Roger Bannister: running the extra mile

The 50th anniversary of the first four minute mile means that you're likely to have seen a lot of Britain's most famous former medical student on your televisions and in your newspapers. But what happened during his subsequent medical career? Peter Cross went to find out

Recently Roger Bannister has been doing a lot of running around. Not physically, you understand, but metaphorically. A car crash in the 1970s ended his ability to run, but he is still actively involved in sports administration and London's bid for the 2012 Olympics.

Bannister was a medical student at St Mary's, London, when he broke the four minute mile. His record only lasted 44 days but was a remarkable achievement. Athletes had been trying to break this barrier for years, yet the person who finally surmounted it was a committed medical student whose running and training took second place to medical studies. Bannister won the 1500 metre race in the 1954 European Games then turned his back on serious running, concentrating on the career he had always wanted.

Why, I ventured, did he choose medicine, and why neurology?

"Well the brain is the most important organ," he told me, "I've always accepted challenges, and I felt that to study the brain would be a lifelong challenge, but I might in some way be able to contribute to some little bricks in the wall that was being built to some kind of full understanding of the brain."

Medicine was always his goal: "You know that you will always have a role, you perform useful care of patients, cure a few, alleviate problems in a few, but underlying all this is science. And I was a scientist, a natural scientist, interested in biology and nature before I became dedicated to medicine. I was doing research and had already decided that I was going to study the brain. And I was one of the first recruits for a new course which was called PPP--philosophy, psychology, and physiology."

Dining with novelists

After his finals he got a scholarship at Exeter College, Oxford. "It had dining rights," he explained, "At that stage [JRR] Tolkein [author of Lord of the Rings] was a fellow, and he would invite CS Lewis [author of the Narnia books] to dinner. I did my two years research, I came to St Mary's, I was running, and I was writing up my research and starting clinical work. Research was on how the brain controls and regulates breathing--its rate and depth. It was an area that had not been studied for some time and I was able to coordinate some factors that I knew about because of my running." He wrote two papers which were published in the Journal of Physiology in 1954.

An early role model was George Pickering. He was "One of the new generation who came along and said 'can you hear that murmur or can't you hear that murmur? How do you know the statistics of taking blood pressure standing and lying? You think this drug is better than the other but you have to have a controlled trial.'"

He did National Service in the army. He used this period to study heat illness in Aden. "They needed a philologist to work out why they were dying. To answer questions like 'Do the sweat glands get blocked? Is the amount of salt they take wrong? Do the sweat glands get fatigued? If you inject or give a drug, do you start making them start working again?'" The conditions were tough but there was nothing else to do in Aden but research.

Another important influence was Paul Wood, then a leading cardiologist at London's Brompton Hospital. "He was able to quantify medical observations, anyone else would say there was a loud murmur and he would say, 'We can't get away with this anymore, we have to have a four part scale--mild, medium, moderate, and severe, and whenever you think about anything you have got to put it into those categories.' It was also the time when the mechanical recording of murmurs was also coming in." There followed a Radcliffe travelling scholarship, which took him to Harvard for a year.

He feels that running and the fame it brought was "a grave disadvantage for ten years. People in academia looked down their noses at sports," he felt, "They can't believe that somebody could get involved so deeply in something so trivial and unintellectual that they could consider a serious career in medicine."

However he was still made a consultant when he was only 33, nine years after qualification. "In those days consultant appointments were so short because the government knew that consultants cost money. The more consultants you have, the more tests they want and the more they study patients who are going to die or get better if you leave them." When he was appointed there were only 72 neurologists in the country. He thinks there are now approaching 500.

Working on auto-pilot

It was research rather than clinical work that maintained his interest: "After 20 years you have seen a lot of patients with headaches," he asserts, "A lot of patients with tumours and a lot of patients with multiple sclerosis. Essentially you work on automatic pilot. You are looking for unusual things, which is really what keeps you going because every patient is slightly different, and what you are trying to do is see where the next medical advance is coming from. In reading, and the textbook I was writing, I wanted to be up to date in areas in which I did not fundamentally have a major interest. When I started the methods of special investigation were very primitive, there was no scanning and as I grew more senior people could scan the brain in an hour."

He has researched the autonomic nervous system, a primitive organ dealing with emotional control, fight and flight, and limits what exercise you can do. As it lay between the fields of endocrinology and cardiology and biochemistry it was relatively neglected. The first edition of his textbook came out in 1980 and is now in a fourth edition. The unit he helped set up is now a referral unit for the United Kingdom and abroad. It has formed the basis for a world body--The International Clinical Autonomic Research Body. This has drawn together various talents and experience he has developed from his physiology days--uniting physiology with neurology.

What I wondered did he think about his future. "Future?" he replied "I have a past." At this point his wife, who had sat quietly during the interview, interrupted. "I'll tell you what he does; he makes a whole wealth of people happy in Oxford and of course everywhere else. He has started a book reading group, ex-heads of Oxford colleges, ex-ambassadors, he's got a philosophy group, he's started a walking group, and he is still on St Mary's Development Trust."

Peter Cross freelance journalist,
Email: petercross@medix-uk.co.uk


studentBMJ 2004;12:265-308 July ISSN 0966-6494

1. Bannister R. The first four minutes. London: Sutton, 2004.
2. Bannister R. Clinical Neurology. Oxford University Press