• He is famous for his simple method of performing viable counts of bacteria and for his co-authorship of Topley and Wilson’s Principles of Bacteriology, Virology, and Immunity
• The results of his studies on inflammation and the prevention of infection are, however, the most important parts of his outstanding contribution to medical microbiology
• Although he gained membership of the Royal College of Physicians while a House Physician he was never attracted to clinical practice. The demands of individual patients would have frustrated his efforts to solve problems which kept presenting themselves to his fertile scientific imagination and he was much too humane to have felt happy to delegate responsibility of care to others.
• Developed the Miles and Misra viable counting technique. This was invaluable for quantitative work, previously seldom undertaken because the methods were cumbersome and costly.
• He also showed that Liquid (sodium polyanethol sulphonate) neutralised the natural bactericidal activity of fresh blood in blood cultures and he insisted on the routine inclusion of anaerobic culture and C02 enrichment. Although, it was not until the war, in his capacity as London Sector Pathologist, when the hospital was evacuated to Leavesden near Watford, that these methods were put into practice.
• The Medical Research Council, at the Government’s request, set up the War Wounds Committee to devise preventive methods not only in the Field and Base Hospitals but also applicable to civilian hospitals which would receive air raid casualties, and which were not subject to strict discipline. Ashley was a member of this committee and became Director of the MRC Infection Unit at the Birmingham Accident Hospital from 1942 to 1946.
• Ashley took great trouble to see that everyone in the unit and at Birmingham understood modes of spread. He devised simple experiments which nurses could perform to demonstrate to their own satisfaction that apparently clean sites could be heavily contaminated.
• After the war, Ashley left his professorial post when it became clear that financial stringency would not allow him to develop research and in 1946 went to the Department of Biological Standards where he was Director from 1947 to 1952.
• He collaborated with Janet Niven to investigate enhancement of infection during shock and devised a method of studying inflammatory reactions in guinea-pig skin.
• 1957 – published experimental evidence with J. F. Burke that the first 4 h after microbial invasion of tissue were vital and treatment delayed beyond this time was unlikely to prevent infection.
• He was a Member of the Medical Research Council, of the Public Health Laboratory Service Board and Committees of the World Health Organization
• He was President of the Society for General Microbiology, which he had helped to found, and of the Executive Board of the International Association of Microbiological Societies
• 1961 – elected Fellow of the Royal Society, served on many of their committees and became Biological Secretary and Vice President from 1963-8
• He was an Honorary Member of the Pathological Society of Great Britain and Ireland.
• 1966 – he was knighted
• In 1930 Ashley married Ellen Marguerite Dahl. Her half-brother, Roald Dahl, the well-known writer, refers in his autobiographical books to some amusing incidents during the courtship of his half-sister Ellen. The marriage of Ellen and Ashley was happy and successful, although childless, and lasted until the spring of 1988 when they died within a month of each other. Ellen was familiar with the working of a laboratory and was able to take a keen and well-informed interest in Ashley’s work. She worked with him in the laboratory for varying periods until he became Director of the Lister Institute and her name appears on published papers together with Ashley’s
• In 1942 the Medical Research Council (MRC) set up a small research unit at the Birmingham Accident Hospital to study initially infection in industrial wounds and the experience obtained in this field was considered possibly useful in infection in war wounds. Ashley invited Robert Williams to join this unit as resident pathologist, which led to a close co-operation lasting for some years.
• At that time, the importance of cross-hospital infection was increasingly appreciated, and this fitted in to a large extent with the wartime problems of wound infection. Infection following surgery had already been a matter of close interest to Ashley when he collaborated just before the outbreak of war with the surgical unit at UCH.
• Ashley combined the duties of part-time director of the Birmingham Accident Hospital with those of Sector Pathologist at Watford.
• Ashley was essentially a medical microbiologist of the classical type and his main contributions have been in this field. He was especially interested in the problems arising from the interaction of bacteria with the host and thus he was concerned with certain aspects of clinical immunology. During his career, his range of scientific activities included work on inflammation and related fields of experimental pathology.

Main research work at the Acci – Hospital Infection

“In collaboration with W. McKissock, a brain surgeon, it was shown that hospital infection with Strep, pyogenes could be reduced from 31% among air raid casualties to about 2% by revision of the dressing technique and the tightening up of ward discipline. At the Birmingham Accident Hospital R.E.O. Williams and Ashley analysed the time-wasting layout of dressing stations and proposed a new system which was adopted by the Hospital. Williams and Miles investigated carriers in the nose and on the skin and found that up to 50% of normal adults attending hospital carried S. aureus in large numbers in the anterior nares and 20% carried them on the skin at the back of the wrists. Carrier rates were found to be variable. Altogether, Miles and Williams laid the foundation of the work on hospital infection of all types.”

• In 1941 the Medical Research Council set up a small research unit in the Birmingham Accident Hospital to study wound infection, Miles was invited to act as its part-time Director.
• It soon became clear that the streptococcal cross-infection seen in the war-wound studies was repeated in the industrial wounds so we set about trying to apply the rules laid down in the War Memo and had all postoperative wound dressings carried out with no-touch methods in a special ‘dressing’ room.
• Miles entered into all the planning with gusto, as he did later when the hospital was designing new outpatient facilities. All innovations had to be cleared with the Medical Director of the hospital, William Gissane, a process that was helped by the fact that Miles generally stayed the night with the Gissane’s, but even so there was often need for a full dose of Milesian wile.