Bonny Lunch with Martin Thomas
Tuesday 17th March at 12.30 for 13:00 | Pall Mall | £75.00
We are delighted to announce that Martin Thomas will be our guest speaker at the next Bonny Lunch on Tuesday, 17th March at 12:30. Martin will speak on Florence Nightingale, and we warmly encourage members, especially those who have not yet attended a Bonny Lunch before, to join us for this insightful event. Florence Nightingale was so called because she was born in Florence. In 1854 she took 38 nurses to the Crimea to look after the sick and injured troops in Scutari Hospital. With her attention to what she called “Dirt & Diet”, the hospital mortality was reduced from 40% to 2%. Over a 7-week period, the Battles of Alma, Balaclava and Inkerman caused 7,000 casualties. These numbers were dwarfed by those suffering from dysentery, cholera and frostbite. In 1860, she founded the first School of Nursing in the world at St Thomas’ Hospital. Nightingale Schools of Nursing soon appeared across the Empire, in America and around the globe. She was the third person and first woman to appear on a British bank note.
Our speaker is Martin Thomas FRCS. Martin is a retired Vascular Surgeon with experience in limb amputation. He worked initially at St Thomas’ Hospital in London where he developed an interest in Florence Nightingale. He was involved with casualties from the Moorgate Tube Train disaster, the Old Bailey bomb and the Clapham Train Crash. He visited the “Valley of Death” in the Crimea and the site of Scutari. He used to train military surgeons, mainly from the Army at St Peter’s Hospital, Chertsey, and Frimley Park Hospital, Frimley. He also taught vascular surgical techniques to young surgeons and theatre sisters of all three services (mainly Army and Navy) at workshops held at RAF Halton, and became a member of the Military Surgical Society. He is a keen sailor and was Commodore of the Ocean Cruising Club and the Royal London Yacht Club. He has sailed the Atlantic 3 times. He went down to the Antarctic and followed in Shackleton’s footsteps by sailing the Southern Ocean to South Georgia and climbing across mountain range, the Shackleton Traverse.