Richard Cooke
PIONEERING CHILDREN’S DOCTOR, RICHARD COOKE, WHOSE DISTINGUISHED CAREER IN THE FIELD OF CARING FOR NEWBORN BABIES CHANGED THE FACE OF NEONATAL CARE AROUND THE WORLD, HAS RETIRED TO DARTMOUTH.
P
rofessor Cooke’s name reached global fame when he cared for
the Walton sextuplets who were born to Janet and Graham Walton at Liverpool Maternity Hospital in 1983. He was credited with doing much to ensure the survival of the famous Walton girls – at the time only the fourth known set of surviving sextuplets.
In fact, thousands of babies owe their lives to Professor Cooke’s research and dedication in the field of neonatal medicine, although he modestly says he was just doing his job.
Professor Cooke, 65, studied medicine in London and went on to work at Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital before lecturing at Oxford University where he gained a Doctorate for his studies on the brains of new born babies. He then spent two years working at the Sophia Children’s Hospital in Rotterdam, Holland, where he developed the use of the latest ultra-sound machine, invented in America. He used this technology to examine the brains of new born babies suffering from brain injury. Professor Cooke said: ‘In those days we knew babies had difficulties because of brain damage but it was difficult to diagnose because you couldn’t see it. I helped to develop ultra-sound scanning as a way of examining a baby’s brain and diagnosing brain injury.
‘I experimented with the machine and tried it out on various babies and discovered you could see beautiful pictures of their brains. You could see the blood vessels pulsating and areas of damage, and so you became quite good at rapidly recognising what the changes were you were seeing and what was causing them. ‘Because I had the latest machinery I had better pictures than anybody else and I was able to present my research in Oxford. People got very excited about it, it was published in the Lancet and
‘I experimented with the machine and tried it out on
various babies and discovered you could see beautiful pictures of their brains.
away it went.
‘Changes in medicine tend to come when new technology is introduced. Ultra-sound before this was very crude but this new type of scanner worked so much better. Of course the scans we’ve got now are 100 times better than the ones we had in the 70s.’
In 1980 Professor Cooke returned to the UK to become Liverpool’s first Consultant Neonatologist and a Senior Lecturer at the University of Liverpool. He set up the Regional Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at the Liverpool Maternity Hospital, the first
of its kind in Merseyside, and for the first six years ran it single-handedly. Fewer than three years after his arrival at the hospital, Janet Walton, expecting sextuplets, was admitted. Professor Cooke said: ‘In the early 80s people were experimenting with various ways of managing infertility and a lot of early attempts at treatment resulted in multiple pregnancies. There were lots of triplets around then but every now and then that number was exceeded.
‘I had only been at the hospital two-and-a-half years when suddenly I was told that Mrs Walton had conceived six babies after infertility treatment. The problem was I was single-handed as the only consultant running a regional unit. It wasn’t so much a medical problem, it was a strategic one in terms of having enough equipment and staff. We managed to borrow some from other places and it all went very well. ‘They were the first lot of surviving sextuplets in the UK and the only set in the world that comprised all girls, the reason they became very well known.
‘Managing the journalists and
TV was the difficulty; the medical side was quite straightforward. We had more than 70 reporters and TV people at the hospital, it was astonishing. This was a little outdated hospital at the time and it was very cramped.’
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