Community general practitioners.

Commemorating a giant figure whose memory is still fresh to many is a heavy responsibility. Pat Byrne was a plebeian and rejoiced in the plebs' victory represented by the introduction of the National Health Service in 1948. In 30 years of practice in Milnethorpe, a market town and former seaport of Westmoreland, Pat developed the ideal of personal, continuing primary care of the highest clinical quality then possible. He was able to look after his patients as he would have wished himself, or his own family, to be looked after. In 1970 he became the first professor of general practice in England, in the utterly different circumstances of central Manchester. He did as much as any general practitioner, and more than most, to apply his Milnethorpe ideal to the reality of an industrial city. Though he went on to solve other problems successfully, in this particular task he was probably no more and no less successful than all the others who have broken their hearts trying to get enough clinical enthusiasm into urban industrial practice for it to achieve active, independent, unsubsidised growth. He did not, and could not, transfer Milnethorpe to Darbishire House health centre. If giants have failed to apply the rural and market town model of good general practice to urban industrial settings ordinary men and women