| Description | Interview with Professor W.M. Millar, recorded on 11 February 1985, by Elizabeth Olson.
First part of an interview with Professor Millar, continued on MS 3620/14
Transcript of Interview :
0 Professor Millar, you were an Edinburgh student and worked there before the war. Why did you come to Aberdeen?
M There is a very simple answer. I hoped to go back to Edinburgh, went to see my old chief, who said there wasn't really a worth while job for me, and by chance I learned that there was a Senior Lectureship likely to be coming up in Aberdeen. I knew nothing about Aberdeen or anything about the job or about Dr MacCalman who was just made the Professor and so I came up to Aberdeen on spec, just to see what was what, met this quiet, kindly man in his club and one of the first things he did was to talk turkey with me [discussing] exactly what I would be doing, how much I would be getting, what the job was like. The whole thing impressed me so much, in contrast to my dear old chief, Sir David Henderson, who had nothing to offer that I just said, "well if you want me I'll apply", so I applied for the Senior Lectureship and got it.
0 And that wasn't a conscious choice to go for a University appointment?
M Oh yes.
0 As opposed to a clinical appointment?
M Oh yes. Going back to Edinburgh was going back I hoped to a teaching type of appointment. I'd come from the Royal Edinburgh Hospital under Sir David Henderson which was really you might say the Professorial unit of Edinburgh University and before the war I'd been trained by Sir David Henderson and took my post graduate degrees and so forth there and was in point of fact about to go off to the United States on a Rockefellar Fellowship in September 1939 when the war broke out. So I abandoned that and volunteered with a number of colleagues at Morningside to go into the army, so we were in there by the end of that year, and remained in the army until 1946 when I came out.
0 What were the interests of the department under Professor MacCalman?
M Well they were varied and the history of Professor MacCalman and his department is well worth recording. He came here from Glasgow where he had been really a Child Psychiatrist, mostly related to the Notre Dame clinic, under a very famous lady called Sister Marie Hilda, and there were other clinics attached to the Children's hospital, but he had had wide general experience and he came to Aberdeen on an appointment that had been created back in 1937 called a lectureship in Psychopathology. That lectureship had been inspired by two men, one by the name of Ross who was at that time Chancellor's Assessor to the University Court who was head of Crombie's, and the other was Alexander Anderson, one of the chief physicians, the Queen's physician in Aberdeen. Now these two men between them were much concerned about the way in which medical students were being taught Psychiatry and they took the view, held very strongly, that the commoner conditions, the neurotic conditions and the everyday psychosomatic conditions and the conditions affecting children and families, were the ones that young doctors, most of whom were going to become general practitioners, should know about and [that] the general hospital was the base for such teaching not the mental hospital and so the department was set up, partly by the University, the lectureship, and partly by the hospital, as the Department of Psychological Medicine.
0 Which was separate from the mental hospital service?
M Which was totally separate from the Mental Hospital. It was a few beds and an outpatient facility in the Royal Infirmary.
0 I noticed there was a lectureship in Mental Diseases. How did that fit in?
M Well now the history of that goes back over a very much longer period of time. It was a mandatory course for all medical students from, oh I suppose, the 20s, and the Psychiatrist responsible for that mandatory course was the Physician Superintendant of the Royal Mental Hospital based at Cornhill. That course was really the only course that students were obliged to take even although first of all the lectureship and then the actual chair in Mental Health were set up.
0 Really? So [this was the case] even after the university department [had been established?]
M Even after the Chair was set up in 1946 there were only, as it were, grace and favour lectures offered to students in Psychology and in these commoner conditions affecting adults, the neuroses and psychosomatic disorders and [conditions] affecting children.
O Did the person in charge of the Mental Hospital take kindly to the idea of there being a parallel service?
M Not at all. There were severe conflicts right from the beginning unfortunately. The then superintendant, a brilliant man, the late Dr Andrew Wyllie, took his position as The Lecturer in Mental Diseases very seriously indeed and as a lecturer in the subject was quite outstanding, quite brilliant. He gave his students their marks and he recorded their attendances and he made quite certain that they did what he required of them and [he] completely ignored any other teaching. He didn't regard that as having any place whatsoever.
0 And wouldn't perhaps have liked to teach it. I mean, he considered his brief was the more gross [pathology?]
M That was his brief and that was also a part of the conditions laid down in the calendar, you see. The regulations laid down by the Faculty and the Senatus were such that only Mental Diseases appeared until some time after I was appointed in 1949. It would be a year or two after that. When I was able to put through a completely radical change in the curriculum for medical students under the general heading of Mental Health.
0 And at that time did you take over the Mental Diseases aspect of it?
M The Mental Diseases as such was eliminated, but [it was] incorporated within the overall curricular time available, so we covered for instance some lectures in Psychology in the early years and then a combination of formal lectures and clinical work in different parts of the service, including the Mental Hospitals. Students went to the Mental Hospitals, they were in the General Hospital, they were in this new department of Mental Health in the Medical School and they also went down to the Children's Hospital and so they began to get a coordinated, overall course in Psychiatry.
0 When did it become an examinable, Professional subject?
M Well it never really became a fully fledged Professional subject and that was a story in itself. One of the reasons for this was that the Professional Examinations, as you'd understand, took place at the end of each year but the main ones in the clinical period took place right at the end of the course, in the fifth year or the sixth year of the course. We never taught beyond the penultimate year and that was just the way in which we managed to fit in our time you see. Because we were not in final year we were never really able to take part in any final examinations and these were the only Professional Examinations that did count in a clinical subject. Certain others counted earlier in the paraclinical subjects of Pathology and Bacteriology and ChemicalPathology but where it came to clinical subjects, it was really only felt that Medicine, Surgery, Midwifery and Gynaecology were The final year subjects. This was partly determined by General Medical Council recommendations and partly by our own curricular regulations set up by our Faculty, so we never really broke through as a full Professional Examination in the whole of my time. So we had to work out various compromises that I don't think I need to go into in any great detail except to say that [these examinations] were regarded, for all practical purposes, as the culmination of the different courses [the students] were taking [in Mental Health] and did have the effect, for example, of holding back students if they didn't make the grade and this kind of thing. It had almost the practical effect of a Professional Examination.
0 What were the interests of Professor MacCalman's department when he set it up, apart from teaching the students? What form of service did he set up in Aberdeen?
M Well for one thing he changed the name you see and that has been held to this day, Mental Health, and there were very good reasons why that name was chosen. It was to get away from teaching the subject of Mental Diseases, Mental Handicap, Neurosis, in a negative way. It was to introduce the very early origins of these conditions by teaching on children, and it was also to get into the field of Social Psychiatry and the social causes of mental illness and to some extent, on prevention, on positive prevention and the encouragement within the community of all manner of voluntary bodies. So the philosophy of the department of mental health, you might say, was: of course to teach medical students, as we have been talking about, undergraduates; to undertake a certain amount of postgraduate teaching and training; to carry out research, which of course is the duty of any University department; but also to act as a sort of public relations unit for the community as a whole. So the department made very positive efforts from the start, from the time that MacCalman came and then, after he went I continue for instance to start the Association of Mental Health, the Marriage Guidance Council, the Samaritans, the Friends of Kingseat and Royal Cornhill. Then we got Divinity students interested in the field of Mental Health, in early awareness of problems in their own congregations. So we had courses for ministers and we had routine courses for divinity students, which still go on to this day as part of their courses in Practical Theology. So that was the overall concept, that it was partly based on the medical model you might say but also on this wider social, mental health model. This took me personally, for example, into becoming a member of the Scottish Probation Council at that time. [It also embraced] wider issues of mental health, [like] setting up of Children's Departments, that was a new thing too.
0 You mean a Department for Child Guidance or do you mean as part of the hospital?
M The Children's Departments which were part of the Local Authority. I should say that we also actually set up under the Education Authority, the first child guidance centre. I was the person responsible for that as well along with the late Professor Knight. Between us we set up the unit in Carden Place which is still going.
0 Is it now owned by education?
M Oh yes. It was Education's from the beginning. There was a feeling that we should have done more on the medical side but at that time there was no finance that came through health authorities, but plenty through education authorities for this purpose, so it seemed silly for us not to push it.
0 Why did Professor MacCalman leave after two years only in the chair?
M He and his wife were very fond of the south.
0 So it was a personal change really.
M And it just happened that his friend Henry Dicks who had been appointed at exactly the same time as he was to the Leeds Chair decided that he would go back to London and Douglas MacCalman eventually decided that he would fill Henry Dicks's place and so he went down there.
0 So when you were appointed to the Crombie Ross Chair of Mental Health in April 1949, what were your aims for the new department?
M Well I had had to learn very fast because my work in the army was so very different, although a lot of it [had been] what they call pure Psychology. I was concerned with the selection of officers for a number of years, and so I had to learn the clinical side of things very quickly, but I learnt as much as I could from Professor MacCalman and it had mainly to do with the way in which we set about diagnosing and treating children's conditions and the neurotic and psychosomatic conditions that appeared before us in the outpatient departments in the general hospital.
0 Yes, the [Aberdeen University] Review comments approvingly that on your appointment you set up a clinic in Woolmanhill where for the first time patients could consult a psychiatrist by appointment. Why did you feel this to be necessary? It's so much part of our expectations nowadays that it's a surprise to me that it must have been an innovation at that time.
M This is a very interesting story in itself because it's very topical, in 1985, this February, this whole question of waiting times and appointment times and so forth. Until 1949 we had a sub let from Sir Dugald Baird in his department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology two days a week, Tuesday and Thursday, and [on] these days, there were three or four of us altogether at that time, we went down at 9 to Woolmanhill and we saw whoever arrived and then we were back again at 2 o'clock to see whoever arrived at 2 o'clock. In no time at all, such was the flood that the 9 o'clock people were still there at 2 o'clock. So we ran on from 9 o'clock in the morning until 7 o'clock in the evening, Tuesdays and Thursdays, and in those days we had to do absolutely everything for those patients who came from all over the Region, including certifying them and having them put in that day into the mental hospital. So chaos reigned and it was quite obvious that we had to find a place of our own. So I took it on myself to look everywhere in that area and ultimately I came across a but that had originally been built for Sir Stanley Davidson's research in Haematology. It was now a plumber's store, still a wooden but and it had five rooms in it and one toilet and so I put up a suggestion that we should take this over as an Outpatient Department for the department of Psychological Medicine in the Royal Infirmary and eventually it was agreed. The place was gutted, painted and I was given £100 by the Board of Management to furnish it. So I went to Cocky Hunter's which was the great junkyard in those days and I bought £100 worth of furniture and I furnished the John Street clinic. The place was so small that we had only room as you came in the door for about four or five chairs for people who might wait. There was one room available for the secretaries, of whom we had two and then three, and then there were four other rooms available for consulting. One of them had to be permanently available to the social worker; the other three [were] for the psychiatrists who came at this time, [from] Kingseat and from my own department but sadly not from the Royal Mental Hospital. [Some psychiatrists also came] from far afield; they came on a regular basis, five days a week and even in the evenings. Because we had such limited facilities, we had no alternative but to have an appointments system. It was thrust upon us and the way we worked it was simply this. That any request from a general practitioner or from other sources, for a patient to be seen was noted down by the secretary and just slotted in to the next available hour for the next available psychiatrist who happened to be giving his session in any one of these three rooms, which were used morning, noon and night. Any repeat, return visits in psychotherapy and any treatment visits were on top of these arrangements, but every patient who came, whether it was for the first time or at subsequent times, would come and be seen at that time, because there was nowhere for him to stand around or sit around.
0 So it made for efficiency?
M So against that background we learned a great deal of how to organise an appointments system, so that later on in 1959, ten years later, when we went into this very much larger unit in the Ross Clinic we removed this holus bolus, got even more people involved, and worked a much more sophisticated system but basically the same type of system that is still going today, with the result that certainly in my time there was never a waiting time to have a full consultation [of] longer than two weeks. Whenever we got more than that we could add extra sessions to cut the waiting list down. Now that seemed to me to be a simple straightforward thing, but to my amazement I don't think that there is anything like it in Aberdeen or anywhere else, in British hospitals. They just do not know how to run an appointments system. They'll do it in private you see. Nobody would go to St. John's Nursing Home without an appointment for a particular time and be seen at that time, but the idea that they should go to a hospital at a certain time and be seen at that time is totally foreign to everybody up in Foresterhill, as far as I know.
0 It seems like that.
M So that's some of your off the record stuff.
0 Yes indeed. So that Outpatient Psychiatry was an innovation in itself at the time
M Oh very much so yes. Outpatient Psychiatry [was now] and the other [innovative] thing that I should mention is that we had at that time very close links with a number of the physicians. I mentioned Sir Alexander Anderson; there was also Sir Dugald Baird and Dr Tom Anderson the dermatologist and one or two others and they became extremely close colleagues with cross referrals and a great deal of common interest with these other departments based mostly on the Royal Infirmary. The way in which Sir Dugald Baird had organised his Midwifery service, which by that time was fully established and world renowned, was also a tremendous example that I could follow, you see, and I became a very close personal friend of Sir Dugald from the beginning and Lady Baird and had a tremendous amount of help from them in the way in which a Mental Health service might come to be organised. So between 1949 and 1959 I suppose I spent a great deal of time in trying to work out how that could be done so by 59 when the Ross Clinic was set up I think I had learned everything that I could learn from Sir Dugald.
0 You took up the Chair at about the time the National Health Service was established. How did that affect you?
M Well the Health Service, of course, was a blood transfusion for Psychiatry. To give you an idea, the highest paid Psychiatrist in Aberdeen in 1948 was the Superintendent at Cornhill and I shouldn't think he was getting £1000 a year.
0 From private sources that would be, from his private practice?
M No he didn't do any private practice. He would have a house as well, but [he and] his deputy, a man who had far less responsibility [payment] but was a very senior person, and his deputy in turn also, who had higher degrees and qualifications and even less responsibility [payment], overnight found themselves with incomes of £2800 a year as consultants, exactly the same as their friends up the road who were Surgeons and Physicians, Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and so on. This was a tremendous transformation in the Aberdeen Medical scene, that the Psychiatrists should be thought to be on a par with these people. Oh yes, [it was] quite exceptional. They had previously been thought to be no more than they were financially paid you see, and some of them of course, [the] people at Kingseat [for example] were paid by the local authority, paid even less by the local authority.
0 Surgeons and Physicians gave their time, I believe, to [the hospitals] before the National Health Service for a minimum amount of money?
M For nothing.
0 And lived on their private practice earnings, subsidised it from that? [While] people in psychiatry couldn't do that because there weren't the fees in that respect?
M They were all paid full time salaries. [The salaries were much lower than their clinical colleagues could earn in private practice.]
0 And presumably you would have been dealt with as a full time member of the University staff, so that was the source of your income?
M That's right, yes. So there was a very small amount of private practice available to Douglas MacCalman when I came, between 1946 and 48, but it was quite tiny and of course ceased when he became a full time Professor.
0 So you gained both [in] status and financially from the Health Service?
M The Health Service yes, and also I think it should also be said that, because we were so backward in Psychiatry and at the same time so diverse and the number of people involved, patients I mean, was so many and so varied all over the place in Kingseat, the Royal Cornhill, way up in Banff and Elgin and out at Woodlands, and the general state of many of the hospitals was so low, it was a terrific challenge to people within the Health Service to see how they could get this thing organised, you see, and I don't think that this is distorting the picture too much to say that almost certainly those who learnt best how to run the National Health Service at the end of the day were the Psychiatrists, not the Physicians or the Surgeons, perhaps latterly the Paediatricians and of course the Geriatricians and of course never forgetting the social dimension that Sir Dugald Baird added to Obstetrics you see here in Aberdeen.
0 What do you mean by that?
M Well Dugald Baird you see was as much a specialist in Social Medicine as he was a specialist in Obstetrics and his interest in the organisation of the Midwifery services had to do with the way in which he could improve the nutrition of his patients. For example, to make sure that they were in a good state and their age at the time of their pregnancies and so on were all terribly important matters to him and his social consciousness in relation to Obstetrics had an enormous effect on Social Medicine in the broader sense of the word, so that there is no comparison, Sir Dugald is a sort of unique person. But the Geriatricians and paediatricians latterly became more aware of the social dimension and the way in which the service had to be organised. But Psychiatrists from the very beginning had to organise and the way in which we organised I think made us, as it were, better administrators of the health service than ever Physicians or Surgeons would be and to this day Physicians and Surgeons haven't the faintest idea of how to organise themselves.
0 And you feel that all being together in the Medical School site must have helped you with your conversations with your colleagues?
M Oh yes and also being in the Infirmary until 1959, when we moved down to the Ross Clinic which was on the Cornhill site, we did in fact see a great deal of other colleagues on the different floors in the Medical School and then we had a tearoom you know, where we met and discussed all sorts of things and there were routine weekly meetings of a clinical nature, clinical pathological meetings which were available to us all. But even going along the corridors in the Royal Infirmary, there were medical consultations going on all the time. I would say that one contribution that I tried to make which I think was appreciated was that when I was asked, by medical colleagues particularly, to see patients that they were not quite certain about, the vague symptoms and it wasn't clear whether there was an organic factor or an emotional factor, maybe both, I think what they appreciated was that I made no pretence of being a Physician. I would tell them all that I could possibly tell them about the emotional side of the patients and the kind of person they were dealing with and the sort of way in which I thought some symptoms might have evolved and might be dealt with, but I didn't really pretend that I was a Physician and knew as much as they did about the ins and outs of exactly how the heart or the lungs or the kidneys or any other part of their insides worked. You see, that was their job, and I feel sometimes that Psychiatrists going into Medical wards or Surgical wards are almost compelled to put on white coats and pretend that they are Physicians you see before they can be accepted, but I think that's a false concept of the role of the Psychiatrist. A Psychiatrist should be quite different in the contributions he's making to the problems of the patient and he mustn't try and pretend that he understands all the ins and outs of the organic aspects. He can use his common sense and pick up what he can and he has been trained up to a point to understand the outline, the bare outlines of physical conditions but he's not all [up in] the detailed technicalities you see, and nor for that matter is the Physician expected to know all the nuances in making the differential diagnosis for instance between what might be an Anxiety State and what might be a Depressive condition. Now that's an area to my mind where it really is quite a [subtle] matter to know even as between these two conditions what you are dealing with. And as often as not, you find the physicians have got it the wrong way round you see and that's just an example. We have got to do our job and they do theirs and between us we do something best with the patient. So I think that would be enough contribution.
0 I think that's an appropriate place to [stop].
0 You were talking about your aims when you set up the new department?
M Yes, well there was another aim, as it were, thrust upon me. The Rockefellar people back in 1950 were getting, it was the post war years, and they were getting hold of youngish Heads of Departments in Medicine of whom I was one, I was just 36 at the time, and giving us a chance of a travelling fellowship in the States to visit other centres and in my case Psychiatric centres in 12 different medical schools right across the country. So in September to December 1951 I went over to the States and I was taken round these different centres and I suppose I met all the principal distinguished teachers of Psychiatry in the States at that time.
0 Were they in advance of Britain?
M They were very much in advance. Every single medical school had its own professorial department; the professors were regarded as the sort of pre eminent psychiatrists around and they had huge departments and they had an enormous amount of teaching time. In Cinncinati I remember they were told that they had 600 hours available for teaching which was almost as much as we were teaching Anatomy and so they were really on the crest of a wave in teaching Psychiatry and I think the entire Medical Faculties sometimes seemed to think that the only thing that ought to be taught was different aspects of dynamic psychiatry, much influenced by psychoanalysis. Avery large number of these men were either psychoanalysts or analytical trained and many of their colleagues had obviously been analysed, Professors of Neurology and Medicine and Surgery even were analysts, so they were all wanting to teach their medical students these erudite subjects. There was a bit much of it, there was not much doubt at all, because every year something was packed in and it was overwhelming. Then of course going to their conferences they were a very high morale group of people and they tremendously influenced me that this kind of dynamic psychiatry based on psychoanalysis was the kind of thing that had to be introduced into this country. Well there were people like John Romano in Topeka Rochester and the Menninger brothers and Pica in Kansas; and there was Henry Brosen in Pittsburg sitting there looking absolutely devastated, in a, what, 12 storey building with I don't know how many dozen staff, wondering what in all the world he was going to do with a budget that was imposed on him of $2 million a year, so this was the sort of situation that we encountered and it seemed to me at that time there were only half a dozen chairs of psychiatry in the whole of Great Britain, of which ours was one, that if we are going to make it, ginger it up a bit, we should do it in the American model and I got American people to come over. Menninger was over, John Romano was over and Milton Rosenbaum from Cincinatti he came over, ( that's the 600 hours man) he came over, I had personally been analysed during the war so there was another reason why I was interested in it, so I thought, well better get going on some much more dynamically oriented psychotherapeutic approach to our patients problems, I even had a man over for a whole year filling one of my Senior Lecturer vacancies and he was a fully trained psychoanalyst, that was about 1957 or so, a John MacKenzie and he started on the postgraduate side and so by then I was quite determined that we would launch the first fully fledged University postgraduate course in Psychotherapy and eventually after a great deal of toing and froing it was launched in 1965 so its now being going, this is it's 20th year.
0 And that's for doctors or for [people from different educational backgrounds?]
M Well to begin with it was for doctors only and it was only for a year but it has gone through various transformations. I may say it was quite unique at the time and psychotherapists were not regarded as having any place in the Health Service and so we were really just training for general psychiatry, an extra dimension you might say, but now you see there are dozens of consultants in Psychotherapy, many of whom have gone through my course and the whole situation has been transformed because there are these psychiatrists doing nothing but psychotherapy and also social workers and clinical psychologists and others who are also taking this course.
0 And that's still [running now?]
M It's flourishing and developing according to the needs that the Health Service and other services are creating.
0 And when you came back from the States were you in a position to appoint new people at that time, when you were expanding?
M No that was back in 51, 52 you see when I came back from the States, so it took me 12, 13 years of hard graft, but the first breakthrough was in 57 when we got John McKenzie to help, but gradually for other reasons as I said, our curricular time became properly organised and staff then could be added and the department gradually grew and then we brought in the National Health Service people which I may say, fortunately included the late Dr Andrew Wyllie as a full scale Senior Lecturer in Mental Health and he continued to carry on, more or less as he had done before but on a more reduced scale because others were involved as well, and with a good grace I think he accepted things and latterly we were really on quite good terms.
0 And that must have given you access to the Cornhill site?
M Oh yes. In fact the Cornhill site became the base for the Professorial Unit in 1959 when we moved from the Royal Infirmary, where I had a ten bedded unit in Ward 4, to the Ross Clinic which had 40 beds available and the whole of the outpatient service available and we moved down there and of course moved in many other ways after that. We moved into the field of Epidemiology because the Ross became the sort of focal point for Psychiatry for the entire Region in a way that the little John Street clinic couldn't ever have been, you see.
0 You still have Psychiatrists coming to the Ross Clinic, to give sessions, as they had done previously in John Street?
M As they had done previously you see, but we added to it and it became more sophisticated and included a large number of people and we had enough accommodation for conferences, clinical conferences and conferences for people outside the Region and so on, so it became a focus and that sort of eased up relations all round and we got appointments made within the Department of Mental Health of all consultants and then all senior registrars, so I don't know, there must be 50 or so people on the department of Mental Health staff now compared with 3 when I started.
0 In the 1960s you were appointed to the University Court. How did that affect your own work?
M That was a big decision to make because by the time the Ross Clinic was set up and going well, the work that had been done up to that point or at that point became a focus of interest nationally and I found myself rather caught up in organisations outside Aberdeen.
0 Was that at the time of your being on the Mental Welfare Commission or was that [afterwards?]
M The Mental Welfare Commission was one of these and then I went onto the Advisory Committee for Medical Research in Scotland and at that time we started, really for the first time, to develop our research programmes in a big way which were mainly epidemiological and which were focussed mainly on our Psychiatric Case Register which started up about that time which is still going and which is one of the very few registers in the country or indeed in the world and so that took me and the department out of Aberdeen. So the big decision really had to be taken by myself that my day to day clinical responsibilities and day to day teaching responsibilities became less and these other matters became more time-consuming and even within the Department I was getting out into Faculty matters and then I became Dean of the Faculty you see and then round about the same time I went on to the University Court.
0 When did you become Dean of the Faculty?
M 1965 I think.
O And was that for a set period of time?
M Three years.
O In rotation?
M Just after Sir Dugald Baird. So that took up time and then I went onto the Court at about that same time I think, when I was Dean. I was still on the Court in 68 I know and so I became really involved. Maybe harping back a bit, I had always been interested in teaching and had therefore developed a natural interest in Education and of course especially Medical Education and had written quite a bit on the subject and a group of us met who were interested in the Philosophy of Education some from the Faculty of Arts and also Divinity where Professor Cairns was the professor of Practical Theology but we developed a little group for example, oh a year or more, with Dr Whiteman the lecturer in the History and Philosophy of Science and we had members of the department of Moral Philosophy, Donald McKinnon and, Dr Bernardowski, a Polish chap, and a number of other people from the faculty of Arts and Psychology and we tried to work out, for example, definitions of abstract terms like hallucinosis and things of this sort and I know that still somewhere there are the minutes of these meetings that Dr Whiteman kept very slavishly over many, many months, a year or two, and this was a sort of interdisciplinary approach that always intrigued me. I loved the way other people went about their particular academic activities and so I think it was a very natural thing for me to get on to the Court as well and get interested in the way in which the University as a whole was running. I never, when I was on the Court, felt that I was there as the Medical Member to grind an axe for the Faculty of Medicine of course.
0 Were there many of the members of the Medical Faculty on the Court at the time?
M Well there was Dr Sandy Lyall, he was a member of the Business Committee who was a medical man, and we usually had one that came up through the Business Committee of the General Council, so there was just the two of us, but I never felt that it was a proper thing for a member of the Court to be seen to be a member of a particular Faculty, far less a member of a particular department, and it was the broader aspects of university life that really did fascinate me and that allowed me to take interests in oh, various things like the way in which the University was developing as a whole and the size of the University.
0 It was growing at that time?
M Yes, and where it should expand in the Arts side or the Science side.
0 Were there various attitudes sort of crystallising that you feel you could comment on or?
M Well by that time of course, Edward Wright was the Principal and I had a very high regard for Edward Wright, as a man who had very considerable foresight in these matters. He was, I think, he was a very much better Principal than his predecessor, Sir Thomas Taylor, from the point of view of the University. He understood students very much better; I think he understood the aspirations of staff better; but he was better overall. He had a kind of vision of how a University should evolve and he had a whole series of long term objectives, I needn't go into them all, because maybe I wouldn't be able to give you an account of them all, but that was my idea that he had these long term objectives and anything that presented him with a problem today would be decided in the light of these long term objectives. Sometimes he would be quite ruthless in his decisions but if you saw them in the long term you realised that they were very sound and I think that the way in which the University increased in size under Edward Wright and through the Robbin's initiatives, I think was quite first class. I think he got things pretty well organised, and believe it or not, he took a very good view of the Faculty of Medicine at the same time, yes, and that was a contrast with [Taylor], although as I say he was a mathematician and steeped in the Faculty of Arts, he had a keen appreciation of the way in which the Medical Faculty ought to evolve too. His own idea.
0 Which was?
M Well, I think, in insisting on the highest possible academic standards among staff that were being appointed, junior staff that were being appointed. He personally was in the Chair in most of these junior appointments and if he personally didn't think that they were up to scratch he would say so and they very often weren't appointed and if he had any difficulties with even senior appointments he would needle the candidates in a way that sometimes made me squirm. He had this idea that it didn't matter what faculty a person was in, he himself would have a pretty clear idea of whether he was of, what he thought, adequate academic standard or not, you see, and if he thought he wasn't up to it then he just wasn't in. So he applied in other words, the same standards to Medicine as to any other Faculty and this was rather refreshing; that's an example. But for example he was totally behind the view which I had held very strongly too, and many others, that we should increase our student numbers from what had originally been a mere 70 in the year to 130 or even 150 and he was very much persuaded of the fact that if we were to survive we should be a large Medical Faculty; that was another of his great contributions. We were gradually whittled down in the end of the day, he and I, on that particular one, and of course the numbers never went above 130, but I think that, morally speaking, he won the day on that and I still think that was a right thing to have done.
0 To increase the class size, because that gave you a correspondingly large Faculty?
M That's the whole point. The real point of having large student numbers was to have large departments to teach student numbers. I don't mean large just for the sake of being large, but large enough to be viable. Now when you have 70 students and you have got a department of Child Health with 3 people in it or a department of Mental Health with 3 or 4 people in it, where is your career structure you see? Nowhere, and especially even in Medicine and Surgery in a small group you either have either to import people from outside or you suddenly find yourself losing a couple of staff to some other place because that would be the natural way in which these people would find careers. Constant turnover, and of young people who you would much prefer to retain, you see, into their prime of life or even into senior posts and up to a point you see it has worked in the faculty, that it's bigger and it's offered a career structure. Why? because if you look now at the number, the actual number of professors, full professors and personal professors, you see that many of these young people who stayed on in Aberdeen finished up in the highest ranking appointments you see. That's really the argument for the large numbers; you've got careers and you've got much better chance of attracting outside moneys. Then you can make your contribution in the research field.
0 And had Aberdeen until then been a particularly small faculty?
M No, not by standards in many of the other Medical Schools in the country; that was the strange thing about it. Dundee was no bigger, smaller in fact; Edinburgh and Glasgow were certainly bigger; but the individual medical schools in London were no bigger and of course there was practically nothing in Oxford, and nothing whatever in Cambridge and most of the provincial Medical Schools were round about 70 or 80 at that time.
0 But of course at that time when the numbers were increasing they also increased the number of medical schools in Britain?
M Yes that's right. The Royal Commission realised that they had to double them, more than [double] the total number of medical graduates. That meant increasing the size of individual schools, with all the benefits that I have mentioned you see, and rationalising the situation in London which was just long overdue, and creating new medical schools. Of course I may say that I was on the Medical Sub Committee of the University Grants Committee during that period when all these Medical Schools were coming into being and the other ones were being developed and it was because of my position on the Medical Sub Committee that I was so convinced that Aberdeen had to get cracking, otherwise it was going to fall way behind.
O And yet now we talk about medical unemployment?
M That is a very odd piece of political gimickry on the part of some members of the profession and I must say that I'm profoundly unimpressed by it. Curiously enough at the local Medico Chirurgical Society we had two meetings in successive months, one from a protagonist of this idea that we have too many doctors floating around and we should have fewer, and the very next one from a man who took the opposite view. So it's a thing that has got two sides to it, but I really feel myself that, provided of course that we can get through the present financial difficulties, the national financial difficulties, one way or another, then we really must have more doctors, not fewer, and this idea that there are unemployed doctors, I think that there are several ways in which that could be explained and rectified. I don't think there is a problem.
0 Looking back on the Court discussions of that time, are there any decisions which you feel you would have preferred to have been taken differently, with hindsight?
M At the Court?
0 Yes, of the things that were discussed, do you think there were things that were reasonable at the time and probably were reasonable in themselves but perhaps you might have changed?
M There is one small one, just while I'm thinking maybe of something else, but quite important and with hindsight I think quite significant. Oh from time to time from the 60s onwards a number of us tried to persuade our Senatus colleagues, and of course the Principal, this was Principal Wright by that time, that we should set up a fund raising organisation for the University. We had some ideas as to what the funds should be raised for, a library was an obvious choice, and we pressed Edward Wright especially on this and he consistently opposed it as I think Sir Thomas Taylor had before. The reason I understand that it was resisted was that if we were to be seen to have a lot of private funds available to us, this university, this might prejudice our chances of getting grants directly from Central Sources. I think that would probably be his reason if he gave it, although I'm not certain that it was valid, because now that funds are drying up from central sources there is now no alternative but to set up fund raising. I think myself that it's a great pity that there hadn't been something started, even in a small way, to get into this idea that it was a good thing to have a complementary source of income or a complementary source of capital for special purposes. Because you see in the 60s and during the Robbins era, money was pouring into the universities and it looked as if this was a cornucopia that was never going to stop and I think the idea that we should think of an alternative source of income was probably not taken too seriously, but it is a pity that it wasn't thought of.
0 There was a point of view among some members, perhaps not of the medical faculty staff, that increasing the student numbers would mean a dilution in standard of student entering the faculties. Was that considered a problem by the Court at the time or was it just accepted that it would be a good thing if more people had more of an opportunity?
M These arguments were thrashed out at various levels, Faculty level, Senatus level and National level and I remember even a British Association meeting, I think it was in Aberdeen, where the late Sir Eric Ashby took up this challenge at a national level, and he showed conclusively that increasing the total number of students coming into the University did not reduce the overall quality and he showed, for example, taking Arts subjects as a case in point, that there were absolutely more First and upper Second class graduates coming out of the universities as a result of increased student numbers and so that was a view I must say I agreed with and that's the kind of thing I was interested in. Because I was also during the war years interested in the intellectual aspects and academic aspects of our candidates for officer material, it always struck me that we had far more intellectual resources available to us in this country than many academics imagined. I have had many arguments with for instance Professor Reg. Jones on this subject, who has a most elitist view about students, that only a small number could ever aspire to be decent students. I keep telling him that each of us has on an average 10 thousand million brain cells available and the only reason why they are not showing that they can work well is that they are not being used, its not a question of the ability not being there, is that the chance has not been given and so I don't think this increase in student numbers diluted in any way. What it did do though was that it broadened the, I think that I could say this again off the record, it had a very interesting effect for a number of years on the quality of the staff that had to come in, in a very short period of time you see, to meet this bigger demand of students. There I would say that there was some falling off in quality of the junior staff taken in and this is back to Principal Wright's point you see about standards of these junior staff. He was very keen to keep them up and he managed to keep them up latterly but I think to begin with when there was this great inflow of students, especially in these big subjects like Psychology and Sociology; the staff that came in had very poor basic qualifications and almost no experience and yet they had huge numbers of students to teach so that the actual quality of the teaching was not very good and I dare say that would be reflected in the quality of the student in the end of the day you see, so that Robbins had some baleful influences during the big buildup period because there weren't the staff there to teach.
0 What about the influx of women that came. The Medical Faculty now has about 50% woman and there are always a good more women in Arts, of course.
M I think that's entirely to be welcomed and it really in a sense [reflects the numbers of men and women applying to the Medical Faculty. The numbers accepted have always reflected the proportions of those who apply.]
End of this Interview
Another interview continues on MS 3620/14
|