The specialty of geriatric medicine can trace its origins to London in the 1930s and
to the pioneering work of the indomitable and extraordinary Dr Marjory Winsome
Warren (1897–1960). When tasked with providing clinical supervision for the several
hundred ‘inmates’ of an old workhouse which formed part of the West Middlesex
County Hospital, Dr Warren took the revolutionary step of clinically assessing these
people and amazed the medical world when she identified a range of clinical disorders
which could be diagnosed and treated.