Longer term, based on his frontline experience, he developed his study into the effects of wartime conditions on the resilience of troops which was published in the 1930s as a series of lectures titled
The Mind in War and culminated in a book
The Anatomy of Courage, published in 1945 at the end of the
Second World War. He was the dean of
St Mary's Hospital Medical School between 1920 and 1945, where he oversaw the rebuilding of the premises, while also maintaining a private practice in London at Number 129,
Harley Street. In 1938 he chaired a Home Office committee to plan the organization of London's hospitals to receive casualties expected in the then anticipated Second World War. and was created
Baron Moran, of
Manton in the
County of Wilts on 8 March 1943 and made his maiden speech in the
House of Lords the same year, on the
Beveridge Report. He helped set up the Spens Committee which laid down the remuneration of general practitioners and dentists, and chaired the government standing committee setting the payment of specialists from 1949 to 1961. He declined the appointment as a
Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire (GBE) offered at the end of the chairmanship. Moran's book,
The Struggle for Survival, is about Churchill during and after the war. It was published in 1966, fifteen months after Churchill's death, and aroused much controversy, as its detailed descriptions of Churchill's failing health appeared to constitute a breach of patient-doctor confidentiality. Moran claimed that he had compiled the book with Churchill's knowledge, although he had sought no permission to include conversations made in his professional capacity with the Cabinet Secretary, other officials and medical colleagues. leading many later authors to suggest that throughout his life Churchill was a victim of, or at risk from,
clinical depression. Formulated in this way, Churchill's mental health history contains unmistakable echoes of the seminal interpretation of Moran's Black Dog revelations made in an essay by Joseph Storr. In drawing so heavily on Moran for what he took to be the latter's totally reliable, first-hand clinical evidence of Churchill's lifelong struggle with "prolonged and recurrent depression" and its associated "despair", Storr produced a seemingly authoritative and persuasive diagnostic essay that, in the words of
John Ramsden, "strongly influenced all later accounts". However, Storr was not aware that, as Lovell has shown, Moran, contrary to the impression created in his book, kept no actual diary during his years as Churchill's doctor. Nor was Storr aware that Moran's book as published was a much rewritten account which mixed together Moran's contemporaneous jottings with later material acquired from other sources. Wilfred Attenborough has demonstrated the key Black Dog "diary" entry for 14 August 1944 was an arbitrarily dated pastiche in which the explicit reference to Black Dog—the first of the few in the book (with an associated footnote definition of the term)—was taken, not from anything Churchill had said to Moran, but from much later claims made to Moran by
Brendan Bracken (a non-clinician and wartime Minister of Information) in 1958. Although seemingly unnoticed by Storr and those he influenced, Moran later on in his book retracts his earlier suggestion, also derived from Bracken, that, towards the end of the Second World War, Churchill was succumbing to "the inborn melancholia of the Churchill blood". Also unnoticed by Storr and others is Moran's statement in his final chapter that Churchill had managed before the start of the First World War "to extirpate bouts of depression from his system". Despite the difficulties with Moran's book, the many illustrations it provides of a Churchill understandably plunged into temporary low moods by military defeats and other severely adverse developments make a compelling portrait of a great man reacting to, but not significantly impeded by, worry and overstrain, consistent with the portraits of others who worked closely with Churchill. Moreover, it can be deduced from Moran's book that Churchill did not receive medication for depression—the
amphetamine that Moran prescribed for special occasions, especially for big speeches from the autumn of 1953 onwards, was to combat the effects of Churchill's stroke of that year. Besides medical observations, Moran also recounted personal political comments made by Churchill in conversation. Visiting Churchill on the afternoon following the announcement of the
1945 General Election results, Moran commiserated with him on the "ingratitude" of the British public for voting in a
Labour government, to which Churchill, referring to the recent wartime hardships, replied "I wouldn't call it that. They have had a very hard time". He also recalled Churchill suggesting in 1946—the year before he put the idea (unsuccessfully) in a memo to
President Truman—that the United States make a pre-emptive
atomic bomb attack on
Moscow while the
Soviet Union did not yet possess nuclear weapons. The motivations behind the publication of Moran's book,
The Struggle for Survival, and his criticisms of Churchill, may have been due to Moran's personal grievances against Churchill's staunch imperialist attitudes. He once stated: "Winston thinks only of the colour of their skin." ==Family and later life==