Courage and determination are recurring themes in Professor Somerville's career, especially in its formative years when as a newly qualified graduate she had to battle the old boy bastions of the English medical establishment to secure a permanent hospital post; even then in the late 1950s, having abandoned cardiac surgery in favour of cardiology ("I wasn't a good surgeon," she says, "my hands were not connected to my head"), she became the first medical registrar in the long history of Guy's Hospital in London.
It was at Guy's that she "begged for" - and got - a post-registration job with the cardiac surgeon Sir Russell Brock. These were, she recalls, "heady days and nights in theatre", with just one evening a month off - and barely enough time to court her future husband, the distinguished cardiologist Walter Somerville.
Jane Somerville, EFESC, went on to train in cardiology at the National Heart Hospital in London, where she was much influenced by Paul Wood ("the greatest bedside clinician") and the cardiac surgeon Donald Ross, EFESC. "I was deeply involved with cardiac surgery and advances in congenital heart disease," she says, and it was from then on, as the techniques of paediatric cardiac surgery advanced in the mid-1970s, that her "obsession" with the survivors of congenital heart disease developed. These "grown-ups with congenital heart disease" - GUCH patients - often required further surgery and presented many new challenges, which she and Ross would understand and address.
"I was an obsessive follow-upper," she says, "so I was always interested in what happened to my patients. It was from seeing those patients with congenital heart disease grow into adulthood that the concept of GUCH was born."
Professor Somerville, EFESC, opened the world's first adolescent ward at the National Heart Hospital in 1975 (the Paul Wood ward) and organised the first World Congress of Paediatric Cardiology in 1980. However, the unit she had fought to found was sacrificed in the merger of the National Heart and Brompton Hospitals. It would take another three years before she could find the will (and the funds) to start again and rebuild the ward, which, in 1996, was finally named by the Brompton as the Jane Somerville GUCH Unit.
The award of an ESC Gold Medal to Professor Somerville, EFESC, is surely in recognition of such determination, but, she says, it also recognises GUCH as a formal subspecialty of cardiology. The
ESC's own Working Group on Grown-Up Congenital Heart Disease was founded by Professor Somerville, EFESC, more than 20 years ago.
"This is the first time that I've ever had formal public recognition," she says. "But maybe I've had too much to say. Anyway, I've never had the time to be political, to sit on committees, so this Gold Medal is welcome to me personally, and it's good for GUCH patients that the specialty is recognised as important."
View the ESC Guidelines on Grown-Up Congenital Heart Disease