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Background to the Summer SchoolsThe Mayneord-Phillips Trust was established in 1991 to commemoratethe work of the late Professor W V Mayneord, and Major C S Phillips. TheTrust was founded and continues to be supported by the Institute ofPhysics, the British Institute of Radiology and the Institute of Physics &Engineering in Medicine. Trustees are drawn from the membership of thefounding bodies and serve for a term of three years.The main activity of the Trust is the organisation of biennial SummerSchools on topical areas of medical physics, primarily aimed at PhDstudents, post-doctoral researchers early in their careers and medicalphysics trainees.Profiles of two pioneering PhysicistsW V Mayneord and C E S Phillips were two outstanding pioneers of theapplications of Physics to Medicine. In their nature as pioneers they bothhad strong concern to help and encourage younger colleagues developtheir own interests and expertise in this worthwhile and stimulating field.A number of their former colleagues and successors, members of thescientific societies with which Mayneord and Phillips were themselvesclosely associated, share this concern and have felt that an effectiveexpression of it would be a series of summer schools that would exploresome of the currently active developments in the various applications ofPhysics to Medicine.We hope that the following short accounts of the careers of Phillips andMayneord will give participants in the Summer Schools, and others, animpression of these two individuals as real working scientists, onlyseparated from the rest of us by the accident of time.2
Major Charles Edmund Stanley PhillipsMajor Phillips has been described as the first British medical physicist.Born in 1871, he was educated privately, never attending College. AGentleman Scientist, he knew well such men as Kelvin and Crookes.Primarily an experimentalist he worked at home and was, in commonwith many contemporary physicists, studying the electrical discharge inevacuated glass tubes at the time of RÖntgen’s discovery of X-rays on 8 thNovember 1895. His laboratory notebooks are preserved in the library ofThe Institute of Cancer Research.Experiments with discharge tubes led to the observation of the rotation ofa luminous ring in the electrical discharge tube within a static magneticfield; the effect soon became known as the “Phillips’ Phenomenon”. Hisnotebooks detail how he brought this to the personal attention ofestablished physicists such as Crookes and Silvanus Thompson and hisecstasy when being allowed to publish in the Proceedings of the RoyalSociety. These were the days when FRS patronage was the only way ofhaving one’s work appear in this revered journal. His notebooks containexquisite line drawings of his apparatus with blow-by-blow accounts ofwhat he achieved (and what went wrong) with his experiments. Such washis joy being noticed by Crookes that he even stuck into the notebook theenvelope of the letter bearing the news of his paper’s acceptance by theRoyal Society.In the autumn of 1896 he began, for reasons that are not known, to recordall his daily notes in Pitman shorthand, an annoyance for today’shistorian. In 1897 he published a book listing a complete bibliography ofX-ray literature, a task just possible at the time and almost certainlyimpossible thereafter. The work also contained all sorts of practical tipson how to make one’s own equipment.In the early 1900’s Phillips became interested in quantitative radiationand in 1909 he was commissioned to prepare three small radiumstandards which were calibrated against a standard in Rutherford’slaboratory and then presented to the RÖntgen Society of which he was a3
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here - The Mayneord Phillips Trust

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