Michael Hall and his wife, Ann, retired to the Isle of Wight four years ago; they had been frequent visitors since 1949. They met at the London Hospital in Whitechapel, where Michael was a medical student and Ann a nurse, although Michael remembered playing on the beach at Sandbanks with a small girl—was it Ann Wescott, also on holiday with her parents? Before qualifying Michael was a junior lecturer in physiology. In later years one of his research interests was diabetes. He was intrigued to learn that the room he had used in the medical school, was the one in which J J R Macleod, co-discoverer of insulin and Nobel prize winner, had worked from 1899 to 1903 before moving to North America and eventually Toronto, where he was responsible for providing facilities and supervising Frederick Banting and the then medical student, Charles …
