| Description | This is a continuation of the interview MS 3620/10, on the 19th February 1985 with Professor W.M. Millar begun on the 11th February, recorded by Elizabeth Olson.
Transcript of Interview :
0 Professor in your time on the chair, the Medical course was changed radically. What was the intention in making these changes?
M Well these changes were really the result of the recommendations of the General Medical Council. The G.M.C., as we called it, brought out recommendations every 10 years or so and it had always really been understood that these were no more than general guidelines, hence the word recommendations, but over the years it hay come to be thought that they were actual regulations setting down quite specifically what should and should not be taught. So the recommendations that came out round about the beginning of the 1960s indicated that there should be much less instruction and much more education of a broad kind, a scientific education as it turned out. This really meant that individual universities and medical schools could work out, as it were, there own salvation to a much greater extent than before because there wasn't any longer this notion that the G.M.C. was requiring so many hours of this subject, so many of that subject, and that the long term objective was to turn out a particular kind of doctor. The particular kind of doctor that would ultimately emerge was to be determined by postgraduate education and not by undergraduate education. So the undergraduate period of 5 years was thought to be much more concerned with laying down foundations, scientific foundations, of a kind that would last the student a lifetime; he could build on these throughout the rest of his professional life. So that really did make very drastic changes to well, some of the subjects which had to go and other subjects that had to be brought in. For example in the end of the day the very first year subjects of Physics and Chemistry were relegated as it were to the 6th year at school and the student started off in his first year with the subjects of Anatomy and Physiology, some Biochemistry and some Psychology, that sort of thing. The effect of this on entrance requirements, I think, was something that should be mentioned. I think in the early days, certainly when I came here first and when the Medical School had only an entrance of about 70 or even less each year and when the number of applicants was not great, most applicants were thought to be adequate and they were admitted to medical school. By this time, after the new regulations or recommendations came out, the pre clinical subjects of Physiology [and] Biochemistry, particularly, laid down such high levels of academic expectation that only a very small number of applicants were thought really to be suitable for admission to this much more high level preclinical periods.
0 So that it's a reflection of the course; the difficulty of the course is the reason for the increase in entrance standards?
M As conceived by the pre clinical teachers unfortunately, as I saw it from the clinical point of view. This was an open invitation to the pre clinical departments to set their own standards, that in a sense bore no relation to what might ultimately turn out to be a good doctor, you see. So long as they were going to be first class scientists, that's really what mattered and I think that, as things turned out in Aberdeen and in other medical schools that I visited in later years, I did feel that they were admitting the students whose academic achievement at school in the sciences was paramount and almost no other qualifications were brought into consideration. This was quite a major change in our entrance requirements and this kind of student who came into medicine.
0 And that change took place in the 60s?
M Yes throughout the 60s.
0 And remains to this day?
M Various transformations occurred. There had been a 6th year course and it was reduced to 5 and of course, an extra year was added at the other end, [the] so called pre registration year, which was a mandatory period of hospital practice before full registration was given by the G.M.C. so there were various changes but effectively those changes 20 or so years ago [established] what is the state of affairs today.
0 But the course would have been changed more recently than that, would it not? When did the change from a 6 year course to a 5 year course [take place?]
M Well there you have me for dates.
0 I see, but roughly in the 60s or the 70s?
M It would be in the late 60s or early 70s.
0 And how far do you think the new course has succeeded in the aims that you set up for it at the time?
M I was never myself entirely happy with the selection procedure because our particular method did not involve interviewing any candidates and therefore the selection committee, the admissions committee, determined its selection entirely on paperwork and this involved essentially the number and quality of Higher and G.C.E. grades that were obtained by the candidates and headmasters' reports and that was it. Now one extraordinary thing that did happen, was that this in point of fact, because it was so competitive, allowed, gave, a tremendous advantage to those who had taken the English G.C.E. examinations and so an increasing proportion of G.C.E. candidates came forward and were successful to the detriment of those who had taken the classical, broader based Scottish Higher Leaving Certificate. So that was really quite a substantial and significant difference.
0 So that a Scottish student would need to have done 6th Year Studies before he would be an acceptable standard?
M No he was accepted alright but he was in competition with other Scottish applicants much more fiercely because there wasn't really all that much difference between him and other Scottish applicants. Whereas the English G.C.E. applicants walked in fairly comfortably because they had specialised, you see, in the very subjects that they were being given their grades for, at a much earlier age.
0 What about the distribution of subjects within the course once the students had crossed the threshold into Medicine. Your own subject would have had much more time by this time?
M That was one of the most difficult problems to solve and of course it remains a problem in Medicine as it does not in any other faculty. Medicine is unique I think, in that it has a standard course throughout the entire 5 years; every student has to take every subject. Therefore the proportion of teaching time in each subject has to be worked out in relation to the amount of time available to all the other subjects and the established subjects clearly had all the advantages and wishes to retain the number of hours of teaching and the times of teaching as well that they had before. So it was a matter of pressure on the part of the newcomers and a certain amount of magnanimity on the part of the established departments and maybe rather less than magnanimity on the part of others to have to give up hours and make adjustments. The biggest slash of course was in Anatomy and I think that, well it came down in my own time in Aberdeen from 1200 hours to something like 600 hours, but even 900 hours was thought to, be a bare minimum.
0 For the amount of work that was expected?
M One of the arguments, interestingly, was that the G.M.C. had laid down that the whole body had to be dissected. Now we have never had regulations laid down, it was not a regulation, it was a recommendation. So the finding of so much time from Anatomy certainly made it much easier. The way in which the Anatomy time was cut really coincided with the retirement of one Professor before the appointment of the next and that was really one of the ways in which it occurred.
0 And you also gained some time from altering some of the first year subjects, but you were compressing from six years and summer vacations into a much more concentrated 5 year course?
M Well we had eliminated physics and chemistry you see, so that was also [a help].
0 That was six terms I suppose.
M Yes. So overall the main cut was in Anatomy, with slight additions in Physiology and in Biochemistry over the years and some additions in Psychology, not substantial, in the sense that they [did not] upset the pattern for these early years. In the pre clinical and clinical years, another device was worked out to try and make the most of the available time left and that was to integrate teaching in such a way that instead of two or maybe three departments dealing with the same topic in three separate teaching periods, perhaps even in different terms, they were brought together to carry through on so called Systems Teaching. The various aspects, pathological, bacteriological, clinical, aspects of the different systems, the cardiovascular system, the urinary system and so forth; and that was not only better teaching, from the point of view of the student, but it was more efficient in time. There was a point that I always felt on this that many of our colleagues used to think that the be all and end all of these discussions on the curriculum had to do with the amount of time available for teaching, whereas of course so much that went on was not teaching but learning. What the student was learning was more important that what the teachers were teaching and the amount of time available for reading in libraries and at home and for perhaps discussions and other types of experience elsewhere, these were all very often overlooked as essential parts of the curriculum, vital parts of the curriculum. The amount of private study that students were pursuing in their own way in any subject [was limited].
0 Is that why they introduced electives?
M That really was the basis of the elective system, that somewhere along the line we did agree that a proportion of the time in the senior year, penultimate year and even in the final year, some of the time should be devoted to the study of a subject of the student's own choice and that was not necessarily a study in Aberdeen; it could be anywhere. I saw a young lady only the other day who had just returned from Perth, Western Australia, where she studied for two months with one of our own Aberdeen graduates, Professor German, in Psychiatry and others go to Africa, Zambia and places of that kind. Others have gone to the States, indeed all over the world.
0 How do they finance this?
M Well that's a point. They are more or less self financed. They'll have relatives or friends or fiances or something of that kind who will see to it that they get there.
0 Are there any modifications you would like to introduce now that the course has been running for some time and you are looking back at it?
M Well of course it's now nearly 8 years since I left it and I'm not really quite up on the latest developments. There was at one time a suggestion that the pre registration year, which was almost entirely confined to six months surgery and six months medicine, should be extended to two years and be very much more broadly based in offering a mandatory experience in a wider variety of subjects and some efforts were made, even within the pre registration year, to achieve this, but without success. I think that a second year might well have been beneficial for most. I think that would have been worthwhile. But of course the movement away from set lectures towards more tutorial type, small group teaching, I think that has in fact taken place and the more of that we can get the better. However, the great drawback of that approach is that it's inordinately expensive in staff time and you can't really afford that nowadays. You see in the old days when I was a student, almost everything we learnt was through lectures and the study of textbooks and that was it and so I could be, in Edinburgh, one of 200 students and we sat and we took our lecture notes and then we went and read our books and then we sat the examinations and we got through or we didn't and we re sat and so on and then we were through and it didn't much matter if there were another 10 students or 20 students and the same even on the wards. There could be as many as 50 students sitting round one bed and you couldn't really see the patient, but you could hear this great man, they were all great orators you see and actors and they had their own little visual aids and a bit of ham acting and they could enthrall 50 students round a bed on a heart that we never listened to, you see. So in those days teaching was of that kind and very, very cheap in staff student ratios.
0 And more efficient or less efficient, do you think, in producing [doctors?]
M Well one thing, it was highly competitive and you just sank you see without trace if you didn't pass.
0 Yes I suppose if you failed, nobody cared.
M And you were aware of the stark realities of learning again in this competitive environment, which had its own advantages you see, but so far as those who succeeded, it was the survival of the fittest in other words, but clearly it didn't make a doctor. But it set, in the same sort of general principle as the present curriculum it laid down certain foundations which were I think every bit as good as the present ones. The previous foundations were of a highly competitive society and a zeal to learn whatever was to be learnt, otherwise you were sunk you see. Now it's very much more sophisticated; it's a matter of getting down to almost the mathematics of the scientific method in one's approach to any subject, Biochemical or Physiological or Pathological subject and even within Clinical Medicine or Clinical Surgery the understanding of what is going on has to be an understanding at a much more sophisticated level than ever we would have hoped to have achieved you see.
0 Yes the increase in scientific knowledge I suppose [has made for changes].
M The increase in scientific knowledge and the various techniques required to acquire that knowledge. You have got to know how an electron microscope works, you have got to know some of the fundamentals in Immunology and of course in Biochemistry - you have to know what a Krebs cycle looks like you see and you have got to know things that were way beyond anything that we could have comprehended in our day.
0 You've spoken of how student numbers have grown over the years. Have the students themselves shown different characteristics at different times, for example after the war?
M Well when I came in 1946 there were already a number of students who had come back from the war and they continued to come to Aberdeen over the next five or six years, ex servicemen, and they had of course one interesting advantage over other students, apart from being older and the experience of the war, they were financed by reason of the fact that they had been in the army, in the services. So they were a pretty relaxed lot and the most striking difference between them and the other students, the younger 18 year olds who were there, was that they knew how to read the headlines first and they almost never read the small print at the bottom of the textbooks.
O They had gained a sense of proportion?
M Exactly, and therefore you could never catch them out on making some stupid mistake. They would never make stupid mistakes. The great weakness of the young student who feels he has got to learn everything, is that he has very little idea of the relative importance of different bits of information that he's acquiring and he strings them together and in an examination or whatever he may miss out one or two, obviously he can't remember 100, but he would miss out a few percentage items and these may be the most important for all he knows; he did remember the small print you see.
0 Whereas the older students didn't do that?
M Would never do that.
0 Have you noticed much change in the students since the University has become largely residential?
M Well it isn't really. You mean in the sense of being in Halls of residence?
0 Yes.
M Well it isn't really that. The numbers in the university when I came were I think about 1200 or something like that in 1946 and I think they've risen to something over 5000 now and the Halls of Residence were brought into being more or less after Robbins laid down his various principles for a tremendous increase in student numbers in all the universities and they simply had to find accommodation for them and [building] Halls of Residence was an obvious development. I couldn't give you a figure offhand, but I would be surprised if there are more than 2000 places for students in Halls of Residence. There are of course lodgings officers as well, who spread their net all over the city and out of the city, finding places for students to stay. So that what you really have is a curious combination of what we might call the traditional Aberdeen student who either stayed at home or stayed in digs and then this more recent type of student who lives in a Hall of Residence and lives the life of a student similar to students in olden times in Oxford and Cambridge you see, and so they have got the two types there.
0 What kind of relationship was there between staff and students before the expansion, when the place was smaller?
M Much more intimate. It was more intimate at the staff level and of course it was intimate at student level among themselves because students in a group of 70, without too much effort I think, did over the years, (you see they went through 5 or even 6 years together, 70 of them, gradually whittling down maybe to something less by the time they graduated), but they would almost certainly know, each would know all the others in that number. So there was a group feeling among the students themselves. The staff also had a similar group feeling, partly because they were smaller, but also because they were confined either in the Medical School or down at Marischal (and the Marischal people very often came up to Foresterhill, so we really saw them as often as we saw our colleagues at Foresterhill) and the numbers allowed this to be the case. As time went on when numbers rose to 130, among students that broke up the student grouping; and of course a corresponding increase in the number of staff broke up the staff. But then another thing happened when Foresterhill itself was extended on the clinical side and a system of so called embedding took place, in which the clinical departments preferred to have their teaching headquarters near the patients rather than near their colleagues you see, then a department of Medicine would find itself in the new building, the department of Therapeutics would be in their new building and the department of Obstetrics was moved you see, and so forth, and so the Medical School where all these clinical departments had formerly been congregated together, ceased to have this total group of clinical departments and it was largely in the end of the day, occupied by [a reduced number of] departments: the laboratory departments and the department of Social Medicine and little bits of the other departments. They tended to split off to where their patients were.
0 Which might be a loss to the students and to themselves as a group?
M The idea of a corporate body of staff and students disappeared, yes.
0 Would you say that individual Principals had their own effect on the university at the different times they served?
M They did and of course the events themselves determined it in a way. The period of great expansion of the University you see, itself determined the kind of activities a Principal would have to be engaged in and so forth.
0 What sort of place was it when you came and Hamilton Fyfe was presiding?
M Well he went shortly after I came. I think he went in 1948 and he was, so far as I was concerned, a remote figure. I think that I would have looked upon him and upon his successor Thomas Taylor, who had been the Professor of Law but had a very fine undergraduate career as a Classicist as well; I looked upon both of these Principals as steeped in the old tradition of an ancient University. You expected them to speak Latin most of time and of course in those days you may know that Arts students could not enter the University without taking Latin as one of their required subjects you see, and of course the graduation ceremonies were in Latin and the sort of centre of gravity seemed to be down in old Aberdeen and the general feeling of the academic life of the university was one that centred round the departments of Humanity which included of course both Latin and Greek and English and Logic and Moral Philosophy. These were The subjects you see. Somewhere down the line there were a few science subjects like Physics and Chemistry and a little Botany and a little Natural History. They would be just a little below the level of the true academics in Arts and then of course there were the other, at that time quite important group, the Divines. The faculty of Divinity was a powerful intellectual force in those days, with men like G.D. Henderson who was Professor of Church History and a world authority on matters of that kind. Then there was at that time, curiously enough, only a very small faculty of Law and it was only dust for a year or two that there was this very notable Professor of Law, Tom Taylor, who began to make it into a proper official subject and had whole time students instead of students coming in from Law offices to pick up law, rather like chartered accountants. But he you see, had this classical tradition as well and the Faculty of Medicine was really a totally separate thing. For example in the whole period that I knew Principal Taylor I never knew him to have visited the Foresterhill site. He may have done, but I never saw him at the Medical School and he certainly did not pay any official visits to the Medical School as one of his duties, so this was a very different atmosphere. The Senatus, which was a small group of Professors, were dominated by the Professors of English and Divinity and the Arts people generally.
0 Did this make a practical difference to the Medical Faculty or did you get the freedom to do what you wanted to do in a sense?
M Well we had a permanent Dean who had been Dean from about 1936 or perhaps even earlier, David Campbell and David Campbell was the Faculty of Medicine. He was the Dean, he was the member of the Court, latterly he was also the University member for the General Medical Council and latterly the President of the General Medical Council and he simply ran the Medical Faculty. Our Faculty Meetings consisted in I suppose rather like Politburo meetings nowadays routine meetings of those who were entitled to go, to hear what the Dean had decided and the business went through in about half an hour and no one ever got up to say anything or make any contributions of any sort and this went on really until he retired. He was Dean for the best part of 30 years.
0 Is that why the subsequent Deans had tenure only for 3 years, in case you had a similar situation?
M Yes. There is a completely off the record of how that happened, but I don't know whether you would like to hear that?
0 I would love to.
M Would you? Well, what happened? Well it's simply a matter of fact that it had reached the stage where the Faculty was dying on its feet really and there were a number of younger men of whom I was one, but others older than myself and established like Sir Dugald Baird, who were finding the greatest possible difficulty in getting developments going, particularly in the field of research. The Medical Research Council unit [which] was ultimately set up under Sir Dugald Baird, had to be literally arranged behind the Dean's back and that was one sort of thing. Where I was personally involved was that I was actually anxious that Sir Dugald should be appointed Dean and of course we were supposed each year at our May faculty meeting to appoint our Dean for the ensuing year; that was the regulation, which I discovered and it had lapsed. So under any other competent business I found myself standing up and saying that I would like to reintroduce a very important matter of business that seemed to have lapsed over the last 20 years or more and that was the appointment of the Dean for the coming year. So there was a deathly hush. And so I said a little bit about how I thought it was very important; one of the most important things that the Faculty could do was to appoint its Dean and give him the backing that we should give him. So in accordance with the regulations I would like to propose that Sir David Campbell be appointed Dean for the coming year. There was a lobster face at the head of the table and nothing very much happened after that and the meeting broke up in disorder and I was chased up the quad by Sir David. However it was really intended to be a shot across his bows for the following year. However we couldn't persuade Dugald Baird to be nominated to stand against him and so nothing happened, except for the fact that one or two of Sir David's friends felt so apprehensive that there might be some opposition that quite separately they put in nominations for him in writing. So there were two quite separate lots of nominations and motives as well, unbeknown to one another. So it had to wait until Sir David retired before, in the end, a Dean was appointed for a limited period and that's what happened. But you see, that was really the transition. Looking back of course, there was a lot of heat and tension and animosity and everything else at the time, but looking back on it I would simply say that we were caught up in a historical period in the university and in the Medical School; from the old easy going, casual way that things could be run. Sir David for example, only had half a secretary. He was doing all that he was doing you see and the same applied to the Secretary of the university. Here was a man and a boy running the administration and when the university took off and research also became a very important aspect of our work, then all kinds of changes had to take place and the old order just had to go, so Sir David represented the old order and we just came in about the time of the new order which was post Robbins, essentially.
0 Who succeeded Sir David?
M Well for three years the Professor of Anatomy succeeded him, Professor Lockhart, until he retired and then Sir Dugald became Dean for three years until he retired and then I became Dean after Sir Dugald for three years, but by that time it was a younger group, so I was succeeded by Professor McGregor and continued to be Professor until I retired.
0 Yes, because you'd made the change of how things were being done at that time.
M It wasn't just before I retired.
0 So that the Medical Faculty was separate and run by Sir David Campbell in Sir Thomas Taylor's day.
M In Sir Thomas Taylor's day and that was I think part of this old order that I'm mentioning. Sir David himself, I should say, was a brilliant man and also extraordinarily well versed in Latin. Yes he could speak with Sir Thomas and the other Classicists.
0 They spoke it, in conversation?
M Well not exactly that, but they could make the kind of classical references that came from people who had a full blown classical education which Sir David had had, you see, as well as Sir Thomas had. So there were these correspondences in those days which were based on the Classics and I remember Sir Thomas Taylor saying to me himself that he felt that the glories of ancient Greece were to him the finest examples of any civilization of any time and the Greek language was the finest you could ever imagine. So that was the spirit; and so it was only after Robbins, that I have just mentioned, and Sir Thomas's early death, he was in his sixties when he died of a heart attack, that he was succeeded by Edward Wright who was the Professor of Mathematics, but at the same time the Vice Principal, Edward Wright, stepped into his shoes almost exactly at the right moment, with the take off of the development of the University into eventually a population of 5 or 6 [thousand.]
M Yes so Edward Wright came in just at the post Robbins period responsible for the development of the new departments and the Halls of Residence and linking up with national bodies. You see the University Grants Committee then became a very much more important body than ever before because of the millions and millions of pounds which were now going to be poured into Universities in the 60s. Then the other developments had to do with the setting up of, to begin with an unofficial body called, the Committee of Vice Chancellors and they became a group of very influential senior academics [with influence on] government and government policy as well as the University Grants Committee so Edward Wright was a very penetrating influence at these levels as well as a man of very considerable vision in seeing how this ancient university should preserve all its traditions but at the same time move into the new era.
0 So he was more progressive than [Taylor]?
M And he was a man of very strong views which he expressed very cogently, and very clearly and made a lot of enemies as a result, but in balance I would say he brought the University right bang up to the present day. A point was often lost sight of in the 60s that I personally tried to correct in different quarters, that Edward Wright's contact with the student body was superb. He set up a number of committees of the Court and the Students' Representative Council and committees of the Senatus and the student bodies and he had members of the court and other senior members given tasks that had to do with, for instance, the way in which the Halls of Residence would evolve and he saw to it that the students were kept very fully informed about the developments that were likely to take place so that at no major point in the whole of these movements were the students kept in the dark and simply told what had happened and what was going to happen without their consultation. In other words he almost anticipated their possible anti authoritarian rebelliousness and of course we saw it in Edinburgh and Birmingham and Bristol and all over the place where the Vice Chancellors really didn't know how to handle the students. I shudder to think what would have happened I may say if Tom Taylor had been the Principal yes; he had totally different views of this. So he was quite outstanding in this way and I don't think, in the nature of things, you can understand he was never given the recognition for that contribution nationally until I think he was retired by the time he was given his Knighthood. I had the pleasure and privilege of telling him personally that I thought that he was a man that was far overlooked and I wanted to know why; he thought perhaps he had antagonised too many people in high quarters. But he should really have been given that kind of recognition, building up the University and keeping the student body on exceptionally good terms with the staff and himself.
0 Then Sir Fraser Noble succeeded him for a short time?
M Yes, that was after I left. Although I had known Fraser Noble when he was originally in the department of Economics here as a lecturer and had known him also as a member of our Board of Management of the Mental Hospitals and so I knew him personally. I think that he arrived at the beginning of the decline of the universities as I mentioned 10,000 a few minutes ago, it was thought that there would be a progressive increase because it was thought there would be no limit to the finance available to universities. Some people of course didn't really like the idea but certainly if they had wanted it, it would have gone to that had the money been available; but by the time Fraser Noble arrived the small clouds were gathering and retrenchment was really the order of the day and then by the time his successor arrived, Principal McNicol, they then had to start talking about redundancies and cutting and so forth.
0 When you arrived in Aberdeen you said you found your clinical colleagues in the university were welcoming and cooperative. Was this also the case socially?
M Yes, yes I think (we still do in fact), those of us who are the same age and are still alive, we see quite a bit of one another or we meet at the Medico Chirurgical Society or we play golf occasionally or whatever and we are very much on first name terms and have been over all these years.
0 Was there a gulf between the Chairs and the non professorial staff on the clinical side?
M In the early years yes, and that was partly due to the pay. A Professor was paid very much more than any of his staff, but that was corrected in the case of Senior Lectures, who held an honorary consultant appointment anyway, that's among clinical groups, and their basic pay come up on a par with the professors. I only introduce pay because obviously it has a bearing on the seniority of the people who would then be in a department. In other words it would be worth somebody's time to stay on as a senior lecturer because there was a career; there was an end point as a senior lecturer and not just a movement to something else. So the professors found themselves surrounded by Senior Lecturers Readers and then Personal Professors who came to be about the same age as themselves and in certain cases of course, with new appointments of professors, there might be older Readers and Senior Lectures than the professor and so that's now the pattern if you like.
0 Would pre clincial staff, pre clinical professors, be friendly with clinical ones or was that a significant gulf?
M Yes, in fact there was much more going on between the pre clinical and clinical people than was often appreciated, at the research level. There was not much doubt that anyone working in the clinical field realised that you simply had to have some of the insights of the pre clincial colleagues in biochemistry or physiology or to a lesser extent anatomy so that at the research level there was a good deal of toing and froing and research projects that came out in joint names of different departments; this really did bring staff very close together on a friendly basis as well as on a professional basis. Teaching was a different thing you see. There was always a fight about teaching but research work brought them together, and then there were certain natural or personal affinities that we all had with one another that had nothing whatever to do with the subject. We might have been interested in Ornithology or golf or whatever it was you see.
0 And did the Medical Faculty mix socially with the other faculties? You said something about Sir Thomas Taylor running parties?
M No there wasn't I'm sad to say. I personally [had mixed], partly because of my subject, but partly I think because I had always been interested in other academic departments, arts department; for the most part there wasn't really a very close tie between members of different faculties, but the Taylors did their best. I must say that Edward Wright gave up a hopeless struggle, I don't blame him. But then again when the University was a little smaller it may have been possible. But what the Taylor's did at the Chanonry Lodge, which was the Principal's own big house, they would invite staff regularly right through the session until all had been invited to the Chanonry. But unfortunately the spirit was rather in contrast with the actuality of the thing. The professors were invited, and their ladies, in groups of about 8 for dinner and it was a formal occasion, dinner jackets and evening [dresses], whatever, and there was the usual small talk before dinner and then there was the dinner and then the ladies retired and the men had their port and cigars and the men joined the ladies again and there was small talk and then Sir Thomas would give us, he had a fine baritone voice so he would go to the piano and he would give us a song and perhaps somebody else might have a voice. In fact Principal Wright's wife, she was a fine singer, so she might presumably have; I was never there when she was there, although I heard her later when she was the Principal's wife singing with Jim Kelman at other evenings, but this was a very formal occasion and nothing much really happened there. The lecturers and senior lecturers were invited in much larger numbers, perhaps 30 or 40 at a time and they had a buffet and they had what were described there as silly games, where you had a label stuck on your back and somebody had to guess who your were and this sort of thing and the whole thing was superintended by Lady Taylor who was that kind of a person and so she made sure that we, or they because I was never one, that they enjoyed themselves. Then there was also, I should mention the Ladies Club which she was also president and [that] still goes on, and the Ladies Club was in those days an equally formal occasion, when they went they [wore] a very large label showing their name and believe it or not, the department to which their husband belonged.
0 His rank?
M No, but my dear wife used to feel a little self conscious always going with 'Mrs Millar, Mental Health' stuck on, until one day she, to her amazement but to some extent to her relief, came across a 'Mrs Rutherford, Venereal Diseases', but that was about the size of the these Ladies Club evenings and for the life of me I don't really know what went on, but they were pretty formal occasions and a poor time was had by all. So there wasn't really very much social life that was officially organized anyway and nor were there the facilities, that's another point I'm just suddenly remembering. It was only again in the latter part of development of the University as a whole that the idea that there should be some kind of social life built into the University should be done. So the refectories for the students had corresponding refectories for the staff and they had the dining room and the meeting rooms and the bar and things of that kind and a little private place where you had dinner parties. That I think did enormously improve the social life of the University, but since it was in old Aberdeen it was very much more popular with the people who happened to be in old Aberdeen than the people up at Marischal or the people up at Foresterhill; that was one of the great snags. One other thing that just suddenly occurred to me. There was so much room up at Foresterhill that even in Tom Taylor's time, I tried to persuade him and various other people that they should move the entire Medical Faculty up on the Foresterhill site and that Anatomy, Physiology, Biochemistry and Embryology might go up there and indeed, if they wanted to take it a step further, because the departments of Botany and Zoology at that time were quite small departments, that the Biological departments should also move up onto the Foresterhill site and that we should have the whole of the Biological and Medical schools located on the Foresterhill site. Now it wasn't as crazy as it seems now, because of course many of these big biological departments have grown enormously since then, but at that time they were just about to take off you see and there was clearly a lot of sense from the Medical, purely medical point of view, in at least having Physiology and Biochemistry and Anatomy up there. But the Physiologists and the Biochemists said they didn't want to come because they wanted to be close to some of their friends in the other Biological departments and to some extent to the department of Chemistry but less that than the departments of Botany and Zoology and so on. So they wanted to stay near as much near to their other scientific colleagues as to their medical colleagues, but the answer to that as I say, was to bring the whole shooting match there and then forget Marischal College altogether, abandon Marischal College, and have the other departments that were in Marischal College moved to Old Aberdeen. So that we would then only have two sites you see, instead of the three sites.
0 Would you have put Engineering to King's as well?
M Well Engineering was again the biggest single problem and there have been tremendous fights about engineering in relation to Robert Gordon's College that have been a running sore for many many years and I dare say that it was the problem of Engineering, it was a big department you see, with a lot of installations, that really meant that something still had to go on in the Marischal site. But of course, Marischal wouldn't have been completely abandoned, it could then have become the administrative headquarters you see, but the teaching the students would be in just two areas you see. However that didn't happen and in the way things have worked out it's probably just as good as you could get. The distances are not all that great for one thing and Old Aberdeen has been developed, not only on these basic subjects but in relation with the Halls of Residence you see, so the students are close to these developments.
0 You didn't manage to get a big Residence at Foresterhill for students then? Would you have liked that?
M Oh yes, in fact I had [tried] during the time I was Dean and I thought that we had succeeded. The plan then, which we had worked out with the U.G.C. and also with the Area Health Board, the Regional Board as it then was, was that we should set up a Medical Centre and the Medical Centre would consist in grafting on beyond the medical school, a full scale auditorium, a refectory which would be available to everyone on the hospital, on the Foresterhill site, university and hospital, and a library complex and also bring the Medico Chirurgical Society up from King Street onto Foresterhill site. So that was to be the Medical Centre and behind that was to be a Hall of Residence, primarily for senior students and perhaps also for the pre registration house officers, and the refectory would be developed in such a way that it would then be the eating house for the [residence also.] So what we were trying to get in the way of a building behind the main complex was just a series of dormitories i.e. the cheapest building you could get and at that time, that was just exactly the time when money dried up from the U.G.C. to build halls of residence, any further halls of residence, and we had to find alternative finance we were told, we would have to find alternative finance for halls of residence in future, so that never came about.
0 Although you did get the Medico Chirurgical hall?
M That came up, yes.
0 Was a refectory built as well, some of the parts of it?
M Oh yes, the refectory was built and the library was built and the Medico Chirurgical Society came up.
0 But you just didn't get the Halls of Residence?
M We didn't get the Halls of Residence.
0 You couldn't get the money for that.
0 Do you feel that the University fits into the life of the city of Aberdeen or do you see it as something separate?
M I think that, of course the changes in local government have made quite a difference to the way in which the local authority links up with the university. There was a time when so called Town and Gown meant something in the way of common ground. At one level for instance the local authority provided two members of the University Court.
0 And has that stopped?
M No there is still one, officially two, you see the Lord Provost, but when the Lord Provost was sort of demoted in the Local Authority Act he really didn't quite have the standing nor the interest to think that the University ought to be promoted. [Also] the way in which finance flows down from the central government now, to local authorities and then to universities, really meant that sort of joint ventures weren't likely to come off with any great success and I think that at the time of the post Robbins development for example, a lot of land had to be acquired and a lot of planning had to be put through and a very close liaison had to be established between the University authorities, administrative authorities and the local authorities, administrative authorities to ensure that the university developed in accordance with the overall policies of the local authority for one thing you see. But the local authority was also asked to go out of its way to find land and to approve plans and things of this sort and so there was a lot of close collaboration between the town and the gown during those years. But I think now, as I say with finance being less and also coming down more vertically just to the two bodies and with powers more limited you know, local powers are more limited compared with what they were, they were more related to central government. There isn't the scope and of course the other thing that is entered into the whole scheme of things both in the university as a whole and the health service, the political implications of any decision seem now to be far more important and the political affiliations of a Local Authority or a Regional Authority seem to be much more evident than they ever were before. The inherent merits of the case of a University Development here, there or whatever, you see, seemed to be given second place to the political implications of the development and so they get bogged down on that score too.
0 Do you feel anything ought to be done to reintroduce or to encourage the original easy co operation between medical departments now that they have all hived off into their different situations? Do you feel it's necessary even?
M I think that it's rather a lost cause at the undergraduate level now. The departments are going their own way and they are separate and then of course they are growing too, so each of them is much bigger than it used to be, but I still think that, at the graduate level in medicine, that there remains a very considerable cohesion among the graduate groups. The Medico Chirurgical Society itself has increased enormously in its membership in recent years. It's now got well over 300 members and there are active plans to increase it and to have it more active and perhaps to play a bigger part in offsetting just this very diaspora effect that's been going on within the Departments and not only Departments in the University at the Medical School but the departments in Foresterhill. The departments in the hospitals, they're multiplying and getting larger and more specialised and so forth, so there is a very real need for all the different specialties to come together in some shape or form and I think that it's at the graduate and the practice level that they could come together much more and the Medical Chirurgical Society is certainly one such concept that's helped. My own feeling, a number of years ago, which was shared by only a small number of people at the time, was that we should not have Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons and Obstetricians, Pathologists, Psychiatrists and so on, they were already multiplying, proliferating; that we should have one Academy of Medicine and this was actually an idea that was floated by the late Sir Stanley David son and also by Sir Derek Dunlop as Presidents of the College of Physicians in Edinburgh. Sir Stanley Davidson was very keen on this and wrote a lot about it and went around preaching this gospel but he met a lot of opposition and this was before the days of this proliferation of colleges of which I'm sorry to say the College of Psychiatrists is one, which I was never very happy about. I think that even yet it might be possible to have a kind of federal system of Fellows of Colleges that would bring them together nationally, even in Scotland alone you see, that would set up an Academy of Medicine. And a private hope I have for 1989, the second centenary of the Medico Chirurgical Society, is that it might be given some kind of Royal Warrant, if that's the right word to use, and that it might even go the length of changing its name from the word Society to the word Academy. As I said to Professor Short, who is the current President and who's been the Queen's Physician, so who better you know to make approaches, that if you can have the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals you could surely have a Royal Aberdeen Medical Academy, but of course, a Royal College requires the most incredible collection of procedures to be gone through: the Privy Council and agreement of all the other Colleges you see, and the thing takes years and it's also so crusty in it's approach that the net result of the creation, as I know, of the Royal College, its hardly worthwhile doing it, because it's such a labour to get it done.
0 But having established it you've done something.
M Well having established it then you only give some other specialty encouragement to do the same you see and then you might have about 12 or 13 colleges of this that and the next thing you see, Royal Colleges at that you see. Well why not an Academy because medicine does certainly need that Medical Faculty level you see at local level and at national level. It certainly needs to be seen as one body and you cannot see it as one body if you proliferate colleges and if you have departments as I say, getting further and further away from each other, even in a place like Aberdeen. So that would be my hope, to see an Academy of Medicine.
0 You did say something about you having had students to your house. Was that a common thing for Professors to do?
M When I came, I think this had to do very much with the post war years. I found that my predecessor Professor MacCalman took his students out to dinner and I thought that was a very civilized thing to do. Then when I became Professor I thought well, maybe we couldn't take them out to dinner, but at least we could have them in the house and we could make some sandwiches and a barrel of beer and bring them along in smallish groups and that's what happened. So we had every fortnight, every Saturday right through two terms, we had At Homes and this corresponded with the groups of students we were teaching at the time, for a fortnight at a time and over two terms. So we met them and I think looking back on it, that that was enormously profitable. One consequence of it, I think direct consequence of it, was the number of Aberdeen graduates who took up Psychiatry.
0 Because they felt there was a personal interest in them?
M And we had a large number and in those days of course, that's going back a long way to the 1950s, that's 30 odd years ago, many of them, they are scattered all over the world now and many of them hold Chairs and other positions of seniority in Psychiatry so it did work.
0 Was that a precursor of the clinical tutor system that the students have now? I know my son has someone who sort of looks after him and has him round occasionally.
M That was introduced as another of the developments for the time when we changed the curriculum. It works extremely well with some tutors and not so well with others.
0 Yes it depends on how interested they are I suppose. Arts have always have had Regents, but they weren't, ...well I didn't see my Regent very often in the Arts Faculty.
M No but I think Science have them on a slightly different basis with tutors and I think the tutors were actually paid and they did a good job.
[We paused the tape. In conversation over a cup of tea Professor Millar began to put forward the following analogy.]
M [Medical Education can be compared to the development of the] Motorcar. There was a time when the motorcar was a new thing and really right up to the 1930s because there weren't many around and few were going to buy motorcars. First of all they had little money, but secondly you really had to know about a motorcar inside and out because at any moment it might break down and you would have to set to and mend it and you might have to do lots of very technical things to the motorcar and so being a motorist in the 20s was not just something that you sat behind the steering wheel and got the thing to go from A to B. That's all it is now. No one needs to be anything other than someone who knows the Highway Code and knows how to work a clutch and brake and watch the speedometer. Now, so there's the basic technicalities of some new technology and then there is the simple operative procedures for which these technicalities have been invented i.e. moving from A to B. Now in medicine at the level of practice, if you have a patient in front of you, you should really be rather like a latter day motorist, you have got your signs and symptoms, you have got the book and you make your diagnosis and then you have got your things to do and you go ahead and do them. But, first of all there are so many different varieties of problem, but as a doctor in practice you have got to know about that it's not just learning to be a motorist you have got to learn to be a mechanic as well but many of the new technologies you are [now] expected to know about in the same kind of way as the motorist in the 1920s had to know about motoring you see. Now if you take Biochemistry as a subject, you really have got to know all, you've to be upsides some way or another with fellows of the Royal Society you see, all the intricate workings of the thing and I think a much more simple straightforward analogy is computing you see. How much do you have to know about what a computer actually does, how much do you have to know about all these technical terms like bytes and interfaces and the different languages for writing a programme? How much have you got to write programmes, you see, and how much should you just be able to sit at the control and play with it and use it, not knowing anything at all about how it works, not even knowing if it is a logical machine you see. Now it seems to me that teaching medicine has the long term aim of making the practitioner, as it were, a good driver of a motorcar, with some knowledge of the innards but if anything goes wrong he leaves it to someone else. It's his job to drive the motorcar. But we haven't reached the stage in Medical Education where that's really possible, if you are following me. I think we are still bogged down in all the detailed technicalities of a particular disease or a particular organ system or whatever it is, you see.
0 Which may in the future be left to a specialist, do you feel?
M Which have their practical applications and it's the practical applications that have got to be understood; the end product of all this technicality. If I want to know about, let's say, senile dementia and I'm lead to believe that nuclear magnetic resonator thing is a thing that will show up changes in the brain better than an x ray Well so long as somebody comes along and showed me what the results are that's all I want to know, I don't really want to know how this dashed machine works, you see. But so often the student when he is learning, suppose he's supposed to be doing medical physics, he'll have all the technical details of this new machine rammed down his throat as though he ought to know every weeny bit about this new technology. Well that's all very well, if that was the only thing he had to learn, but he's on to some other aspect of radiology and then some other aspect of Physiology, some other aspect of Biochemistry and so on and Immunology. He can't possibly be up on all these technicalities. So that's the problem we are in. There is too much of the purely technical that has got to be mastered or is simply supposed to be mastered, but not the rather more simple straightforward applications of the technology. If there are simple applications of a technology that is really what the practicing doctor should be dealing with. But at the moment the poor chaps are bewildered and bemused.
END OF INTERVIEW
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