JULIA HORTON julia.horton@theherald.co.uk DRESSED in a three-piece suit, with a trilby hat, smart black shoes, spats and kid gloves, Dr Fyffe Dorward looked a genteel GP as he drove around Dundee in his shiny black car.

But in common with other family doctors who started out in the 1920s, he took three other jobs to supplement his annual salary of £200-£300, which he tripled - also working as a policeman, university lecturer and medical journalist.

With no other staff and around 800 patients, his normal day began at 9am and did not end until midnight - later if the police called upon him to attend a murder scene.

His practice was the family home in Dundee's west end, which he bought himself, using one large room downstairs for consulting and another as a waiting area.

One of the family's two maids or his wife would show in patients, who were charged according to their means.

Aspirin was commonly prescribed for rheumatism but Fyffe had few drugs or diagnostic tests at his disposal for other common conditions such as bronchitis or whooping cough. As a result he was left to rely on guesswork, homemade tonics and large doses of reassurance.

His son, Dr Morrison Dorward, now 80, who also became a GP, says: "His diagnoses were made according to what he saw, heard, felt and smelled, combined with a good knowledge of his patients who he knew well."

While the NHS brought many improvements, its arrival was viewed with dread by Fyffe, as Morrison recalls: "He was intensely threatened because he had private patients sufficient to underpin his household but he was very afraid that many of his patients would stop paying and become NHS.

"Also, he was very afraid there would be an avalanche of demands coming from patients as none would have to pay, and he was right."

By the time Fyffe died in 1964 his patient list was about 4000, with much of work taken up with writing sick lines for workers for things such as false teeth or glasses.

Joining his father in 1955, Morrison was keen to embrace the benefits from the NHS. He says: "I used to do blood and urine tests on patients and examine the slides under a microscope in front of them. They were very impressed."

Initially working the same gruelling hours as his father, in 1978 Morrison moved his practice to a health centre in Westgate in the city along with two others. With eight doctors on site to share out-of-hours work, hours improved greatly.

By the time Morrison's son, David, joined him at the surgery in 1985 an established appointments system was in place.

The biggest health challenges then were heroin and Aids.

While drugs revolutionised healthcare from the early days of the NHS, David, now 52, believes that IT will bring about the biggest changes in the future.

"It will mean quality data management so that whether a patient is seeing their GP or a hospital doctor, they will have the same access to the patient's full records. My son Douglas, who is 19 and training to be a doctor now, will practise in a very different way, I think," he says.