| Description | Interview with Dr Dorothy Younie recorded on 18 August 1986 by Elizabeth Olson.
Transcript of Interview :
Tape begins very faintly. Dr Younie is reading from a written memoir, she begins by talking about her father, Peter Mitchell.
Y …I wish I could still lay hands on a photograph of him in a cricket team in his earliest days at the University of Aberdeen. After his first graduation he took up an appointment in South Africa in the mining industry, the South African climate having been recommended for health reasons, one learned later. The Boer War found him home again, married after a long engagement and buying the General Practice in Portlethen. In the early 1900s he joined his older brother, Alexander Mitchell, an Edinburgh graduate who had established himself in the Old Aberdeen practice which was growing, its centre being 70 High Street, Old Aberdeen. The population was extending and my father's house was in 526 King Street which he built and equipped and from there the practice is still in operation. The partnership of A & P Mitchell, as one headmaster later described it to me fifty years later, had passed into legend, the same headmaster also telling me that it was on the kitchen table that my father had removed his tonsils. This was not an uncommon experience.
Further association with the university and my father's family; there was myself and then two sisters, Peggy and Betty, both of whom were graduates and married graduates of Aberdeen University. Then there were the two cousins of my Uncle Alec, Stephen Mitchell and Philip Mitchell was a doctor. About my own family there was my eldest daughter, not a graduate, is married to Professor Donald E R Watt and my daughter Mary took a BSc as well as an MB, Elisabeth got an MEd is it or an EdB in 1955 and is married at present in Australia and Peter did Law. An uncle of mine, the older brother of these two brothers already married gave the Gifford lectures in 1924/25 and from being a junior lecturer in Moral Philosophy at Adelaide University he became Professor then Chancellor of Adelaide University and with Colin McLaren there is this history of Adelaide University. My son-in-law Donald Watt once remarked how glad he was that he was not one of Uncle Willie's lecturers apparently the conditions were extremely Spartan. All of the lecturers sat with the professor round one table it would seem.
On the other hand quite frequent visits from this uncle were eagerly awaited in Old Aberdeen. His mother lived until the age of 90 at 49 Don Street, the present home of our ex-University Secretary Mr Tom Skinner and his wife they were family households and generosity to the young at the medical households. In addition one gathered that on occasion this uncle was also engaged in finding staff from Aberdeen and the 12 miles around it who would be suitable and willing to take up posts in the developing Adelaide University and where better. This Uncle Willie had already died at the age of over 101 before my first visit on my local authority retirement bonus to Australia but at a graduation ceremony I did sit under his portrait and apart from his son Mark ascending the platform, he was now the first vice-chancellor of the new Flinders University. Professor Robson and Professor Bill Crammond were in that procession. Bill Crammond is an Aberdeen University graduate, the latter had not been long in Australia at that time appointed to develop the Mental Health Services throughout South Australia. He had quickly become friends with a neurosurgeon in the family circle and it was my privilege, really, to have dinner there with his wife at this family household. The next day I spent with him seeing maps and hearing of how and where the mental services were to expand and then visiting the wards of the existing mental hospital and impressed with the beginnings of the much needed changes for the privacy and individual needs of the mentally ill. The first thing that Bill Crammond had done was to have the high wall around the hospital lowered so that all passers-by could look in. Professor Crammond remarked that this had probably proved more directly beneficial for the nursing care than anything else for the patients themselves. The so called mentally ill had been separated and still were being separated from those labelled mental defective and Professor Crammond was really very reluctant to take me to the mentally defective section still in existence under locked doors. More was certainly to come about and surely in no time would one be able to spot untreated spastics who were educable and certainly the deaf.
On more recent family visits Professor Miller had left his name in Melbourne and by opening a psychotherapy clinic around by one of his own training who had come to Aberdeen as an assistant minister at Holburn Church and at the same time developing his interest in the mental health field. In Melbourne too, Mary Esslemont had recently opened the headquarters for the Soroptomists and it was because of Mary's insistence that I spent a memorable afternoon with the moving spirit in all this, Dame Margaret Blackwood. Margaret Blackwood had recently become a Dame and at once she said 'just call me Blackie'. How she loved remembering so much of Aberdeen and around as a guest as so often she had been a guest of Mary Esslemont and she certainly wondered why 'our Mary' hadn't been made a Dame too.
Tape fades again
… it must have been when I was about eight or nine years old and now at the High School for Girls in Aberdeen following a few earlier years at Cromar's little school in Old Aberdeen that I came home one day saying that I had an essay to write and what I was going to be when I grew up. My father remarked that I certainly wasn't going to set the Thames on fire with my singing or painting, all too true. I had just better be useful and become a doctor. And so it was that, years later, the decision was made and the sooner the better. In these days it was possible to enter medicine in the summer term with only two classes for that term, Botany and Physics. There was, however, only a fortnight between leaving school with pigtails and getting one's hair up for entry to the Botany class which was at eight am. That first morning my mother came to the rescue and between us my hair was up and secure with eighteen hair pins and I was glad a little later to find myself sitting next to Maribel Thomson, daughter of Professor Arthur Thomson, on the back of upstairs in the tram car and also finding that having now become a student myself it was not long before I was hearing about Maribel herself and what she was up to and also about the Literary Society because she had been a student herself for two or three years ahead and I had really graduated from being one of the smaller fry in Old Aberdeen who wasn't taken much notice of. At eight o'clock the door of the Botany classroom was locked so one had to be on time.
About Jimmy Trail who was our professor then. Our students would be heard to say 'we will hang Jimmy Trail by his adventitious roots' but I found that I remembered him better being out with him on several Saturday mornings on expeditions. These were entirely voluntary and not very many people sometimes turned up. Anyway we were exploring and finding what grew on Scotstown Moor and around and the sand dunes too by the sea and once for something which didn't grow anywhere else on Lower Deeside near Kin-?.
Already Mary Esslemont was a lecturer in the Botany Department, she had already graduated MA and then BSc and was not yet a medical student but so it was that when fifty or more years later when we were arranging to have a fifty years on reunion of our years and hoping to invite some of our well remembered teachers of student days there was only Mary left to invite and a much appreciated guest she was. We had invited Professor John Craig, a student of our time to chair this gathering and weren't put off when he said 'but we're all dead'. Mercifully he changed his mind when it was pointed out that spouses were being invited and that a goodly number of us women were still around. 'Oh, you indestructible women' he said.
In recollection about the academic side of being a student, the impact of teachers seems to have been more lasting than much of what we were so conscientiously scribbling into our notebooks for regurgitation thereafter. Learning was the thing as Flora Garry has it in one of her poems. But so often that was by rote. Even so the waiting round the notice board at the back of Marischal Quad to discover whether one had achieved a DP or not have passed into limbo.
It must have been into one's second year when the medical curriculum had begun to gel, that a particular moment of thrill is still vivid and I found myself saying to myself 'But the days aren't half long enough'. No doubt student days were rounding themselves to the full in other ways too but at that moment nature's web was unfolding to understandable classification such as species, genera etc. Who can forget Professor Arthur Thomson, 'dorsal brain ventral train', adding his own magic to the flight of birds and the symbiosis of the skate on the chessboard. The only class which one wanted to re-attend even before the medical course was over and certainly thereafter was the Physiology one with Professor MacWilliam. Structure had been well attended to in the Anatomy Department, all important for the surgery to follow but Physiology was bringing a glimmer of the relation of structure to function and there were no goings on possible until clinical experience came along in that direction. As I understand it there are no such gaps and delays nowadays for medical students. Along with Physiology, throughout their student days so many other factors will have been recognised and taught as affecting function, malfunction, impaired function etc. These including the genetic side, social and environment factors and the like. Nevertheless was I not proud when in my first post graduate year, when I'd gone to work with Sir James MacKenzie in St Andrews when he was enlarging on the early symptoms of heart disease. (More about my own attachment to Sir James MacKenzie will come in later.) He was surprised that I already knew a good deal about the mechanism of auricular fibrillation for one thing. 'But you didn't learn that as a student' said he. And I could assure him that not one of Professor MacWilliam's students would be ignorant of that. It was from Sir James, however, and not from Professor MacWilliam himself that our indebtedness for so much was due for so much, to the Professor, which was due to his perception and laboratory investigation and one warms still more to his own innate modesty and true feeling in the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.
From school one was ill prepared for both Nat Phil, Physics as we called it, and Chemistry but particularly one could have wished for more of Professor Soddy on the Chemistry side. It could only be by slog and rote that one got, at that stage, a DP from the only FRS of our day.
Bobby Reid in the Anatomy Department, memory was aided by seeing in the dissecting room but not always enough. Everything had to be learned in tremendous detail and I remember one day particularly, walking down from Marischal Quad right down the Gallowgate down College Bounds with somebody who was becoming a very good friend of mine and has remained so, Nellie Jardine (who became Lady Taylor, wife of the ex-Principal) and all the way down we were recalling the arteries in the lower arm and the ramifications of the ulnar nerve. We were at University Road before we got them all.
Embryology was a disappointment in the Anatomy Department. One was looking forward to hearing more about human reproduction. And sure Bobby Reid launched us well and accurately into the behaviour of cells, normal cells anyway for one remembers no hint of what abnormalities they could get up to. Nevertheless, as probably was the case for many late teenagers of these days one was no further wiser about the facts of life.
Perhaps Professor Cash in the Materia Medica Department would find himself the most behind the times with Pharmacology now. Mercifully there were only eight drugs then, the number is remembered only from a book to know intimately about, and one's recollection is that more time was spent on getting one's Latin right for the writing out of prescriptions, on the folding of little bits of paper for the making up of powders after careful weighing, and certainly for the making of pills. In these days, it was common practice away from chemists for GPs to be making up their own medicines. Pills had to be perfectly round and swallowable before being consigned to these little red pill boxes. One day, as Professor Cash came round to inspect how we were getting on in the practical side - it may have been for examination purposes - anyway it was my luck that he found me scrambling on the floor, a wooden floor too, for one of the pills which had rolled away out of sight and feel but all he said was: 'an ignominious ending'.
The same Ashley Mackintosh will always be remembered with gratitude and affection by any student of his. I wasn't one who could come out of his class like Annie Thain, a first class distinction and a special friend, and discuss in detail all of what had been said and already memorised without much note taking. I did discover, sometime later, when throwing out old such note books that after the heading in a medical notebook, 'blood diseases', there was only half a page of writing, as Ashley had mentioned that there really was very little known about this yet. And I myself had written joyfully at the top in big writing 'praise be there is something left to find out!'.
The curriculum was now extending to hospital patients themselves with student attachment as dressers in surgery and ward rounds with the staff and nurse before a professor's visit. One of the things which stands out about ward rounds was Ashley's courtesy and careful treatment of the patient in the wards. The patient always came first. And right at the beginning of any discussion on a patient came the General Practitioner's letter of introduction. The observations that were already available and the clinical detail which these letters applied. Then we had a careful discussion of the patient but we also, in due course, had to write up the cases of our own patients that were seen, and woe betide poor handwriting.
The home visits for relatives who wanted to know more about their family detail were not discouraged and probably with particular permission. Another student Patty Cassie and I who were doing this case together went to visit a family in the Gallowgate where there was a family malady affecting other members of the family Friedrich's Ataxia which is very rare I understand and was terribly rare then.
The rest that follows applies, at that stage, mostly to the value as it turned out. Not always what one had hoped to do was living at home as a student. Perhaps one had known something, in a doctor's household of course one knew a good deal about what went on in family practice because the consulting rooms and waiting rooms were in one's own house and I myself had had a spell in hospital with diphtheria at the age of six or seven. That was quite an experience and well remembered with those tracheotomy tents up in the middle of the ward. Also, when a bed was empty in the morning that a child had died. There were all impressions. It was also a very painful experience, it was before there were any vaccines for diphtheria so of course there was an enormous syringe full of stuff that was pumped into one. I also remember my mother's distress about my having to go into hospital but I was the only one with diphtheria, the younger children were still not going to school in Aberdeen and that's probably where I had picked it up. Also it's still with me that my father had thought 'Well if I don't go into hospital there'll be plenty other patients won't accept hospital either.'
About living at home and learning more about the world of General Practice and what it meant to be a doctor in the community was the dispensary practice where one in holidays went practically I think every morning to the dispensary in Guestrow where poor people came and always in charge of a General Practitioner, latterly in my day anyway, was Robert Richards and we saw people and gave them injections and so on and wrote prescriptions and very often went to the households as well and we came in touch with the poorer people.
O Did they pay at all?
Y As far as I know they didn't pay. I can't remember how it was subscribed. I think that had become possibly in some way a local authority … or somebody was having … because the Guestrow was available and they came there and that was the poorest part of the town in these days.
O Would better off people not have gone there, for a casualty or something?
Y No. These were the people who couldn't pay for their doctors. The Panel hadn't yet arrived. The beginning of the Panel is well remembered. Lloyd George's Panel which was 1910 or 11 and when doctors had to make up their mind whether they were going to become Panel doctors and accept the men folk, (the women folk and children weren't included in this), as being paid for patients. They were going to be insured but it was only the men folk, and my father and uncle as far as I recollect, must have been reluctant to sign on for the Panel until the very last moment and then they had decided to do so. The days left brought crowds and crowds of people to the house and they were sitting all along the hall and all up the stairs and I know that our bread and milk supper was having to come up to the top storey while we peered over the banisters to see how much more full the house could get. These were the people determined to stick to their own doctor and thank goodness had got themselves on to the Panel which now became a Panel Practice. All this of course was pre-war. The later years of my student life was into war years and my father had been attached to the RAMC for sometime and at the time of outbreak of war he was already the Lieutenant Colonel in charge of the Aberdeen area as far as I understand it. It was on the outbreak of war, we were on holiday but heard that we had no school to go back to because the patients would be coming into the High School and to other places in Aberdeen and that we'd have no school to go back to, which of course pleased us but we thought the war would be over before the holidays were ended. We were in Speyside and we could see that first hospital train going up to receive the first wounded from Europe.
O Was the High School in Little Belmont Street at that time?
Y No, it was in Albyn Place. And so it was that instead of Miss Ward sitting in her own room my father was there and we had it in turns to … Also by living at home and a senior medical student now I got my first pay from Dr Croll when he asked if in the holidays I would look after the Seaman's Mission down on the harbour which evidently he was in charge of. That meant going down early in the morning and being prepared to see all these seamen who came in. Most of them had these fearful seaman's boils and we had no antibiotics or anything at that time and it was a case of putting on fomentations of pink lint and green oiled silk and things and there they came. There was a lot of that kind of dressing to do for these people and I got £2 a week for it. Then there was James Crombie at the dental clinic in Woolmanhill and he asked if I would come, there would only be extractions to do, but I was shown how to do extractions and I had to write down the patients I had seen and how many and who they were. But there were several crosses in the book ahead of me and James Crombie said: 'I always put a cross against a name if they have said thank you at the end' and there were very few crosses really. One day, I suppose from the Denburn area where the gypsies all were, I had an old crone coming in wanting two teeth removed. I could have poked them out with my fingers they were just falling out, but nevertheless I put on the forceps and so on and at the end she gave me a pat on the shoulder and said 'I hope you get a good man', and so I put down two crosses! Also being in the doctor household one was very used to disturbances to the parents at night and my mother raising the window of the room which was next door to the nursery and asking the people downstairs, whoever was at the front door bell, what was wrong and cold air blowing in, because in these days there were no telephones and it was a case of them coming out in the cold and finding out if the doctor could come at once. It was familiar in the waiting room that people would come in drunk or they would come in a pretty awful state to the house and maids didn't like opening the door. So one was not only getting aware of the clinical side to things but also the social side too and also the Women's Movements were starting up and one felt the one was pretty much a suffragette at one time. In clearing up, as I've had to do several times, I've found amongst my mother's papers that an essay of mine had been preserved and I think this could have been written long before pre-war, probably about the age of twelve or thirteen, on the 'golden age' and it ended up by saying that the 'golden age' was going to come when public houses were shut and women had the vote. That I think has finished the academic side.
O Did you do midwifery?
Y Yes. I didn't go away for midwifery but we did the midwifery down at Castle Street and then out in the district with the midwives. I remember going out with midwives, and certainly down by the Denburn and down in some other areas, the delivery of a child on the street level and so many people, especially children, were just looking in to see the baby arriving. There were no curtains or anything else.
O Did you find that people noticed that it was a women student or a woman doctor who was dealing with …?
Y I wasn't conscious of that then, but remember that by this time now we're coming on to the war years because I'd gone up in 1916 and this was now coming to 1920 and there were quite a lot of women and the men weren't all fully back at that time. These people were having women midwives and I could have been a nursing student, I could have been a midwife student.
O But not so much say, in the Seaman's Mission?
Y No. I came home with a ring one day. One man kept on, I had no idea what sort of things men folk could get up to but, I think mother was a bit alarmed but I kept it for a long time. It had a lovely red stone and he came back once or twice, poor lonely chap now I would … . In the medical world - I suppose one was interested in the subjects sometimes. One did attempt one or two of the bursaries and things and I did have the Strachan Bursary which had been reserved for men only. Somebody looked it up before I came away from the Med ? and it's true that Pat Cassie and I did halve the Strachan Bursary and got seven and a half guineas each and two men, both of them distinguished older students, we beat them.
O What was that for?
Y I can't remember what they asked about. It was a Strachan Bursary for all round medicine I think. Perhaps it was largely surgery, I can't really remember but it was called the Strachan Bursary and you could look it up. I did something in the Med ? and I said to somebody I wonder if you'd look up and see if it's possible because they were distributing bursaries and only to men. But we certainly got it and she said you're quite right you did get it in 1920 or something like that.
O Did you do Public Health at university?
Y Yes. We had what they called Public Health and minor specialities Public Health ? and Mental Health these were all terribly small classes and this is why when one had finished with university and one was seeing oneself in General Practice that it was so arranged that one would get as much time in the minor specialities which were the ones that were crowding out the consulting rooms, skins and ear and throats particularly, because we had no antibiotics in this catarrh area of ours, eyes too I suppose, that these were the things that were going to stand you in very good stead as well as the outlook I got with Sir James MacKenzie for the entry into General Practice. Now they've asked me here about the social recollections of student days. First of all, what probably was the greatest boon for a medical student was, that as a student of the university one was mixing with, perhaps in the Medical Faculty, but that all people were attending so many of the societies that one attended and certainly on the games field which of course was where perhaps I was keenest of all. Games had always come first for a long time because we were encouraged at home and at school gym days were the ones to look forward to and we'd also got going about hockey and we had mighty little supervision about team play. We made up our own teams. But somebody must have arranged where we were going to play at Duthie Park and something up at Rubislaw, we had a field there. One doesn't really remember being very much in charge of any school, a mistress or anything, it was our own doing and certainly in holidays and it was necessary to have a good team because we got matches with the other schools and we found that we could play the boys on the Christmas holidays and that improved us enormously. Frowned on by the school one discovered, but anyway it enabled us to play much better.
O You played hockey at university as well?
Y Yes and I had trials too. … So, the war was coming to an end and the men were coming back and when the men came back they were going to find changes because they thought they were going to find King's playing fields just as they'd left them and there weren't enough pitches and one was able to tell them and I thought we'd told then we had about three elevens and needed to practice at the weekends as well in week days. So there were adjustments to be made there. Then we got a golf club going playing at Murcar and then there was always women swimming and we figured in the annual athletic events about that time for the first time too.
O The women did?
Y The women did and we were entering into long jumps, high jumps and even the obstacle race and I think we drove golf balls from one corner to the other.
O Competing against other women?
Y These were women's events. But in coming out from under the obstacle race I think there was soot underneath the carpet or whatever you had to crawl under a professor's wife had said 'it would have better to have seen them doing eurythmics'. Talking about the interest that the university staff took in games, it was not unusual to find Professor MacKinnon and one or two of the other Professors always there to cheer on the teams.
Y Friday night societies. There was the Medical Society and the Women's Society. One attended the Literary Society quite a lot and then the Debating Society. The Debater was really part of the Mitchell Hall underneath there and one well remembers at the end of the war when we were having to elect a new Rector for the University that the Debating Hall was full for this occasion because the Principal was coming to address us. He was very keen that the new Principal, having he himself of course having had lost his two elder sons in the war
O This was Principal ?
Y George Adam Smith. But the men back from the war weren't depressed at all but wanting something to remind them of war they were looking ahead and they wanted us to vote for Viscount Lord Cowdray who would probably give us some money. The poor Principal lost, rather emotionally I think, because he wasn't given to that sort of feeling about things and so it was that Cowdray and of course at home one knew that a good deal of the Cowdray money had been made from munitions also that the operator of Cowdray in Aberdeen was the Daimler cars and they had liveried driver and footmen. It was Lord Cowdray who won and largely on the vote of the men coming back.
O Who was his opponent, do you remember?
Y I can't remember if there had been an opponent, once he was elected and certainly he gave the Rectorial address. We at that time were hoping that there was going to be money coming around that we would very much like a better Women's Union. All we had was a hatch for a room on a level with the cloakroom with a hatch through to the men's union where coffee and buns came through when we wanted them. Mary Esslemont, who was by this time a medical student, and I'm sure on the Representative Council already, but she and I were detailed to meet Lady Cowdray and entertain her, show her our Union and entertain her with coffee before the Rectorial address. I always remember her hat. It had diamond hat pins and they were the size of golf balls, glittering with diamonds on both sides of her hat. I suppose Mary was doing most of the talking but there was no response from Lady Cowdray and time was going on too without very much coming and going till Lady Cowdray herself said 'It'll probably be time now for going through to the Mitchell Hall'. So we separated, and it was an address on the minimum wage which rather bored everybody until the Principal said 'Lord Cowdray has a request to make and there's something he would like me to give you', So holding our breaths, he said 'What the Rector would like you to have is a half holiday!'
O No money involved in that.
Y It's just something I remember.
O That was a disappointment.
Y It was a disappointment. Well you say disappointment, a revelation I suppose, more than a disappointment because disappointments have got that side too it was new ideas and there were so many other factors involved quite apart from not getting our Union which took a long time in coming.
O You weren't allowed into the Men's Union were you?
Y Not except I don't ever remember there unless we had asked for any special occasion but I never remember being in the Men's Union. It was still in the same corridor but the rooms were separate, everything was separate.
O If you went to the Debater, that was mixed?
Y Yes and most of the Societies were mixed.
O Where were they held?
Y Our Medical ones were in some room where the library was down below there and I know that sometimes the Zoology classroom was sometimes used or some of the smaller rooms there, that area was sometimes used, one of the teaching rooms. There was only one funny bit about the Societies. There was one Society that I paid my subscription for right at the beginning, I must have been newly at the University in going up into the Zoo classroom I think it was, when somebody came forward and said 'you look like the sort of person who should join this' and this was the Christian Union and I was to give him sixpence. Well I was at the stage of not wanting to join the Christian Union at all, I was wanting to get into something quite different and so although I paid my sixpence I did not become a very keen member and perhaps only went if I thought there was going to be something particularly interesting and certainly didn't join quite a lot of others who developed a little room of their own in Broad Street somewhere, for more personal meetings. But that didn't appeal to me or to one or two of my friends no doubt. At the same time, we were very lucky in Old Aberdeen with our ministers there, particularly one at the time we were students who came quite a bit about the house his pastoral visiting and he much enjoyed the stage one was at the University and interested in our friends as well. I'd never been at a Sunday School, I think we were quite right that my father was rarely at home except perhaps at the weekends and it was a family day, but also this particular minister who became very much a personal friend, he was one of the grown-ups, and one was aware that occasionally there would be some chat between the doctor and the minister about poor people in the area and how one could help them without appearing to, where there had been illness, unemployment and people keeping some of their serious worries to themselves and really poverty - a basic thing. I just remember that these discussions led sometimes to perhaps extra things we do, and people were of course appearing at the doors of the manse for money.
O Because there would have been no poor relief, or very little?
Y They wouldn't be wanting to declare any relief. One knew where the real troubles were and again tuberculosis was rife and illness, and long illness, and this kind of thing, one felt that. Then I think perhaps one was particularly grateful to that spell ... Churchgoing of course was just universal amongst ones friends and students without much impact perhaps. One did enjoy the chapel services and because of this, and the literary outlook of ministers, and their introduction to reading was of tremendous value, much more so of course than the unmusical me. About this time and really coming from this interest with us as students and the other students, our friends, there was this idea that there would be a week of meetings of other denominations at the University with different speakers. A moving spirit in this already was Tom Taylor, already a rather kenspeckled figure at the university amongst the students and certainly a very keen CU member and a good organiser already.
O He would have been in the Law department at that time?
Y He wasn't a lecturer by that time at all, we were still students. But even in the Law department he would be a kenspeckle figure and he was I know one of the moving spirits in getting this going and quite a number of us were helping and the idea was that Bishop Gore? was going to be invited and I think was going to come until something happened and somebody else whose name I cannot recollect, and whether there is any record of this I don't know, but it was somebody who was not local in any way but a Scot who was doing some Social Work in a broader field and that went down very well and there were other speakers. So that was my development, - you know, growing up - from the Old Aberdeen set-up and then there was this. But the other societies, I paid my sixpence to that Christian Union, the thing was it was the method of approach I suppose and also that you wanted to get away from any more enclosure of ideas.
O You belonged to the Debating Society did you?
Y The Debating Society came, I don't think I was ever in it but I like hearing other people debate and when the men came back there was certainly a great deal more discussion then. I never belonged to a political party or even related things to politics and I think I was pretty general.
O People were not committed to politics?
Y No. We weren't relating ourselves to party politics, although as I know the women's side of things was appealing and also naturally one was the underdog - was always a factor. Coming from a General Practice which had a number of them were mostly poorer people, I mean the social ... And of course in the home all these bad debts that somebody used to come in and try and sort out how many bad debts there were. I just used to clear these without payment. Money wasn't mentioned.
O People couldn't afford to pay their fees and yet the doctors would go because what else could they do?
Y Of course and after all it was only half a crown. There were a lot of bad debts and there were quite a lot of people who didn't pay at all and one knew that they wouldn't pay at all. Like other doctors families, ministers, this kind of thing because they were just all part of the same ethic at it were.
O There was a Women's Medical Society, how was that different from the other one?
Y Because we just kept it for the women students.
O Why did you feel it was necessary?
Y I suppose one did it because we weren't always included in the mens. I can't ever remember being at the men's Medical Society.
O How many women would there have been in your class, roughly? What proportion would there have been?
Y During the war, how many graduated? There was probably about twenty going up all the time.
O Out of?
Y It was a smaller proportion until the men came back.
O How many would there have been in your year in 1916?
Y I don't think there would have been 50/60, but it was nothing like a year or two later when Betty was there, there were hundreds.
O That was a very big year, ? Gordon's year?
Y Yes, he was 1924. Entertainment, when I first went to the University there were sixpenny hops at Kennaway's Rooms.
O Where was that, in town?
Y Yes. The sixpenny hops and they were only girls.
O The boys didn't go?
Y The boys maybe but we were so few. Then when the men came back we certainly got invited out and there was tea in the Palace Hotel. The Mitchell Hall dances came along.
O They started the hops?
Y Yes. Cinderellas and so on.
O What was that?
Y There was the Cinderella dance which stopped at twelve and some of those, one wasn't personally invited, one could get a ticket and I know when we were doing athletic ones, our games ones together, that one was saying 'I'm going to pay for own ticket and I'm not going to get up and dance with anybody if there are any wallflowers' One had the wallflowers in mind - I was a horrid creature. There was these awkwardnesses. We had began, before I left the University to join up with Glasgow and Edinburgh particularly and we had a field day when we asked several of the teams all coming up on one day we would play hockey and they would be playing rugger and we had very good dances and get-togethers particularly with the Glasgow lot.
O Would that have been in the Butchart Pavilion?
Y No. In the Mitchell Hall but all the games were played and we put up the visiting members themselves in our own homes.
O You would have had all your meals at home I expect?
Y Yes, mostly, unless there was an occasional tea at the West End Café or something like that and very rare theatre goings.
O Did people pair off in those days?
Y We noticed when people did.
O So it was probably rather less usual?
Y You didn't talk about boyfriends or that sort of thing so much, but there were goings out with and before the end of the war people coming back would ask one to go to the pictures and that kind of thing. But that was very rare. These sort of things were quite rare. Amongst my own friends and, unfortunately I can't clear this with them: 'we've got a good taste in men'.
O Did you have male friends as a group? Would there have been a crowd of you?
Y Not enough I think.
O You mostly had women friends?
Y Yes because we had been at a girls school and here were mostly girls. My brother was much younger and he had quite a different time. Then the student shows came along and this mention of my cousin Stephen who was here the other day, of course he's ten or eleven years younger than me, its more like fifteen, he was a great person and he went into the theatre from this. They came and heard him and that has been his life the theatre world live and first of all the films. The student days Dorothy Kidd must have been in them and they were all younger than me and I was only there if I happened to be at home. Perhaps, I was there in the first one and certainly I was there at the end of the war celebrations in 1918.
O Do you remember where you were when you heard that armistice had come?
Y Yes, we heard during the day and I suppose one was at home in 1918 and we knew there was going to be a torchlight or there was going to be some celebrations that evening.
O Run by the University or run by the town?
Y No, I'm sure this was students and we were also going to collect for some reason, I think I'm right about that and there was certainly a bonfire, and I got into my father's khaki clothes and gumboots and we certain had a march up … the town was all alight. Some people had sad memories, some people weren't feeling in the way of celebrating except it was the end of the war. I also know that it was that particular evening when we knew the Profs were dining, or some of them were dining in the Palace Hotel and I don't remember who I could have been with but there was some mob of us 'we're going to go up and see those Profs' and we went barging up the stairs in the Palace Hotel to the dining room and surprised them all. We weren't shooed out but we didn't stay long.
O They didn't give you much money?
Y I don't know. Then the collecting of the money was carrying a sheet and we carried a sheet, I think my parents were on a top decker that night and they knew what was happening, yes and we carried a sheet and people threw pennies in or coins in of some kind, even notes we got, I know we got gold coins. Then the next day it was washing these coins before we could hand them over to whoever was collecting them.
O Why?
Y They were so filthy. But this carrying of a sheet up Union Street and having people throwing or dropping coins into it and then carrying it safely and then keeping it before the torchlight when we had this great bonfire in the Quad.
O This is very interesting, nobody's come up with this one before.
Y Then there was a lot of singing amongst the crowd and all the old fashioned tunes, Tipperary and all the rest of it. People were going arm in arm, men folk and everybody. That was the nearest one ever got to that kind of camaraderie in Aberdeen. I've told you about the staff in my early days but what I didn't mention was how some of them entertained us. The ones I remember are garden parties. Matthew Hay was then living, in the summer term, at Seaton Cottage which was familiar ground to us from Old Aberdeen and he gave a garden party to his students and Professor McWilliam out at Bieldside or Cults they entertained and then the Crolls entertained and the Cooks. Professor McKerron, now he and his lively family they entertained the people who were officials in the games world, perhaps that was a less staid evening, I can't remember.
O Would there have been quite a gap socially between staff and students?
Y There was a lot of awe. I think that the staff were, because I'm mentioning this, perhaps they were trying to break that down more than we were prepared for it. You are of quite a different generation but more the generation of my own youngsters and I know that later on, my Mary who is the doctor one and Joyce Baird, that when they came to a Med ? meeting or something they were willing to speak and discuss and I'm sure in their session groups or when discussing cases that the professors would get far more out of the students and how they were thinking than we never did. We just accepted what was told to us. … When I came back to Aberdeen, this was a very long time later, I was coming back to work with Dr McQueen in the local authority world and he wanted a department on Mental Health and this is when I first of all went up to Professor Miller on Saturday mornings, he was very good about including local authority and John Craig of the Children's Department he was very much the professor and he did say to me 'but you know, there are so many haven't moved on from what they were taught in student days and still belong in that time what they were told then was gospel for always'. He didn't say it that way of course, nobody was more diplomatic. He had been a General Practitioner himself and he was very good, had patience and families liked him very much, but he was a little cosy.
O What did students wear in those days?
Y My father was so keen on Harris tweed and I had too many Harris tweed suits which were so hot. When we were talking about these dances we had an aunt, a sister of my mothers who made a lot of our clothes and she always came at the end of the summer holidays and she stayed in the household and she saw what we were going to wear for the winter and also what had to be renovated and what had to be changed. My poor third sister, the third one, said she never got a new frock in her life, they were all handed down. I know that when I went to my first dance at the University, my ball dress, evening dress was white, later on it became pink and by my final year it was black.
O Was that symbolic or was it just fun?
Y I don't think I had much taste but I don't know if I'd thought enough about it. I liked the dressing-up ones we had.
O Were they called balls if you had a formal occasion? Was that distinct from the hops that happened on a Saturday?
Y We called them dances, we had pencils and tickets and you all filled them up.
O Would that have been run by the University or would have been social in Aberdeen?
Y No. I think these would all be within the University and I think men folk or even women folk I suppose could invite people who weren't students, they could have partners but at some of the hops they weren't partnered but you were invited. Of course, you didn't want to do until you knew who else had been invited. Also when we were told about the games we did manage to get before I left the university and it wasn't to come in until the year later that women were to be considered for blues.
O That was new?
Y Yes, but I know I said we got that through somehow to being the following year because I felt I was just keen about all that.
O When we say there was a Women's Union, was there a president of the Women's Union?
Y I think there must have been.
O Was that established by the time you came up to University?
Y I don't think it was established but there was a committee.
O When you were on the wards what did you wear?
Y We had white coats.
O Were women supposed to be dressed in suits like the men or did nobody care what you wore?
Y As long as you had your white coat on and sort of low heeled shoes, but that was easy for me as it was what I would wear anyway.
O Were students generally healthy at that time? Was there any provision made for their care?
Y Not as far as I know.
O They belonged to General Practice in the town?
Y Yes, they would be.
O Was there a lot of TB among the student population?
Y I wasn't aware of it. But my father's health, going to South Africa, it wasn't until much later I realised that some good lecturer, I've forgotten his name now, because my father had been infected, from his father and he was the toddler when my grandfather had died and left my grandmother with six children and I'm perfectly sure that my father was infected as a toddler as so often happens and that that may have been cavities, I don't know but I'm sure this is what the end because he had the shortest life of all his brothers. They said they couldn't find it, and then he had the war and he got the flu and all that kind of thing and worked jolly hard. He came off worst, health wise, and it was tuberculosis that had swept the North East that carried off my grandfather. Granny Mitchell was a great figurehead for us and what a remarkable person she was.
O Did the flu that came at the end of the First World War affect the University students or were they young and healthy?
Y I know that I went down with it and my father came back from Sandanika and we weren't there at the station to meet him and he said 'Go back to your bed at once!' because he had just come through the flu epidemic all round the East.
O It was a very serious one.
Y It was terribly serious, his ears were affected and he had a small pension from that. That was devastating, it comes out in my Indian letters as it was sweeping through the native population.
O So it was world wide?
Y Yes.
O And carried by the soldiers going home initially?
Y I don't know the behaviour of some germs. We just don't know about this AIDS now, you can't always say it's contagion. They have a life of their own, at least that's how I think one can regard it.
Once one had left the University there was no provision for medical students in house jobs within Aberdeen so we had to think of something else. On my 21st birthday my father gave me, that was before I graduated, it was really my 22nd birthday, he was interested in James MacKenzie and he gave me his book 'The Future of Medicine' which I swallowed whole and said during the next year or so 'This is where I want to go'.
O That was General Practice?
Y No. Sir James MacKenzie came here to St Andrews after having been a General Practitioner first in Buxton in the Midlands, and then being particularly interested in heart disease, and the beginnings of heart disease and then going to London where he became a very eminent cardiologist. But was still thought as we knew the end results of heart disease but we didn't know the beginnings and he came here to St Andrews to gather together in a place where there was a stable population, because people didn't move much and also it was varied, it had the University and all round about it. Then he could get together General Practitioners who could study the early symptoms of disease and he set up an institute on the scores clinical institute for clinical research. So I said this is where I would like to go and by the time I was graduating about the early Spring of 1921, between them there was going to be a three week course for anybody who was interested in the theories and practice of James MacKenzie, who by that time had gathered together, got the building, they were living at New Park, he and his wife and their daughter Dorothy and his wife's sisters were secretaries and so on. They got together a team of about eight or ten General Practitioners in the town and set up to look at all their cases. They had a consulting room each and they discussed different cases and early symptoms and response to effort and goodness knows all what. He was going to study the early symptoms of disease because he said 'We consultants in the wards and in the hospitals see the end results, we should be in the out patients and we should be where the General Practitioner is and following the early symptoms so that we know how we can stop the things and prevent it'. It hasn't happened yet. The consultants are still out in the wards dealing with the end results and … Well, I was inspired with this. Somehow or other Ashley and they must have got together my father … he was just … I was living off home and I came down here in the Spring of 1921 to work with James MacKenzie and to be attached to that three weeks course and then to stay on as I did all that summer, they let me stay to work with the General Practitioners and to sit in with them and following the schemes more or less with the General Practitioners about their cases and the ones they had chosen to investigate with their families. James MacKenzie had also devised, at that time, his cardiograph. I could take it round to the various households and this is where I was in about the houses here and taking records, stigmographs? at that time to see if they varied and so on and what they were. He was terribly good to me and I was out there having strawberry lunches and then going round the golf course, there was open tournament. He had attracted quite a lot of people from Edinburgh, professors and the like and for the first time I was meeting a few Americans who were very … I was taken to, I thought I would never like an American but I was taken with them. They asked all the direct questions and there was no nonsense about them. It's Dolly MacKenzie's money who started the General Practitioners chair in Aberdeen. Iain Richardson's chair is really based on MacKenzie money. Naturally quite a lot of the letters and earlier records and the story went to Iain Richardson's department and they're there. There's also pictures of Portlethen where I came from because Iain became, he'd never been a General Practitioner per se when he became professor which really irritated some people I think, but I was very indebted to Iain especially he was in the Public Health department when I first went to Aberdeen. When he gave his inaugural address, which I heard, there was me at the door of the institute carrying the little cardiograph and somebody beside me said 'what a suit'. I had on a terrible suit, a tweed suit of course, but it was trolloping round my ankles. He said 'Well that's not an up-to-date suit'. What's his name again, Farquharson-Lang. James MacKenzie was terribly anxious that I should get the opportunity of going to London and he was so out of tune with so many of the hospitals there and other students that he came down stairs one day and said 'I've had no luck' and there I could see him still coming down the stairs and he had been writing round some of the chiefs and so on but I wasn't caring a bit because I knew I was going to Edinburgh. I must tell you one story about him. One day we were both going to see a case in St Andrews and there was a hansom cab waiting at the bottom of the steps. I was carrying the cardiogram and so on and when we came down the steps, and I certainly was ahead at that moment Do I go in first? Does he? Of course, he was Sir James. And then suddenly there was a great poke in my back, 'don't be an IM' so I was pushed into the little hansom cab, there was just two seats. And then I said 'What is an IM?' 'An imitation man, don't be an imitation man!'. My story was with anecdote and that is one of the things so suffragette and all the rest of it, I was not going to be an imitation man. That was where I went and stayed for all that summer and then as I also said the idea had been that I'd get into General Practice but with hospital experience at first. But first of all some more experience in the minor specialities and for that reason I got myself in as a clinical assistant staying with the Youngs into Edinburgh and did eyes first and then ear and throat. These were short periods in the departments. With ear and throat there were quite some people there at that time under Logan Turner but I got very interested in that. Also with all these catarrhal diseases there was … and they allowed you before your leave year they said you'll have done a mastoid operation you'll know how to take tonsils and adenoids out at all the rest of it. Sinuses were terrific. These are all things that were common in these catarrhal days before we had …
O And you would do it as a General Practitioner if you'd gone into practice?
Y You would really know what was going on and perhaps, the treatment came later and I really became I believe the first non-resident house surgeon in the ear and throat department. I got scarlet fever myself but then when I was just about finishing, there was a request came to Logan Turner from another Scot down in the King Edward VII Hospital in Cardiff, and he Doctor Donald Paterson from Inverness and an Edinburgh graduate wrote up and said 'Have got anybody you could send down to me as a house surgeon?' They had nobody to send but with me and so for the first time over the border I went down to Cardiff and found myself the only girl with eight Welshmen and I thought I was never going to look a Welshman in the face again, I couldn't bear any of them and they all took a tremendous loan of me and also thought good gracious and also I suppose out of sheer wickedness said how are you going to stick it, he's terrible the man you're going to work with. Well they were quite wrong Donald, he was very eminent, much more eminent than a great deal of the others and he too became really a very great friend and his family and in fact came up later to Aberdeen and asked if they could come and see us. His daughter too I was playing hockey every week with her and they entertained and so on. I was very interested in ear and throat and might have pursued it but of course I was wanting still do other things and I was all alone and they put me in to live with the superintendent. I got a flat up there in the hospital and Nellie Jardine, Donald Paterson was very good on the admin side and he said 'We've got an application from somebody who you may know who wants to come to the eye department, would you like her to come sort of thing'? Because this would have been another girl. So that's where Nellie and I, … we became great friends.
continues on MS3620/1/51/2 |