Sir James Calvert Spence

James Calvert Spence was born in Amble, Northumberland, the seventh child of an architect . After being educated at Elmfield College, York, he attended the Durham College of Medicine in Newcastle upon Tyne. During World War I he served in Gallipoli, Egypt and the Western Front. Upon returning to England, he worked as a house physician at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle upon Tyne and then moved on to work as a casualty officer at Great Ormond Street in London. In 1922 he returned to Newcastle, where he took up the post of medical registrar and chemical pathologist at the RVI. He also joined the medical staff of a day nursery, in West Parade, Newcastle, which eventually became the Newcastle Babies' Hospital and provided the foundation for much of Spence's future work.

In 1926-27 he spent a year at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, returning to the RVI in 1928. His innovations in medicine included studies which showed a disparity in health between the children from 'poor districts' of the city versus the rest of the population, and the practice of admitting mothers to hospital with their sick children, so that they might nurse them and contribute to their children's recovery. In 1942 he became Nuffield Professor of Child Health at the Newcastle General Hospital and honorary physician to the Royal Victoria Infirmary. In 1948 when the National Health Service was established, Spence was a government adviser.