| Description | Interview with Dr Dorothy Younie recorded on 18 August 1986 by Elizabeth Olson.
continuation from MS 3620/1/51/1
Transcript of Interview :
O So you got a lot of clinical experience in Cardiff?
Y Yes.
O But by this time you thought you'd go to India?
Y During the period there I had decided that plans had changed and that I would go to India eventually in 1925. I had finished those three house appointments, Ear and Throat, Surgery and then Medicine and then I had so longed to do some Obstetrics. But just as a wee story about Medicine. There was only one HP there to eight house surgeons, there was so much Surgery and only the medical cases were far fewer but I still thought Medicine was the place for getting your clinical experience. One day when I was, I had already had a house surgeons job and never out of the coroner's court, that was one of the things there were so many tragic accidents, there was mining accidents. One was learning an awful lot about poverty and disease and tuberculosis as well. One day I was in the outpatients, probably an outpatient day, and there was a case that I must have thought required a surgeon, so I sent off somebody, I knew a surgeon was in the building, he was in his own office I suppose, and there was some reluctance about this Mr Cook coming, so I thought I would just go and get him myself because really I thought it was his job. So he came, we walked along the corridor to find this patient and I don't really remember the ins and outs of it but he did say to me 'But you know, how is it that you as a house physician have come and called and wanted me to see the case?' and I just said 'Of course surgery is just the hand maid of medicine'. And I think to myself now, what sort of ide fixe did you have. And Henry Cook, probably had a good chortle to himself and went along and looked at the thing. I'm only saying that these were how ideas were growing as you went along. And I don't think they were bad ones, really.
O Did you feel that your undergraduate training had been adequate as you went on to these stages?
Y I think that, because if one was going to think that that was all you were ever going to learn about medicine in your life then it was completely inadequate, as I think any training is of that time. But as a University training which is really still an education and it gave you some points of where to begin but there was no question of anything except attitude being the firm thing. Nothing but attitude.
O Because there were so many changes?
Y There were so many changes and I suppose at the end of the day now one thinks that one should have been at this stage one can accept that the changes have to be slow but that the recognition of small changes is what matters and that a great deal of money has been spent and effort has been spent when time hasn't been allowed for ideas to grow and then realise that this is fine for the time being but there may be another stage. That in fact evolution must go with revolution. Am I talking nonsense?
O No, I wondered if you could be more specific about that?
Y Over General Practice for instance, of course I think that it was a tremendous mistake that the money was given to hospital practice at the time of 1947 was it? Somebody said the other day 'Why was it that surgeons got such a lot of kudos'?. And one could only say 'Well, of course they were terribly necessary when we had so much to do with … the idea of the knife and removing things and perhaps based on the time when Edward VII got his appendix out peritonitis or what ever it was', there may have been that sort of reason and also I'm awfully glad that doctors have come off a lot of these pedestals as if they were magic makers and unless you were going to add something or find you own way in medicine or really get the idea that you had a contribution to make and it may just be a very wee one, but it's the way you approach it and use it.
O Do you think that you were taught attitudes in the University?
Y I think I got the attitude from some and certainly, when I'm coming to talk about my one year in practice and I'll show you how Ashley impressed with his courtesy and his obvious acceptance and dependence on the doctor's letter and his tremendous courtesy to the General Practitioner and how he could introduce the case and give …You were asking about the medical curriculum. I think what one should have perhaps got more of and it may not have been available in our time but that the history of medicine and I certainly got some of this but not in the University because I got books but I think that one should have been a much more modest realising that there were still things that were going to be discovered and that one had to really practice this psychiatry, listening and finding out what was really wrong with people and not just the snare of the presenting symptom. I think that's a terribly good phrase that I got from somebody talking to me on family psychiatry, I got away to a course on that. I think it's really the person you are and how you're going to be able to get on with people and I don't know that the selection of medical students is all the best if it's only on their exam passing.
O Was that the case in 1916?
Y Not at all, I got in on my lowers because my father said the sooner the better and off I went. The school was terribly disappointed.
O They would have like you to do a sixth form?
Y I wasn't going to get in from my fifth form, some of my good friends were, but my Maths was so awful but I think that the English and Latin people were very disappointed. It doesn't matter I was going to do Medicine.
O It's just interesting to know what the University expected. Presumably they knew you were a doctor's daughter in the area? I wonder why they took you on your lowers?
Y They were doing all that.
O Would they take anyone who applied?
Y Yes, I suppose. I suppose they would have taken anybody but I don't think they do it now. Also before I left this country, before I left the Practice there was another arrangement possible. When I was so keen on ENT I thought I would take my MD in that because of the associated infections and had gone ahead with some sort of thinking about doing the clinical side but I was allowed to do that clinical when I hadn't a thesis ready. That helped enormously because, as I said, there was something that came out of India home on leave and still having one of the children and then having quite a long time living at home to again I thought I knew exactly I want to do my thesis now, so having got the literature of a subject so having got my clinical a year or two before then I was able to proceed with looking into all the aspects of lactation, feeding and spent a lot of time at the Rowett, a lot in the libraries and what was so interesting the League of Nations literature on Europe. So although I had children at home, the second child was Mary who I landed in Aberdeen and then I had several months and so I got about 400 or more references that filled up and they gave me accommodation for that.
O And the topic was?
Y The failure of lactation. When people were trying to say that you could just feed babies as well out of a bottle. I'm only saying that how would they ever have known that one would have been so lucky and it's very difficult unless you begin to get some confidence in yourself and I wouldn't have known that I had thought of these as stepping stones, they just came my way.
O You did a year in practice in Aberdeen after Cardiff?
Y No, from Cardiff I went to London to do Obstetrics in a little clinic and then, knowing I was going to India, I provided myself with a diploma in Tropical Medicine and attended the Tropical School. It was a very short course then, what a lot I had to learn about bacteriology and most of the thing was full of missionaries and people going out to Africa to the IMS with tropical diseases. I managed to get through all that in a little while. Although it helped me to have a diploma as well as an MD which I had about that time which I've talked about - this is the sort of thing people look at without looking at you, to have had some sort of Public Health Diploma for when you came back to the local authority. So that's what I did when I left Cardiff and went to London.
O And then?
Y I went to do Obstetrics in a woman's hospital, Dr Annie McCall's, Clapham where there was a lot of visiting amongst family houses. It was a Spartan sort or set-up but I'd heard of it. I was only there a few months. She was terribly keen on no medals in midwifery. I don't know how good we were in ante-natal, but I got a lot of visiting in the homes outside, so there was a lot of family practice from that way and the women coming in and seeing them and following them up with well-trained midwives. Then I went to do the tropical diploma in the Endsleigh Gardens. That was I suppose sort of a slog, but it was preparation for the East and, of course, one fell in with quite a few people who were going to India but most of them, my recollection is, going to Africa. I was very glad to have that and I wasn't marrying a doctor and I wasn't intending to practice medicine.
O So then?
Y Before I went I came back from the Tropical School and had a year with my father in Practice and that's when I must have done the clinical for my MD and also it was invaluable learning to drive a car and going round the patients. When you came up to patients who wanted a second opinion or whether this was a consultant and of course they really wanted me to say 'I'll get my father to see you' and my father would say 'Nothing of the kind you are now in charge and so you have to take this consultant up' and nothing could have been more valuable. Taking Ashley out and then Surgery and occasionally somebody else.
O Marnoch?
Y Marnoch certainly but the idea that they would come, the patients had medication and there was seeing the patients, seeing that he was listening carefully to the patients and then the consultation in the sitting room afterwards. Whether it was Ashley or we were very fond of Court, the Practice used him a lot because we liked his way with the patients, they never left without telling the patient how much this was going to cost. There was no free service if they were going to have it done in nursing homes and some of the houses were quite modest and those people were falling on the words of the professor. And I was learning and as much as anything I was learning how to handle a patient, well I think I got that pretty well, but I meant it was the courtesy and the dependence that these people quietly and courteously the consultants learning as much. I was awfully conscious of that, right away, and I hadn't been conscious of that from any of the younger, not my own daughter, but just the attitudes, 'We're the people who know' and 'I say so'. It was a further going on with the making of yourself really, and that's why I want to put in that about McWilliam, which didn't really come to me at the time, but he just showed you what real research is.
O His research interest was heart wasn't it?
Y Absolutely. There were no second strings it was there to see how something was working and for no other reason, it was pure research, out of this might come something, something good, and certainly when we're talking about de-fribulation? It had, when they could be interpreted by MacKenzie. It's the outlook but there are no shortcuts, and I'm talking, not only about clinical experiences, personal experience as well. If it hadn't been for you, goodness knows if I would have known where all this came from or the putting it together.
O While you were in India you didn't practice at all?
Y No, but the value in India was that I went to a missionary set-up.
O Hospital set-up?
Y This was a little missionary hospital which was there the first year, I mean, before the babies arrived and I was there every morning and of course seeing the cases that I knew about ? and malaria and so on. The one thing that I noticed at that they are very pious, very serious: 'Why are all these children running about? I hear an awful lot about coughs and colds amongst the children , You wouldn't find that in our own servants children.' And I thought, is that because of prudity, they've got them all clothed? But Doris Graham was doing a very good job with the training of nurses, she had a very loyal staff, and of course there was very much … goodness before there was any operation, and there were quite a few in the maternity line, there was always a prayer before chloroform, the magic. This was sort of new but I enjoyed that and the other missionaries who were doing the educational side and lived elsewhere, we were in that, it was a very interesting station to be. There was also a Roman Catholic mission and daggers drawn between them. They were just leaving the babies at the door at the Catholic mission, delightful mums they were. But India as a whole that was ? then, then we were at one spell and very often always our own servants were always wanting something for their coughs and colds and then some of the ? children, my husband would say ? .
O So you'd keep an eye on?
Y Well they would come and say or I'd go to their houses and then we had this spell in Darjeeling where my own four children were there and we'd taken our education out with us but the civil surgeon there, I went to his ante-natal clinic and helped with the operations sometimes and heard something that was going on in the hospital world. There was also a baby clinic run by the Church of Scotland's minister's wife, Mrs Duncan had her baby clinic down in, 'So would I come to the baby clinic?' and so I went to the baby clinic but then I was rather puzzled about where some of these people came the hill people are all delightful and I thought I'd like to see where they stayed, there must be something funny going on about these houses and so I don't know if Mrs Duncan was ill but one day I said 'I'd like to come home and see your other children' and I was just absolutely horrified at the sanitation of these houses behind the main street and Mrs Duncan said 'You can't do anything about that' … a well known name in Darjeeling who had put up a tremendous amount of money to house so many people and of course to criticise his sanitary arrangements wouldn't have done at all. The sanitation had a lot to answer for some of the things that we were seeing. I didn't get caught up in the earthquake apart from my escaping it because I wasn't going to leave the family, that was the Behar earthquake, which was rather tempting because they were needing people in Behar but I couldn't leave my children and John was away too. We left all the children at home then and then we went to Assam, there were no judges in Assam and we were loaned to Assam. The first station we were in, we were only in two, here was ? the children were all at home and I was feeling very much that there should be something and they were going to open a centre for the women to come for maternity purposes, which would be a clinic, an ante-natal clinic, I think in Assam and a great deal of money had already been spent on it and it had been opened with a gold key and a notice put up by the collectors wife who was leaving and they were terribly please they'd got all this, you know when I went in I never saw a patient there. The first morning I went down there was a husband I think and he thought that a little magic would, from me, but I said 'I can't do anything without seeing your wife'. To open that wretched clinic, I'm only telling about the awful things that go on, because there was going to be a governor's visit afterwards. This is the Bengali but they had opened that place and they had only borrowed the equipment from the hospital for the opening and there was literally nothing inside. It was just for show and that had been opened by the collector's wife who was a graduate at Aberdeen University. Robert Reid he came along a little while later and I heard him saying, and this babble was going on about all they were doing, and Robert Reid just said 'And why?'. I was just feeling so sad because I had really thought here's something one could do. There wasn't a nurse in the place nor had anybody been trained in nursing. There was absolutely nothing one could do and I remember John saying there's only one thing you can do and just say 'No useful purpose can be served'. I don't know what happened to it. There'll probably be a key in the door or a plate up. But this is what I mean the disappointment at how things can just go wrong and there was an opportunity, I think, and it was an opportunity with the men folk and I suppose if one knew one was going but these short stays of ours because we were only attached to Assam for more than one term or something like that.
O Which was how long, three years?
Y No, two years would be the most and we'd been at Lahore? before that in that one spell. It was a very short time that one could have made any lasting impact.
O You came back to Scotland with your children hoping to retire?
Y Yes, and hoping that my husband would probably find something. We were going to leave Aberdeen and we were going to bring up the children, possibly in the country, and we came to Central Scotland because he was interested in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Remember it was 193,8 and we settled in Dollar. We knew there was a school but we couldn't find a house then we found a very nice house there and we settled there but there was no job and as pressure came from High Court and the war was looming and John went back only to be for two years because he still hadn't completed his whole service. So he went back at the beginning of 1939 and we never saw him again. He was in Calcutta for the first year or two and then as the war came and he was wondering what I was going to do when the war was declared lots about anxiety should we go to Canada. There was very few people left in Scotland for the war and I didn't and he certainly thought India even then early in the 1940s was saying this place, I'm thinking of the far east, Japan ? and of course all the Australians were … I've mentioned all these Australians haven't I?
O No, what were they doing?
Y I mentioned my Uncle Willie.
O You'd been in Australia?
Y Yes, but then I didn't mention that why we've got so many relations in Australia was that along with Uncle Willie, or about the same time, his sister went out to marry her sweetheart of nine years before. Now TB had taken him to Australia and he had a bit of teaching. All were graduates of Sydney University, five of them doctors, and along with their spouses there's a tremendous amount of Doctors in Sydney elsewhere and their children and grandchildren. I've been out several times and we have this huge Australian connection and they were wiring and saying 'Send us your children' but I wasn't going to do that unless I could go with them and of course the schemes were for children to go unaccompanied. Before the war ended they had invited me to go back and do some clinics, school clinics in Clackmannanshire which I did part time. In early 1942 I begun to do part-time work and then, of course, 1942 brought me completely in, my husband suddenly died, then he was working at the High Court, to me this was all a war-time pressure. I still couldn't have bought myself into a General Practice because it was still 1947 so I was interested in all sorts of medical things so and I liked this school this was invitation and I liked my clinics and then there was a vacancy as late as 1945 in Stirling and this is where I went as an assistant MOH to Neil Reid in Stirling. At the interview, I got Lord Wavell … I got some good references of course they loved big names, so I went to this and I was only appointed temporary because the previous assistant was on war service and hadn't returned and as we were walking along Neil Reid said 'Of course you know 'it's just the Cinderella of the profession' and I was just sure it wasn't and neither it is. I never heard anymore about the temporary and I never heard any more about the 'Cinderella' business and Neil Reid's been here he's still at Bridge of Allan. He said to me 'There's one thing I'd like you to do', take a particular interest in, because he was beginning at this time, I was terribly lucky to be going into school medicine at that time because this was the time the new Education Acts had come out and there had been a great deal of more provision for the handicapped and the disabled in so many ways. He said 'I'd like you to keep an eye on the Special School' which was Dawson Park in Falkirk. There I was every Friday and certainly got very interested in the various handicaps and why the youngsters were there and what a friendly place it was. They'd come running out carrying this and carrying that. I was thanking Neil Reid for that. I said I don't know enough about that. He was interested too, and about that time he began to be interested in deafness, he was a clinically interested MOH and he was interested in deafness. He had invited the Ewings from Manchester to come up, Mrs Ewing, they all became knighted afterwards, as you remember, and he put Mrs Ewing in charge of her and I liked her very much. At that time we were only thinking that we must get rid of [hearing] aids and everything else together and sign language, at least not of aids, but of sign language, forgetting that communication one way or another is what really matters. Then there was the selection of teachers who could be peripatetic amongst the deaf in ordinary schools, you know how it's all developed. That was awfully good and I myself (I mustn't say I all the time, but I know it was me!) had got a parents association going in Dollar anyway because we were so many grass widows with children and wondering what the world was going to be like outside and so we had a rather active parent's association going in lots of directions. Certainly we got Karl Konig down from Newtondee thanks to the Taylors and we got one or two educationers from Edinburgh and Lord Boyd-Orr there too over nutrition so we were rather a good little group of people and over at Winifred Rushforth's clinic, she came several times, and so many people that I hadn't known terribly well but parents who had or thought they had handicapped children found that ? and Winifred Rushforth were awfully good on this. So even while I was in Clackmannan days I was getting children and I wouldn't see a single child and never would see a single child at the opening examination unless a parent was there, and the teacher if possible so that in some of these Alloa schools the teacher came and sat in out of interest. What one was stressing in ones self, and I think I got something into a journal, the student health service from a doctor's point of view, it was a service to education not whether they had big tonsils or ingrown toenails, it was a service to education and what was interfering with their learning, what was their capacity for learning, and that that is where we were, and through the Women's Medical Federation … but I wasn't long and I said I couldn't live long enough for this because I couldn't change their stereotyped ways. It had all been laid down, by teachers, at the beginning of the century who had just been so dismayed at the poor health of ragged children in London at the turn of the century and they got doctors into the service then. Of course, they were treating ill children, neglected, starving children. They had scarlet in their handicap, cardiac disease and so on. They were getting all these things and the service was typed out in different ways and this rigmarole you were still filling up things and it wasn't really tackling the problem and I was getting on a wee bit in Aberdeen when I said I would go to a school once a term for nothing else but have the teachers refer the children to me. Certainly, I got very interested in school attendance and of course that was left in the hands of trackers. I'm sure you don't have them now?
O They do, but they call themselves school welfare officers now. They're a very nice crowd, a very well meaning crowd.
Y Of course they are, but at that time it was very much a punitive thing.
O But it doesn't seem to be so bad now.
Y But I meant it was one or two days and certain days of the week there was always an absence from one or two children or at different times. I used to find that girls simply weren't coming on the gym days because of they were held back by their mothers. I wasn't long in Aberdeen and Mary Esslemont knew the function of a school surgeon and she got me certainly into one case. That was the first case anyway, she said I wonder if you would look into this it looks like a real case of school phobia. It didn't come from the schools, but eventually there were one or two cases of the parents complaining of teachers and a breakdown in a teacher can be awful and that was coming from the authority themselves who asked me if I would look into this. Then not all of them were so enlightened and the entrance to Beechwood was entirely mine and then they had to go through this committee and they were saying it wasn't filling up quickly enough and then they got their own ideas and they put in whom they liked and that was old Bill what's his name, he's over in Dundee now, he thought that he would fill Beechwood and there were some terrible mistakes. There was one boy, when Helen tells me about the terrible business that dyslexics have and the non-readers, and there was one boy, and I can see him yet, and he was not put in by me, the lad was already eleven and when it came to seeing printed pages he just turned away and goodness knows what's happened to him. Also, I got a whole lot of children who had had no education at all out of their homes and got on home education and I went through all, not Newtondee, the Rudolf Steiner School, Camphill - Karl Konig and some of them had put their children there and that was impoverishing them and unnecessarily so and some of them came out and came to our own special schools. There was a lot of muddle up there, and children who had been denied education because … one awfully good spina bifida girl, I wonder what's happened to her, excellent parents and she could have had every education but she was incontinent, and they couldn't cope. She'd never been tried but a home teacher and then they'd want to stop it, but she did get some qualifications and a secretarial job as did a polio girl but they had had their confidence themselves very badly impaired.
O So you'd have come back to Aberdeen about 1950?
Y 1953 I think.
O Did you have any relationship with the University then?
Y Not until I was put on the Business Committee.
O When would that have been?
Y I probably went on to the Business Committee two or three years later.
O Did you enjoy that aspect?
Y I was going to say about that, I thought it was rubber stamping until a good deal later, because one or two terms one was on it, when the University was getting and one was learning a lot about other departments oneself, and one got Harold Watt on to the Business Committee and I remember, I don't mind saying this, I feel that the University should be indebted, because Harold like his mother before him became very interested in a lot of the voluntary things in the town. Harold, by this time had come on to the Deaf Society which met in Rose Street and one night coming out of that, and I knew there was going to be a vacancy on the Business Committee, so I said to Harold, by this time Helen, how did I know Harold Watt, of course I've known him better since Helen married Donald, I don't know whether I had got so far in with Harold or not then, I don't think so, anyway I said 'There's a vacancy on the Business Committee and we've got nobody from the commercial or business world, I wonder if you would think about it?' He took a long time and I wondered if he heard me or was he just going to say no and then he said 'It would be a very good thing to have somebody', he by the way had been terribly useful to oneself in finding jobs for the ex-deaf in the printing world and that had been a very good avenue for their future, joining the University Press. So he came on. No sooner was he there, he was a very good committee person in a very quiet and humorous way and of course he had us for the first time getting all a calendar since he knew who we were going to see this kind of thing, and then as things developed and the chairmanship changed a little bit, I think it was the new Principal, I can't remember, anyway somebody coming saying 'You know we're relying on you more than you know and we're asking you to do this'. It wasn't the case of their making the decisions and us … 'But we've got so much less time now I wonder if you'd give this particular attention?' And the Business Committee could in fact ? there was one or two very good people there asking the right questions that I felt that I just wasn't any use there except and of course I was sitting on other voluntary things, particularly the Mental Health one. Because I was the local authority representative but that was a voluntary thing that was hospital. Then only the town, because they say town and gown, the only town was the Education Committee and I found that quite difficult about the understanding of handicaps, especially when they had built this enormous school. Where are we now?
O We're talking about what it was like to come back to Aberdeen, how you saw the University?
Y I couldn't say until I had really finished with the local authority I wasn't in touch with the University apart from the Business Committee.
O You must have seen a tremendous change in the premises of the hospital from when you'd been a student?
Y Yes. You mean away from Woolmanhill?
O Yes.
Y Yes.
O Did the premises at Castle Street seem bad to you in their time?
Y I suppose when one was going out at night from the practice to the Castlehill Barracks, I had to go there quite a lot over testing the children for Beechwood …
O Perhaps it wasn't so bad though, it was later on things became slums, perhaps before that they were merely homes?
Y No I think if you'd got my sister Betty who followed me in General Practice, I think Black's Buildings, which came down, were the worst, they were on the road down to Woolmanhill. They all came away. Black's Buildings was a seat of iniquity really but not the Castlehill Barracks, they had been very well built and some of these rooms were enormous.
O What about the medical premises, the hospital premises down at Castlegate, was that flourishing when you were young?
Y We accepted open fires in the Children's Department and the Obstetrics Department and the Obstetrics, the Maternity Hospital was down there.
O It was said that people left that for the modern hospital with a sigh of relief in the 30s but then perhaps in the 20s they weren't perhaps trying to do open operations in the maternity hospital?
Y But then buildings don't really come first?
End of interview
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