Dr John Wilson: expert witness in a personal injury case concerning damage caused by administration of smallpox vaccination

The following is an interim description which may change when detailed cataloguing takes place in future:

Papers of Dr John Wilson, retired Consultant Neurologist at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, London, as an expert witness in the personal injury case of a patient (b.1960), damaged by vaccination for smallpox without the parents' informed consent. The papers also include contemporary reports from the Medical Officer of Health for Bradford and the Chief Medical Officer of the Department of Health.

Please note that this archive is largely made up of patient data that is highly sensitive in nature. When the archive is catalogued, the patient data will require closure for the lifetime of the data subjects in accordance with the 1998 Data Protection Act. We anticipate that it will not be possible to make patient records from the archive available for research before 1 Jan 2061 at the earliest.

1960s

1 transfer box

Donated to the library at Wellcome Collection on 17/01/2008 by Dr Wilson, with the formal consent of the solicitor representing the family of the person who was the subject of the case.

Dr John Wilson is a retired Emeritus Consultant Paediatric Neurologist at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, London.

He qualified MB BS 1956 and obtained his PhD in 1965. He became a member of the Royal College of Physicians, London, in 1958 and a Fellow in 1972. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society. Other previous posts, all in London, include Honorary Consultant Paediatric Neurologist, National Hospital for Nervous Disorders; Scientific Staff of the Medical Research Council Clinical Genetics Research Unit; Lecturer Department of Chemical Pathology Guy's Hospital Medical School; Academic Registrar at the National Hospital, Queen Square.

Dr Wilson is a founding member and first treasurer (and later president for two years in the early 1980s) of the British Paediatric Neurology Association, which held its first meeting in Jan 1975 under the title of the British Association for Paediatric Neurology.

During his career Dr Wilson acted as an expert witness in a number of personal injury cases. In the early 1960s, following the last natural outbreak of smallpox in the UK in Bradford, Wilson became involved in the case of an 18 month old child vaccinated, without the parents' informed consent, who sustained a rare neurological complication.

In 1974 Dr Wilson was central in initiating what became a widely publicised theory that whooping cough immunisation was implicated in causing neurological complications in children. His conclusions were based on case studies of children admitted to Great Ormond Street Hospital over a period of eleven years. Although a subsequent National Childhood Encephalopathy Survey (1981) seemed to indicate that the whooping cough vaccine had in a small number of cases caused permanent brain damage (a risk of 1 in 310,000 was posited) a four month legal case overseean by Lord Justice Stuart-Smith concluded that there was no hard evidence to support the figure of a risk of 1 in 310,000 and no evidence of permanent brain damage. Subsequent reports and reviews of evidence provided further epidemiological support for this legal judgment.

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