The research gains him a post with the "Mines Fatigue Board" in London, but he resigns after six months to set up a private practice. He studies for, and is granted, the MRCP, and when his research is published, an MD. Eager to improve the lives of his patients, mainly coal miners, Manson dedicates many hours to research in his chosen field of lung disease.
On the strength of this job, Manson marries Christine Barlow, a junior school teacher.Ĭhristine helps her husband with his silicosis research. Resigning, he obtains a post as assistant in a miners' medical aid scheme in "Aberalaw", a neighbouring coal mining town in the South Wales coalfield.
Shocked by the unsanitary conditions he discovers, Manson works to improve matters and receives the support of Dr Philip Denny, a cynical semi-alcoholic who, Manson finds out in due course, took a post as an assistant doctor after having fallen from grace as a surgeon. He quickly realises that Page is unwell and disabled and that he has to do all the work for a meagre wage. In October 1924, Andrew Manson, an idealistic, newly qualified doctor, arrives from Scotland to work as assistant to Doctor Page in the small (fictitious) Welsh mining town of Drineffy (Blaenelly is the name given in some adaptations). This is not an attack against individuals, but against a system." The horrors and inequities detailed in the story I have personally witnessed. He had also worked as a doctor for the Tredegar Medical Aid Society at the Cottage Hospital, which served as the model for the National Health Service.Ĭronin once stated in an interview, "I have written in The Citadel all I feel about the medical profession, its injustices, its hide-bound unscientific stubbornness, its humbug. Specifically, he had researched and reported on the correlation between coal dust inhalation and lung disease in the town of Tredegar.
Cronin drew on his experiences practising medicine in the coal-mining communities of the South Wales Valleys, as he had for The Stars Look Down two years earlier. In the United States, it won the National Book Award for 1937 novels, voted by members of the American Booksellers Association. It has been credited with laying the foundation in Britain for the introduction of the NHS a decade later.
Cronin, first published in 1937, which was groundbreaking in its treatment of the contentious theme of medical ethics.
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