Desmond Zammit Marmarà, in reply, deplores “gratuitous insults” but is not averse to gratuitous assertions about matters outside his province.

He cheerfully states that “(the British) loved us so much that even after 1945 several kinds of diseases were still prevalent in Malta due to an inadequate health service”.

I graduated as a doctor in 1949 and did my stint of internship at St Luke’s and the Central Civil Hospital for the subsequent couple of years.

Throughout this period I was involved in the care of patients suffering from diseases still prevalent in Malta at that time, namely undulant or Malta fever and tuberculosis in its many forms.

Never did it enter the Maltese doctors’ minds at the time that the prevalence of these diseases could be attributed to an inadequate health service resulting from neglect on the part of the British authorities.

Their prevalence was due mainly to the fact that specific therapy was still inexistent or only recently become available.

The discovery of steptomycin in 1948 and of tetracycline in 1945 made possible the effective treatment of TB and of Malta fever and we were then privileged to be provided with adequate supplies of these newly discovered and expensive antibiotics. As a result it was possible to make a palpable impact on the prevalence of these two important diseases.

As a young doctor these were for me exciting times and the remarkable therapeutic results being achieved were duly reported in papers published in the international medical press, such as The Lancet.

So let us not be unduly partisan or nationalistic when looking back on our former colonial past.

I can claim unashamedly that I am as proud of the land of my birth as the man next door, and recognise the great achievements of our political leaders, past and present, in transforming a small island colony into an independent, republican European state.

Surely we are now, after half a century of independence, sufficiently self-assured to be able to convey to our better educated young generation a more objective and balanced view of our colonial past.