Winston Churchill's Illnesses: Resilience and Recovery

hello all participants attendees thank you so much for joining us this afternoon and evening wherever you may you may be my name is justin reece and i am the executive director of the international churchill society and the program director of the national churchill leadership center at george washington university thank you for joining us this sunday and i am pleased to be hosting a panel discussion on the new book winston churchill's illnesses now if you haven't bought it yet this is what it looks like i'm actually going to add it to our chat the the where you can purchase it so please do support the authors and and purchase the book if you can so before i introduce our guests i would like to remind you of three things first this panel discussion is being recorded and will be free to watch uh later on in the coming days you'll be notified of when that when the discussion is available second we will be taking questions from the audience in the last 15 minutes of the panel so please use the q a function of zoom to submit your questions and i already pitched the book that was my last point so i think what i'll do now is introduce our panelists and i'm going to begin with aleister vale who is one of the authors of the book alistair is a consultant clinical pharmacologist and toxicologist at city hospital in birmingham the uk and is an r a professor of the university of burning birmingham thanks for joining us alistair and john scabbing is an honorary consultant neurologist emeritus at the national hospital for neurology and neurosurgery in london and chair of the uk's government's independent medical expert group good evening and thanks for joining us john thank you very much justin i'm also very pleased to be joined we all are very pleased to be joined by incredible mother daughter duo gail rosso is a clinical professor of neurosurgery at george washington university school of medicine and health sciences hi gail hi justin delighted to be here and with her as well and all of us is her daughter natalie rosso who was also at the george washington university school of medicine and health sciences as a fourth year medical student hi natalie hi everyone i'm delighted to be here thank you okay so to begin we're going to focus on the book and aleister and john have provided a powerpoint which will last about 10 minutes and it details the book and their research so please enjoy the title of our presentation is borrowed from martin gilbert's excellent book in search of churchill which describes his decades-long quest to write the definitive biography although much has already been written about churchill's health little has been published that is evidence-based in order to write the definitive account by providing a description and analysis of churchill's major illnesses we required access to all of his medical notes against a background of a lifelong interest in churchill i will now describe our search to identify these sources of medical information step one was to identify all the doctors and nurses who had treated churchill lord morin's book the struggle for survival was used as a starting point however it soon became apparent that many of the clinicians who treated churchill were either not mentioned or given little prominence by him step two was far more difficult this involved multiple attempts to find the families of the doctors and nurses concerned in the hope that they still had case notes in their possession relating to churchill step three involved approaching archivists at royal colleges in the welcome library with both general and specific requests when found we discovered the clinical notes were often closed for perusal and most certainly for publication we were fortunate to have the support of the churchill family in having these closed archives open for our use in the end all known archives were open to us and publication was allowed thus we based our description of churchill's illnesses on a large number of new sources churchill's parents lord and lady randolph churchill were able to engage doctors of reputation and skill often at considerable cost later following churchill's military career and his establishment as a major figure in british political life any doctor invited to see him did so without question we are not aware of any doctor declining to see churchill almost all did not charge a fee many of the doctors involved in churchill's care kept detailed clinical records a few also included comments about churchill's reaction to his illnesses we have included these comments in our book because they help provide a rich picture of churchill his fears frustration of being ill his insights his request for detailed medical information his supreme intelligence and his enduring wit but above all churchill's reaction to serious illness demonstrated his courage resilience sense of duty and determination to continue serving in high office this is best shown by his ability to continue during many stroke episodes we believe this to be truly remarkable which is why the subtitle of our book is courage resilience determination the care that church will receive from more than 30 eminent physicians and surgeons and from the carefully chosen nursing staff was exemplary the contributions of three of these clinicians who treated churchill in carthage in december 1943 will now be described but first let me remind you of the details of churchill's illness on the 11th of december he flew to carthage to review military operations in italy on arrival churchill wrote i'm completely at the end of my tether and i cannot go on to the front until i have recovered my strength churchill had developed a fever that in the end lasted for six days due to left low low pneumonia this infection was complicated by two episodes of irregular heartbeat atrial fibrillation lord warren had become churchill's principal physician in may 1940 and remained in this role until churchill's death in january 1965. devoted himself to churchill's care traveling with him during the war and on most of his subsequent foreign travels and was virtually always available at short notice for consultation when church was in britain mauren already a senior and distinguished physician in 1940 could call on any opinion he felt necessary to churchill's great advantage morin decided to publish his book the struggle for survival in 1966 shortly after churchill's death the book was published in the face of lady churchill's objection their moran claimed to have received churchill's permission to write his book later editions of warren's book clarify that it was not based on an actual diary as such but rather notes jotted down at the time interspersed with non-contemporaneous essay material which understandably has led to misleading impressions although jamie wilson the present lord generously gave us complete access to the closed archive at the welcome library including multiple versions of struggle for survival we have drawn on all other available resources in writing about churchill's illnesses the modern archives contain among other documents churchill's temperature and flu charts from this illness you will note that church was so ill that it was five days before he could add a whiskey and soda to his fluid regimen key clinical information regarding the treatment church who received in carthage is also provided by the unpublished autobiography written by professor pulvertaft at the time paulvertoff was assistant director of pathology middle east forces based in cairo in addition to standard laboratory work pulvertaft also played a crucial role in producing penicillin in the middle east and conducting trials on its use here is part of pulvertar's autobiography which describes his arrival in carthage between 1939 and 1945 bedford served with the royal army medical corps as a brigadier in north africa at pulverta's suggestion he was summoned from cairo by to treat churchill in december 1943 he also treated churchill in 1962 after he had suffered a fractured hip here is the first page of bedford's type top medical notes relating to this illness in writing our book we adopted a rigorous evidence-based approach throughout we accessed all existing public sources and identified a wide range of new sources these were amalgamated with the contemporaneous documented observations of churchill's family friends and other political leaders we very much hope you enjoy the book as much as we did in writing it more information is available on the books website gail rosso has written a detailed review of our book in the next issue of finest r we encourage you to read it a full list of acknowledgements relating to the sources and images used in this presentation may be found in our book all are copyrighted and may not be used without the permission of the copyright holder well thank you all for um enjoying that slideshow and thank you aleister and john for putting it together um if i can ask uh john i know you wanted to speak on follow-up at a short follow-up to this um to this powerpoint with a discussion a short discussion on the strokes which which he had you know numerous of thank you very much justin yes very briefly to say that between august 1949 when churchill was 74 and his death in january 1965 he had seven strokes and two transient cerebral ischemic attacks three of these strokes affected the left side of the brain three the right side of the brain one stroke affected his balance and it's it's a a question of of some debate as to exact the exact localization of that stroke um he also had a disturbance of vision which was transient and almost certainly due to cerebral ischemia lack of blood supply to the head and he then had a transit ischemia attack affecting the left cerebral hemisphere with loss of of speech and for the reasons that we've argued in detail in the book we feel it very likely that these are due to small vessel disease in other words disease of the small arteries in in the brain um of course at that time when when churchill was suffering all these episodes there was no detailed imaging that we take for granted now no ct scanning no certainly no magnetic resonance imaging scanning uh mri and even carotid ultrasound examinations were a thing of the of the future and so the and likewise the treatment of stroke was largely expectant there were no specific uh treatments for for stroke and lord brain was closely involved in the majority of these episodes russell brain who was the most eminent neurologist in the uk uh at the time at any rate we could talk uh perhaps later about the medical neurological details but i think it's worth noting that um of course these episodes led to questions about his ability to govern he was prime minister for for much of this time and perhaps we can come back to that in the discussion of resilience a little bit later on however i would just say at this point that uh following an acute left-sided weakness left hemiparesis in june 1953 he chaired a meeting of the cabinet within 24 hours of that episode and no one noticed so this is a demonstration of extreme resilience wow that's incredible um i think your point is well taken regarding um the the types of treatment the type of diagnostic tools that that we all take for granted now were either non-existent or in their you know infancy um and and to your point the ability of this man who had numerous ailments as detailed in your book from of course my favorite as i said earlier of getting hit by a car to all of these strokes to be able to still govern we'll certainly come back to that i'd like to ask gail uh i would like to get gail and natalie's opinion on the book yeah let's start with you with you know you did write a review in finest hour but please please share your thoughts well thank you justin and i want to say thank you to alistair and john for writing this book it is just a point of fact that many people even casual observers of history and anglo-american relations think they know about churchill's health right people think they know about his depression is alcoholism there's just a lot that is not scientific in um in the literature and we're so grateful to the two of you for taking a scientist's point of view and method of working and using uh an evidence-based route to history to bring us real facts but uh so thank you for that that herculean work that you did i had really two takeaways from this wonderful book uh one is just to be amazed at how much medicine has progressed even since the 19 you know middle part of the last century i mean the the pace is enormous uh and and really fast and then the the second is his own humanity uh and kindness and resilience in the face of personal rather than political trouble so just a couple examples of that in terms of his uh of how medicine has progressed let's look at some of the things that doctors veil and scanning discovered or uncovered so you mentioned justin that you know as the son of a wealthy family churchill all his life even before he was politically prominent had access to the best medical care yet when he had pneumonia at age 11 the best care at that time was oral and rectal brandy how crazy is that it just i mean it's amazing to me or things like when he had something as simple as an inguinal hernia which was for him this famous person treated through an 8 inch incision and now of course it's done laparoscopically and people go home the same day uh you know the the mortality rate for pneumonia for someone who is in their 60s as he was during world war ii was 40 40 and we forget that the the leader of the house of commons at the time edward fitzroy contracted pneumonia at the same time as churchill and actually died of it so his life was really in danger on multiple occasions and yet he was resilient and even humorous and that leads to the the second great takeaway is his enormous humanity with and courage through all of this wonderful and and excuse me natalie i first off i know we all thank you for joining us as someone who is studying medicine now who's part of a younger generation um what were you what was your response to the book and you know what what what did you do what did what did you take away from it absolutely yeah i mean i think some of my takeaways were similar it's amazing to see how much medicine has evolved and the way in which this the standards for you know the um standard of care is really different um you know from not so long ago um and i'm going into general surgery and so i was particularly interested in you know his uh operative experiences that he had um and those would be handled very differently uh today compared to when he was under the knife then but i think for me i really found a lot very interesting about this book not only because i'm a medical student but also because i was a history major in college and i've always felt that there is so much to be learned from interdisciplinary study and so i always feel like i learn more about history if i understand it through the lens of science and i understand science better if i apply the humanities and so i think this is a really amazing example of that where this interdisciplinary collaboration helps us better understand the past but also i think gives us insights about the modern day and also the future of of science and of medicine and and what legacy um you know churchill uh continues to have on on us today i echo your your comments about um doctors vail and scouting producing a book that is obviously based in fact it includes of course detailed medical records and medical jargon but it not only is it readable but it provides many glimpses of this man who you know as you know there are multiple books written about him every single year this one stands out for its uniqueness and it provides another side to him but also the people who assisted him who took care of him uh provides a different side of that of that to them as well excuse me so i completely agree with you um if i can ask aleister to uh take himself off off mute and i would love to know from your point of view dr vale um throughout your research what surprised you uh you know in in the amount extensive research and doctor scouting you can also answer that as well i think when we started out on the journey to find the records we never thought we'd be so successful um i think john will recall the excitement when i informed him with each success or each family having been found who allowed us permission to reproduce the case notes but i i think the biggest surprise was the college of physicians because the archivist was unaware at the time of two of the uh sets of case notes and it was only following a flood that they were rediscovered uh which was very fortunate from our point of view i would like to add that uh i owe a great deal as co-author with alistair to his terrier-like adherence to the task and uh his ability uh to get access to find uh what was where and also to charm many people into uh agreeing to release these records so that we could examine them and as alistair has just said the records at the royal college of positions were quite remarkable the handwritten uh and typewritten notes of lord brain in my own specialty of urology were extremely revealing if i may ask and and gail and nano please feel free to follow up if you know whenever you have a question and i should say um we've already had over 12 questions submitted by by attendees thank you very much we'll certainly get to those a little later but please continue to send them from my own point of view i was curious as to why you included uh chapters on uh potential alcoholism and also the famous black dog uh which has uh you know uh dog nope unattended searcher for decades why did you add those two if they're not acute acute situations of of of illness i think the chat line indicates justin why it was necessary because most of the questions so far uh are about alcohol and about depression so the relevance i think is there and moreover john and i have taken a different view from that which commonly pertains in both cases and in the case of the black dog we have gone into this very extensively and shown that actually he didn't suffer from that condition if he had if i missed that if he had suffered from major depression there's no question in my mind that he would never have been able to govern and continue in high office as he did churchill was psychothymic as we all are to an extent he was well known for his emotionality and his tearfulness and uh sometimes quite publicly uh he had much to be emotional about uh is is what i would suggest and i think it was perfectly normal and indeed part of what drove him on was his passion to to do the right thing and that's indeed part of his extraordinary resilience which we may come to in a moment so that deals with the depression as for the alcohol um of course there were times when his alcohol intake was prodigious one could say but it was occasional and for the most part he could uh he could make a little bit of alcohol last a long time and his uh private secretary jane portal later lady williams uh told alistair and me about a year ago at the royal society of medicine where we gave a presentation uh that in the morning he would have what he called his mouthwash which was a large tumbler with a tiny measure of whiskey and the rest of water and he would make that last a very long time um i'm so glad you brought up resilience and there's actually just a question in the chat about uh covet 19 and and what type of what type of um time we're living in i would love to have natalie your point of view um you know being a student now not only a student but a medical student which i've never been but i would presume is is can be quite stressful and and difficult at times you know with this past year of studying from home working from home how how has what does resilience the term resilience mean to you how is it manifested for you and in your fellow students yeah thank you for that thoughtful question i think that's a topic that i'm encouraged to see the medical community talking more and more about i'm as you said before a fourth year medical student so i'm transitioning from being a medical student to being a medical resident at the end of this academic year and it's been really wonderful in my residency interviews to have programs and i'm applying for surgical programs to hear that that topic of wellness and resilience being one that is being discussed much more than i understand it was in the past so i think that's a really positive thing but i think this year has been exceptionally challenging for people around the world but particularly the medical community and i think as medical students we have had to look for creative ways to supplement or support the work of our colleagues i can speak really specifically only to my experience and so by no means does my experience represent that of all medical students but we received an email in mid-march from the deans of our medical school telling us that clinical rotations for medical students had been suspended indefinitely and there was no real you know guidance because there was no national guidance or understanding of how this would evolve and i think i'm particularly proud of how students responded my classmates were i think resiliency you know embodied students banded together to search for creative ways to continue to recognize our position as learners in the medical community but seek out creative solutions to still advocate for the health of our patients and connect them with resources at gw in particular myself and many of our classmates were involved in creating a community resource guide for the district of columbia and surrounding maryland and virginia students were involved at covid testing sites students also organized what they called dc coveted sitters so it was providing child care for health care professionals working on the front lines that's just to name a handful of the responses that my own classmates had and i know students around the country were involved in similar efforts and so i think it was really while it was a challenging moment for the country and for us as students in the medical community it was a real moment i think of grounding ourselves and why we wanted to become doctors in the first place and how so much of what we do is to serve our patients better and to really ground ourselves in the social determinants of health and acting as real physician advocates for our patients and i think gw in particular does an exceptional job of grounding us in clinical public health and having that be part of our credo of do no harm and part of that is not just serving patients in the clinic but it's also reaching them in the communities and doing what you can and so i think that was a really important teachable moment for me and i was so inspired by my classmates and to see students taking that responsibility very seriously well if i can just jump in what natalie said about resilience i think speaks very much to uh the individual and brings us to what this book does for churchill and churchill's reputation you know he's widely acknowledged to be one of the most important figures of the 20th century world-class statesman by anyone's estimation but what this book does that the many many other books about churchill don't do is that it shows those great qualities that winston churchill had that can be an inspiration to us in our daily lives you know none of us really think too much about well what would we have done if we were planning d-day or how would we have handled the tehran conference but you know this the things that he went through with his own personal health getting hit by a car by doing what many brits would do in new york as he did or we could do in london is look the wrong way and he's hit by a car and yet within days he's grateful for the experience wants to share it and write about it he's in battle at the battle of abderman right and one of the great cal last great cavalry charge 1898 and he's grateful for the fact that he has this terrible health problem of a recurrent dominant shoulder dislocation which meant that he was armed with a pistol and not a sword and says yes it's been a problem my entire life he's a politician who has trouble shaking hands right but yet it probably saved his life so over and over again we see his personal reaction to a personal health challenge as being one of courage grace and grit what may i go ahead john please may i comment uh natalie your comments uh take me back 50 years uh to when i was a medical student and i think that uh the resilience i don't know of a medical student whose residence was not at some stage tested um and it seems to me that resilience depends upon motivation a sense of purpose a vision for what one's doing confidence and determination and a feeling that what you want to do is right it's the right thing for you it's the right thing for society uh and also of course the ability to take some hard knocks and recover from them but absolutely behind all this is the need for support and uh not only for your ideas and those material things but some emotional support and i i think one can't rate that uh highly enough and that emotional support comes from family and close friends um churchill showed resilience in abundance uh during world war ii and and later on uh one thinks of the immediately the time of dunkirk and his vision for what was right his decision to send the small ships to to bring back our troops against uh all the odds and at that time his most effective weapon was in of course the english language he he knew how to use it uh and i think indeed one of his colleagues who was not in favor of what he was doing said churchill has learned how to weaponize the english language so there are various ways of looking at resilience but i would suggest that you've got to see it in the round like that my dear late father who was involved in churchill's care i think himself as we all do showed some resilience he used to refer to it as patient endurance that's incredible i and natalie will say i'm very inspirational to hear what what you and your fellow classmates have done this past year and directly impacting uh the community that you live in and work and study in in washington so um you know very well done and thank you for sharing um i there's so quite a few questions i wanted to ask alistair and john um and and you know you touched on this the battle of andermen one person asks um this is brendan russo i don't know if there's any uh relation but potentially there is but it's a great question from this for alistar and john your research didn't reveal anything new about the skin graft that churchill famously gave to a fellow fellow soldier can you tell those who do not know where the skin was taken from can you tell the quick story and and did your research show anything new well there are those uh justin who doubted that he'd actually given us a skin graft but we were fortunate in finding a letter from the recipient um who here in uh the palace who wrote to uh churchill uh many years later to thank him for having done so and then the episode is recorded in the struggles for survival book when he explains um that he gave part of himself in this way uh so i think that is the crucial new detail of finding this letter i i would simply add that the most remarkable thing and we've got um two surgeons uh surgeon and a budding surgeon here is that uh the technique used for the skin graft was aseptic and neither of them suffered in infective complications and it's this is a great uh anecdote to exemplify how far we've come very quickly in medicine i mean imagine taking skin from one soldier who wasn't injured and putting it directly on to this the body of another soldier it just wouldn't happen now i was just this week talking with the dean of the gw college of engineering school of engineering and we were talking about their project that is doing 3d printing of human tissue including skin for skin grafting so that you would be able to create it grow it by computer and use it in that way i mean it's amazing and churchill who was interested in everything a real polymath would be fascinated to know that that's the direction we're going in now and that he wouldn't have to just roll up his sleeve and donate skin so it's it's fascinating i think it um hla of course was a thing of the future but it also demonstrated uh churchill's commitment commitment to a fellow soldier somebody he didn't know particularly well he was said he no hesitation yes of course take some skin do it you may be worthwhile adding john that the surgeon had in mind the nurse who was with him uh but she looked very pale at the prospect of donating the skin so winston did so right well that's incredible um there's a few questions here um a man named jay a man named david talk about mental health and i would like to ask um and i would love everyone's thought on this but mental health of course is is now studied quite quite extensively um modern day it's a big thing for for students for for young people and also for people going on through their career and stresses of a career the question i have and this is kind of a combination of two is how did churchill's mental health impact his resilience um and then there specifically uh jay asked about the relationship with his parents was aloof and removed and cold especially with his father um did that did that is it anyone's point of view that prepared him to have a stronger uh you know mental health capability any thoughts on this discussion this topic i think his upbringing was typical of the time um it's much more difficult to know whether it had an impact um of course many writers have suggested that because it was so apparently cold um that this did impact him but we haven't found the evidence really to support that i would um agree with that sorry i would support that and and uh say that uh of course he was a man of his time and relationships particularly particularly between fathers and sons were very different in those times how many fathers then hugged their sons for example and so there was an emotional distance and i think churchill was always independent he was a bit of a dreamer he was he didn't do terribly well at school he took a little while to get into uh into military training and this story is all told in the in in the book he was saving it up for later yeah i i think that it it is important to think about how these challenges to his mental health really fine-tuned his resilience i give a talk to the medical students called churchill and the art of resilience and we use his art and he famously was a painter of some renown and of course much more so uh now that he's had this brilliant career as a statesman and and has passed on but he was able to channel anxiety of his work life into things that were productive uh such as painting such as writing i mean we've it's not not the topic of this book but of course churchill published more than shakespeare um and dickens combined and won a nobel prize in literature so in addition to doing things like planning the national health service and d-day and so forth he did have creative outlets so he had very productive ways of dealing with the anxiety and stress of his job and that's one of the things that we can all take away from this book again i think the the great gift of this book is that there are examples from his personal life and health that we can more easily incorporate into our own lives than battle plans and national strategies but it shows how much this singular life really has to teach all of us even today natalie i wanted to sorry i just went go ahead john i was going to just add and he had the most amazing wife yes absolutely completely agree natalie i want to give you a chance to respond if you had any thoughts on that yeah i mean i think they're all really interesting points um i think something that's been really um powerful in my medical education has been the way in which we've learned that mental health and mental illness are things that are much more pervasive than was previously understood and while it continues to be a quite a stigmatized area of health and medicine and can be really difficult from the patient experience i think um this conversation is very interesting because applying our understanding of mental health and those kinds of you know psychiatric diagnoses um i think does give us a better understanding of this individual but i'm not sure that it at least for me personally whether he was had a clinical diagnosis or not i think it um makes him an a valuable lesson in leadership because there were these ups and downs um in you know his mental health i think it feels relatable and very real um and so i think that for me was the main main takeaway with regards to uh to his you know that conversation well it's important to know and like you said i it you know maybe at that time he wasn't there was not not able to diagnose any sort of mental illness but let's let's go back to john's or dr scouting's original point initially in the beginning of this conversation discussing how could one govern in throughout all of these um significant illnesses and acute health crises um i mean the man led a country in world war ii similar to franklin roosevelt who who is well documented had significant health issues and and subsequently died before the world war was over john and also you know what what are your thoughts on how how did he persevere and and be able to govern at these very stressful times absolutely i think of course during the world the second world war uh this was well before um churchill's uh cerebral vascular disease first became evident i mean his first stroke was in 1949 so some years after the war of course he showed enormous resilience in relation to a number of other illnesses not least the episode of pneumonia in carthage which alistair has described in his presentation um later on of course there were considerable doubts about his ability to govern and i'll just describe if i may of the immediate aftermath of um a transit cerebral ischemic attack in um 1952 in which he lost the ability to speak so a left hemisphere trans-ischemic attack and people sort of got went behind his back in a way and lord morin his physician uh was in discussion with john colville the joint principal private secretary sir alan lasells who was private secretary to the queen and lord salisbury who was lord president of the council and lasalle said well listening to what you have told me i would say at once that the prime minister ought to resign and be content to be the eldest statesman in the commons or the lords better perhaps in the lords i have been expecting for some time to see you in this room it is true that sometimes the prime minister is all on the spot and then i say to myself why am i worrying but at other times he doesn't seem able to see the point of a discussion well churchill and lord morin had a discussion a day or two afterwards and churchill said to well i knew something had happened when i could not get my words on the telephone i don't like it i was frightened oh not frightened of anything but i'm all right now why you couldn't tell me by examining me that anything had happened says to churchill but the fact remains that you've had notice to go slower to which churchill replies i don't mind dying in harness and then a few days later um gilbert um churchill's biographer uh wrote in 1988 reflecting on this on february 2026 the powers of recuperation and the extraordinary determination of of this man of 77 were made abundantly clear to those who had known of his arterial spasm and discussed how to send him to the lords for it was only five days after the attack the churchill spoke in the house of commons on foreign affairs so this was churchill's ability he had what i like to call and uh sorry about this gayle it's not a very neurological term cerebral reserve he he had so much there he could afford to lose bits and pieces he would bounce back because of his resilience and by golly could he perform you you are absolutely right and a great example of his mental health and physical health coming together with his humor it relates to one of my favorite general surgery aspects of his life in 1922 he had surgery for a black gangrenous appendix through a five inch incision which now of course might be treated with antibiotics or a laparoscopic procedure and he couldn't he was running for reelection he couldn't campaign his wife did an admiral job but you know how it turned out and his response his final word on that was in in the twinkling of an eye i found myself without an office without a seat without a party and without an appendix and just how joyful he is and i think you know at the end of the day that's part of why we all look to him for it's the big stature and doing the the the big grand things it's the little things that he does with great grace but in and courage but he can even be funny and that's that's what makes every generation just want to embrace him it's that that humor that um that shines through and that's courage and resilience and gail i'll say personally um one of the first times i was exposed to churchill was um i hadn't been science in college and it was removed and someone in my one of my history professors sent me a quote you know i emailed them hey i'm not going to be there and he sent me that quote and it was just so you're right like you can you connect on this personal level and you're like wow a man who is so you know written about for so long can actually i can actually connect in some in this very indirect um meaningless not meaningless but very small way um well if if i may there's quite a few individual questions here that i'd like to ask everyone and and i'm kind of going to go a little quickly on these because i would like to respond and and i have to say this has been a very well um engaging group so thank you everyone who is who is watching thank you for sending your questions and we really appreciate it um so i'm gonna ask the first one to the authors um was there any um is there any research or or archives that you wanted to have that you requested to view that was denied to you not in the end uh but once or twice i had to call randolph churchill in to help and after a message from him the archives were open in about 30 seconds funny um speaking of um the ability of the cerebral reserve i really love that term and i am not again outstated not a neurosurgeon so i'm gonna go with it and i'm gonna use that as moving forward um was there any sort of uh history and maybe gail you you can speak this if you've done your own research up under church's neurological history was there any um research done on on predisposition for neurological issues for churchill or or his family members well yes i mean one has to look at the uh to churchill himself as an individual and of course interpret this in the in the light of um of uh now the now understood risk factors to do with cerebral vascular disease and i've listed them somewhere here um for a start he his age he was 74 at the uh the time of his uh first stroke um he um he was somewhat overweight and you may have missed it on alistair's uh slide or actually you didn't say this show this one this time alistair sir john parkinson who saw him in 1942 remarked plump but not as heavy as expected okay so churchill was somewhat overweight he was a cigar smoker but never as far as we know a cigarette smoker he's his alcohol consumption was steady let's put it like that but he didn't have alcohol misuse disorder as we've argued um he had a very rich diet indeed um he had little regular exercise uh although in later life he enjoyed swim swimming in the mediterranean um well it went on holiday he worked excessively long hours and many late nights [Music] he there was probably some inappropriate drug use um barbiturates and amphetamine and alastair may want to comment on that he had a borderline high blood pressure what would be regarded now as borderline high and there were also episodes of recorded atrial fibrillation but they were always brief and actually uh i think i saw a question flash up i don't think the atrial fibrillation was in any way related to his his strokes i think they were due to vascular disease in in situ as for the question of uh work life balance uh which is a term that we have been introduced in my lifetime i don't think churchill would have understood what that meant very good but i don't think his wife would have either they they the entire family was involved in this worm and his moving through life and through the world and they all supported it and he was just an example of greatness being thrust upon someone and rising to the occasion he he lived through an amazing time and uh had an amazing response to it well if i can ask natalie i i you know as how would you go about if i may encouraging other students your peers to really engage with churchill his legacy about his resilience if you've not already done so yeah that's a great question um i think you know for me i find a lot of joy in the study of history and i think both in terms of finding really excellent examples of leadership and resilience but also in lessons of you know examples i'd like to not emulate in my own life and i think there's a lot to be learned from from those uh those two models of of you know character and leadership so i think students are always looking for examples of successful people in the past and lessons to be learned and applied in their own lives and i think churchill is a really interesting example of so many of those things in of course politics but also in medicine and art there's just so many disciplines that he touched and so i think he's would be of great appeal to people who are interested in a lot of those disciplines and for so many of the reasons that we've discussed today wonderful and and so my last question and i'd love the practitioners answer this um current practitioners churchill was famous and i saw mark bainbridge chat this question so churchill was famous for both his daily naps as much as possible uh but also taking a a hot bath as much as possible every day including in the trenches when he was um on the front line in world war one um do you think that for his longevity and the ability to recover in the resilience were daily naps is that is that a good thing for for did that positively affect his his his ability to to persevere well there's some very recent very recent evidence of course on uh which we've just been hearing about recently uh currently about siestas and the advantages of a nap of up to 40 minutes a day after lunch and of course some in some parts of the particularly in the mediterranean uh this is the rigor and i i mean it's something i've always resisted but maybe i should take it up i think certainly we know that yeah we we have learned that we should be treating sleep and adequate amounts of sleep whether it's in the form of naps or or a satisfactory night's sleep it really is important to health and although he kept very late hours he also got up late and famously worked in in from his bed for many hours before he actually took the bath and got out of bed and and so i think he respected the need to recharge his battery and for churchill it was sleep it was also conversation with others i mean he really derived energy and mental health from family friends scientists and advisors and and that was important to him and he also said he couldn't live without champagne i think we you know we did touch on alcoholism and i think we should give i my own conclusion is the same as doctor's veil and scatting that he was not an alcoholic and i think we should leave him with the final word on that in which he says i cannot live without champagne in victory i deserve it and in defeat i need it well i um i will say you know i greatly appreciate all of your time uh he was a leader in in he was ahead of his time in many ways and the tank um being the original uh anti-fascist and then also being a man who took naps every day so i think we've we've learned so much from him and it still applies to this day so um thank you all thank you doctors uh uh veil scouting and rosso and soon to be dr rosso we appreciate your time and please do buy the book everyone

Channel: The International Churchill Society

Views: 589

Keywords: Winston Churchill, Prime Minister, Great Britain, Allies, Leadership, WWII, Second World War, First World War, WWI

Id: ztJOEM-v4PM

Length: 58min 13sec (3493 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 31 2021