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It is important to recognize that all environmental events occur in some specific context, and this was particularly true of the 1952 London Disaster. During World War II London suffered 30,000 civilian casualties in the bombardments from the air, first from aircraft, then from flying bombs, and finally from the V2 missiles. Famed for fogs since the days of Charles Dickens, people largely took London’s fogs for granted.

When I arrived at Bart’s Hospital on 10 December 1952, everything was normal for that time of year. Our wards at that time of year always had a number of cases of advanced chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, many in outright heart failure. A recent BBC documentary,“The Great Fog”(first shown 28 September 1999), recalled a coroner at the time remarking that the morgues were full. For those of us directly working in the hospitals, the elevated mortality was not widely realized.