Britain’s oldest doctor is a fearless 105-year-old boundary-pusher who survived a Japanese prison camp and once treated Saddam Hussein, a fascinating profile reveals.
Dr. Bill Frankland, aka “Grandfather of Allergy,” is best known for persuading news outlets to report pollen counts in weather forecasts.
But his life story is nothing to sneeze at, either. The Sussex-born medicine man trained under one of history’s most famous doctors — and in 1979 cared for the notoriously brutal leader of Iraq.
“I got a call to see the new president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein. They told me he had an allergy and he was being treated with various desensitizing injections,” Frankland told the Daily Mail.“But he wasn’t allergic at all — his problem was that he was smoking 40 cigarettes a day.”
The bold doctor scolded the late Iraqi despot and gave him a lecture on his health. “I told him to stop and if he wouldn’t I would refuse to come and see him again. I don’t think anyone had spoken to him like that before,” he said.
He added, “I heard some time 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 — who celebrated his 105th birthday and was honored by the Queen of England earlier this month — was born on March 19, 1912.
He went to boarding school, enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1941 and was sent Singapore just seven days before the attack on Pearl Harbor, he told the paper.
A year later, he was sent to the notorious Changi PoW camp, where he suffered through “three-and-a-half years of hell” before he was set free, he recalled.
“So many people have asked me how I’ve lived so long,” said Frankland. “There are many occasions I’ve been so near death, but for some reason or another escaped.”
In 1946, he began training under Dr. Alexander Fleming, the famed doctor who discovered penicillin.
Fleming retired from as private consultant in his 90s and now has a non-paid consultancy role at Guy’s Hospital in London, where he researches peanut allergies.
In 2015 — at age 103 — he received and Order of the British Empire praising his life’s work.