Britain’s oldest doctor is a fearless 105-year-old boundary-pusher who survi🌟ved a Japanese prison camp and once treated Saddam Hussein, a fascinating profile reveals.
Dr. Bi𒆙ll 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 h🐼ad an allergy and he was being treated with various desensitizing injections,” Frankland .“But he wasn’t allergic at all — his problem was that he was smoking 40 cigarette💎s 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 ofᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚ𝓀ᩚ England earlier this month — was born on March 19, 1912.
He went to boarding school, enlis🧸ted 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 unde♚r Dr. Alexander Fleming, t൩he famed doctor who discovered penicillin.
Fleming retired from as private consultant in his 90s and now has a non-pa🦂id 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.