaxis of summer Hay-fever and Asthma." The article reported the results of a trial involving 200 patients with previous histories of grass pollen sensitivity half treated with active vaccines, and half with inactive 'control' vaccines.

Frankland was born in Battle, Sussex, England. His father was Rev. Henry Frankland, of North Yorkshire farming stock, who at the time of his son's birth was curate of St. Mark's, Little Common, near Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex, and in later years was a vicar in Cumberland. His mother, Alice (Rose), was the daughter of Henry West, a successful ironmonger of Barnsley. He was born an identical twin; his brother (the elder twin by fifteen minutes), Rev. John Ashlin Frankland, who worked in Sierra Leone in the 1950s, died in 1995 at age 83. They had an elder brother, Basil, who entered the fur trade in Canada, and an elder sister, Ella, who died aged 22 in 1933. Frankland reported that the family doctor was ineffective, and this motivated him to do better himself.

During the 1950s, Frankland served as an assistant to Alexander Fleming in the development of penicillin. The two had a daily meeting, but due to Fleming's lack of interest in clinical medicine, Frankland said that he could not recall a patient ever being discussed. Frankland and Fleming were also concerned with antimicrobial resistance to penicillin, with Frankland crediting Fleming with saying that careless prescription would inadvertently lead to "the death of man".

Frankland was instrumental in the creation of the British Society for Allergy and Clinical Immunology (BSACI). It was formed in 1948 under the name the British Association of Allergists. The speakers at the Association's inaugural meeting included Sir Henry Dale, pharmacologist and chairman of the board at the Wellcome Trust, and Dr. John Freeman. In 1962 the Association became the British Allergy Society, and Frankland served as president between 1963 and 1966. The society became the British Society for Allergy and Clinical Immunology in 1973, which name it retains.

In 1946, Frankland began full-time work in the allergy department of St. Mary's Hospital, London. Frankland continued to contribute articles to academic journals beyond his official retirement and then his 100th birthday.

Frankland continued to publish; at age 100 he authored "100 years of allergen immunotherapy", and most recently co-authored, "Flight Lieutenant Peach's observations on Burning Feet Syndrome in Far Eastern Prisoners of War 1942–45" in the journal QJM in 2016 (aged 104).

Frankland was married to Pauline Jackson, an optometrist, in 1941.

Frankland spent the war years 1939–45 in the Royal Army Medical Corps; initially at the Tidworth Medical Hospital, he later joined the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. In 1942, in the midst of the World War II (Pacific theatre), he was captured by the Japanese and held for three and a half years as a prisoner of war (POW) in Singapore. He would later recall: "Medically, as a prisoner of war, we saw conditions which are now unknown." As a POW, he was forced to provide medical assistance for Japanese troops, which Frankland believed saved his life.

Alfred William Frankland MBE (19 March 1912 – 2 April 2020) was a British allergist and immunologist whose achievements included the popularisation of the pollen count as a piece of weather-related information to the British public, speculation regarding the effects of overly sterile living environments, and the prediction of increased levels of allergy to penicillin. He continued to work for a number of years after turning 100.