| Administrative History | Mary Esslemont was born in Aberdeen in 1891, and in 1914 graduated BSc from the University of Aberdeen, where she participated fully in student life, being the first female president of the Student University Council and she was a noted Aberdeen suffragist. She worked as an assistant in the Botany department at the University of Aberdeen, and as a science lecturer at Stockwell Training College, London, before entering the medical school, from which she graduated in 1923. She was appointed assistant medical officer of health in Keighley, Yorkshire, from 1924 - 1929, before returning to Aberdeen, where she was in private practice for over 30 years.
She was a member of council of the British Medical Association for 23 years, during which time she served on its Public Health, Amending Acts, Joint BMA and Royal College of Nursing, Occupational Health, and Journal committees. She was also the first woman to serve on the Scottish Council, and became its chairperson in 1968. During her time in Aberdeen she became involved in many other local organisations and causes, for which work she was awarded freedom of the City in 1981. She served on the University General Council for over 40 years, and in 1947 became the first woman assessor on the University Court. Maintaining her family's well-established association with local politics (her father and grandfather had both been Liberal MPs for Aberdeen South), she became first woman president of Aberdeen Liberal Association in 1954. In 1954 she received an honorary LL D (Aberdeen) and in 1955 was awarded a CBE. |
| Description | Interviews with Dr Mary Esslemont, recorded on 14th August 1984, by Dorothy Johnston.
Transcript of interview recorded on 14th August, 1984:
J Let us now move on a bit, to the period when you were teaching and then when you came back and did Medicine.
E Yes, I went to Stockwell College in London as a Science lecturer.
J And was this immediately after you graduated?
E This was before I went back to study Medicine.
J I think that you had already taught for some time in the Botany Department, is that right?
E For two years, as an assistant to the Botany Department. I took the practical work for the medical students and I did a certain amount of lecturing.
J Did you do any research of your own?
E No, not really. I was too busy doing the teaching and that sort of thing.
J And was there any particular reason why you went to London? Had you any contacts there?
E Well, I got the job in London you see as lecturer, without even an interview because I had some friends in the Goldsmith College there and they spoke for me, and they took me without interview.
J At that stage, did you think you would teach for your career? Or did you know that you were going to look to medicine?
E Well, I had decided that I wouldn't want to teach all my life so that was why I went back and studied medicine.
J And that was after you'd had some more experience in London?
E Yes.
J I understand that you had two jobs in London, is that right?
E Yes. I was Science lecturer you see at Stockwell Training College and then they were requiring some help in King's College in the Chemistry Department and they wanted me to switch my job over to King's. But I didn't want to leave the College because I was resident there, and I was very happy living in the College. So that was when I did the two jobs you see, in order to enable me to stay on at Stockwell Training College.
J So you actually lived in Stockwell, and taught in both Colleges.
E [Yes.]
J Well that can't have left you very much free time.
E No, it didn't leave me with very much free time. Preparing you know, I had a good lot to prepare, but still I managed a good few things. I was very keen on the Ballet you know, looking, and it was the time when they were just starting in London, you know, and that was very nice.
J Some of the time when you were in London must have been still during the war. Is that right?
E Yes, a year of the war, when I was lecturing in Stockwell Training College.
J Did that have any very direct effect upon your life there?
E No, I don't think so.
J I was wondering if you had many Aberdeen contacts in London?
E No, not many. Yes, there were some interesting ones for instance the Bullochs, the Bulloch family. Professor Bulloch was Professor of Pathology down in the [Lambeth] hospital, well he was an Aberdonian, and there were several like that, that were very helpful to me when I was in London.
J Did you meet Professor Bulloch's brother, John Malcolm Bulloch?
E I knew both of the two brothers, yes. There was one rather good story but I forget who it was about. I forget who it was being introduced, the Captain of something or other, and he looked at him, and when he was told he was Professor, he said, go on, because he didn't look a bit like one.
J We always hear of J.M. Bulloch, that he kept a very strong University connection. Of course, he worked in journalism in London, but he retained his university interests.
E Yes, very much so.
J So he presumably knew many of the students who came from Aberdeen to London.
E I don't know that he looked up Aberdeen students in London particularly unless he knew them in another way you know.
J You then decided you would do Medicine? Did you think of staying in London to do that?
E No, never.
J And how was this idea received by your family. Were they surprised at your decision?
E No, they never seemed surprised although there was no medical tradition at all.
J Was it becoming more usual for women to do Medicine?
E Well, you see during the First World War there was such a heavy casualty list that a lot of the young doctors were killed and so they actually went round the schools in Aberdeen and encouraged the women to go in for Medicine because they expected to have a shortage of doctors.
J And did that policy work?
E Yes, it did. I think there were about 15 women in my year.
J And did most of them complete the course?
E Yes.
J And ended up practising as doctors?
E And practised as doctors, yes.
J So you came back to Aberdeen. Did you still live at home?
E No, you see in those days we bought and sold practices, so I bought the practice of a couple of doctors who died. A Dr Walker, my partner, and myself. She had been five years an assistant to the two doctors who were retiring whose practice we took over and of course it was a great help that she had been an assistant in that practice for five years before we took it over.
J Is that what you wanted to do when you started doing Medicine. Did you ever think that you would stay in hospital work or specialise in any aspect?
E Well, I started doing the Gynaecological clinics at the then dispensary, but when the health service came in, we had to choose whether we did hospital work or other, and of course I didn't want to go whole time in the hospitals so I had to [work] outside.
J When you came back to study medicine, did you find that you knew many students still at the university?
E Well, you see when I came back it was in 1919, I think. The men were all coming back too from the war and so I didn't feel such an outstanding oddity as being 10 years older than all the other students, because a number of the men who had been away too were coming back. They had been in the army and so on. Of course a great many of my friends that I had made when I was an Arts student were killed afterwards.
J So, you didn't feel very unusual at being a little bit older.
E No I didn't. There were men in the same position.
J I wondered about the teaching in the medical faculty at that stage. Was that also mostly at Marischal College or was it in the hospitals?
E Well, the lecturer in Surgery and the lecturer in Medicine, they both lectured in Marischal College.
J And how soon was it before you actually went into the hospitals and saw patients?
E Well we were about the third year before we did that.
J I wondered if there were any particular lecturers that you remembered? I think that for science you had already had Professor Japp?
E Professor Japp was the Professor of Chemistry. He was an interesting lecturer and you see in those days the students always had the Professor. Nowadays very often they never see the Professor; it's maybe a lecturer in the department that's teaching them. But in those days the students always had the Professor.
J So you would have known most of the Professors quite well?
E Well, [we] knew when they thought they were good lecturers or not.
J And Professor Japp was good?
E Professor Japp was good.
J What about Professor Thomson?
E Oh, of course J. Arthur Thomson was the most popular lecturer of all. The whole of the undergraduate students always turned out to hear his first lecture of the season.
J Why was that? Was he entertaining?
E No, it was so beautifully written. It was just so, it was just such a lovely ....
J And he read it as a lecture.
E Yes.
J His family presumably would have been contemporaries of yours as students?
E Yes. The family of Professor Trail, who was the Botany Professor, they were contemporary with mine and the family of the Professor of Zoology they were contemporary of mine too.
J I think for Anatomy you must have had Professor Reid. Is that correct?
E Yes, we had Professor Reid for Anatomy. He was a good lecturer.
J But for Anatomy you would have had demonstrations.
E Yes, it was mostly practical. Well, not mostly, but we had all the practical bits to do in turn, in dissection.
J And what about Professor MacWilliam?
E Oh, Professor MacWilliam was a very interesting Professor. He was Physiology and he was a most interesting lecturer. I actually attended his lectures when I was an assistant in the Botany Department before ever I took the Medicine later on when I repeated them.
J Why was that, simply because you were interested?
E Yes. Well the first time I did it just because it was a pleasure you see. The second time I did it as part of my course.
J But he must have had a good reputation?
E Oh yes, very good.
J And what about Professor Marshall?
E Well Professor Marshall had a very difficult subject to lecture about, Pharmacology, and one couldn't say that it was desperately interesting but he made the most of it.
J What about Professor Matthew Hay?
E He is the most distinguished man that's gone through the staff of the university I would say. Matthew Hay and Ashley Macintosh, the two of them, planned all Foresterhill site with the Medical School near the hospital. You see that was a very interesting thing to do, because it made for the good connection between the two and they were the ones who did it. Oh, Matthew Hay was an outstanding Medical Officer of Health. Oh, very exact standard.
J And at the stage when he was lecturing to you, was he a senior man in his career.
E Yes.
J Did he know all the students by name would he?
E Oh yes, he would know his students. He was very good at knowing his students.
J At the time that you were there, was Ashley Macintosh in Aberdeen?
E Yes, he was the Professor of Medicine.
J So, at that time you were not yet at Foresterhill.
E No, we moved up in about 1934 or thereabouts, I think. We had most of our classes at Marischal College, [and our clinical work] in the old Infirmary.
J Did you ever go away for any of your practical clinical work?
E I did it all in Aberdeen.
J Did you find as a local Aberdonian and as a woman that there was any difficulty with patients? Were they quite prepared to accept you on equal terms?
E Yes, we never had any great difficulty there. I don't say that they did it on equal terms. You see when they were going in for Medicine they chose the students in a way, and I discovered afterwards from Professor Dugald Baird that they used to go through all the men first and choose the good men, and then when they began to have one whose qualifications weren't so good, then they started on the women.
J But you weren't aware of that at the time.
E No, you're not conscious of it, no. In fact, I only discovered that lately, you know. I came a lot in contact with Professor Baird because he was very interested in the social side.
J Would that have been later, when you were practising?
E Yes.
J You also had Dr Dodds-Brown, did you?
E He was at the Mental Hospital. Yes I didn't come across him quite so much, but he superintended our attendance at the hospital there for psychiatric cases.
J We haven't talked yet about any extra-curricular activities that you might have had during your period as a medical student. You became the first women president of the Students Representative Council. Was that a great surprise to your fellow students?
E Yes that was a surprise, but it was the men that did it, I mean it was they that enabled me to get that fob.
J When you stood for that election, what did you see your role as being, if you became president?
E Just the chairmanship thing, you know.
J Was there anything particular that you felt the students ought to be doing?
E No, nothing much then. The women of course, had no union. Later the men got the new union. The union as such used to be in Marischal, where the debating hall is now, and it was only later that they moved over to the union where they are now.
J And it was at that point was it, that women were allowed into the union?
E Well they weren't allowed into the union, they sort of shared in it. They were quite separate really.
J Did that sort of distinction cause you many difficulties when you were president.
E No, I don't remember any great difficulty.
J What about your contacts with the university authorities. For instance, as president you must have occasionally had to meet the Principal? Can you remember anything particularly about that? This would have been Sir George Adam Smith.
E Well I knew them very well, you see and so I'd very great interest with them. I had no difficulty in communication there, they were friends as well.
J So you would have made arrangements to see him quite easily.
E Oh, very easily yes.
J Were there any other student activities that you were involved in?
E Well, I played hockey for the team, I was interested in that. We had separate Debating Societies but we always had a joint debate.
J Did you find that it was very time-consuming to be involved in student activities as president? Did it affect your work?
E Yes, I think looking back it was more time-consuming than I should have experienced. I mean to say that my work would probably have been better without it.
J And what about life in Aberdeen generally. Were the students much involved in activities in Aberdeen?
E No, I don't think they were involved enough. They really didn't have the necessary experience that they might have had if they had been taking a more active part in city life, distinct from university life.
J What sort of things do you think they should have been doing?
E It's difficult to say what they might have been doing, just to be more interested in things. You see the only way they became interested in those days was in politics. In fact it was the only way that they had an interest in politics, because most of them, elections of whatever kind it was, were political. I mean, it was whether the person was a Conservative or a Liberal or and so on.
J Would the students have been active in local politics?
E I don't think they would have been active in local politics. They would have been active in politics when it came to electing a Lord Rector because that was political, and that made them interested in the party angle of it and into politics.
J But not in the city itself?
E No.
J What about culturally? Would the kind of things that they would have done for entertainment have been typically north-eastern things?
E Well in my time when I was back at the University we started the first of the Gala weeks and the money-raising things, and that was a fair activity every year, because each year was trying to beat the last year in money-raising and so on. They did a lot of money raising, they gave concerts and all sorts of things like that. They gave a show you see at the theatre.
J When you say that they performed concerts, what sort of music would they have chosen to play? Would they have played ballads from the north-east?
E Well you see there was a man, McCallum, he sang and there was another man he was a beautiful accompanist and that kind of entertaining, yes.
J [After] the university did you move straight into a practice in Aberdeen?
E Well I did 5 years in public health work in Keithly in Yorkshire, as an assistant Medical Officer of health. That was an interesting experience, particularly in Keithly because it was a town of about 45,000 or 46,000 and you could sort of see everything and the M.O.H. he did the fever hospital too, and that sort of thing. We have a fever hospital, so I had a varied experience there, and then we had a smallpox epidemic. Keithly was a very, very unvaccinated place, because of course vaccination was supposed to be obligatory in those days but in Keithly they defied the law and they didn't have vaccination. Well the consequence was that they were very exposed when we had an outbreak of smallpox and then we did a lot of hurried vaccinations.
J Why were they against [compulsory vaccination]?
E Well sometimes people had a nasty result or say a complication and I think they took that too much into account and opposed it.
J Had there been any particular reason why you went to Yorkshire? Did you have a contact there?
E The School Medical Officer in Aberdeen was Dr Rose and he was a fellow student of the M.O.H. in Keithly. He was looking for someone to do a locum for a year because their doctor was going off for a year somewhere, but she never came back so I stayed on there. I quite enjoyed it.
J Did you always want to live back in Aberdeen, to the North-East?
E I wouldn't have come back you see, but my father had died, and my mother was keen that I would come back to Aberdeen. So when the chance came up of buying a practice here I was persuaded to take it so that I could come back to Aberdeen.
End of Interview
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