For a woman to succeed in a man’s world, she has to be twice as good as a man. Luckily, this is not too hard! (Anonymous)
About 1795, a daughter was born to the Barry family in London. For some reason, it was an aunt and uncle who raised her. The latter, a well-known painter, James Barry, believed in encouraging both males and females to achieve their potential. But this gem of an uncle died when the girl was only 11. She took her love of learning from him, and also his given name.
At 15, ‘James’ and the aunt moved to Edinburgh, where she passed herself off as a male to join the University Medical School. No way could she have done so as a female; that milestone was still over half a century away.
Though fellow-students teased her about her slight build and hairless chin, she kept her secret safe. Her only close friend wanted to teach James to box, but she learnt the rapier instead.
At 17, she completed a brilliant thesis on hernias. At the early age of 20, she gained her MD by defending this thesis against interrogation by the whole faculty, and by discussing two of Hippocrates’ Aphorisms. Much of this, of course, was in Latin!
In 1813, she somehow avoided the usual physical examination, satisfied the Army Medical Board, and started on her lifetime career in military medicine.
Soon she distinguished herself at the Battle of Waterloo.
Next she coped well with a cholera epidemic at Cape Town. There she also saved a mother and child by performing a Caesarean delivery. Well before the time of antiseptics and anaesthetics, this was an exceptional outcome. Soon she rose to become private physician to the governor of Cape Town.
Wearing high-heeled boots and satin waistcoats with padded shoulders, James won the favour of many ladies. Since she excelled at duels, the men didn’t dare rib her about her high voice or the little dog she always kept with her.
By 1821, as colonial medical inspector, James was able to raise the level of medical care. For example, she decreed that only physicians or apothecaries should prescribe drugs, saying: ‘Pedlars and hawkers of drugs … do more real injury … than the most virulent diseases.’ She also drafted the enlightened Rules for the General Treatment of Lepers and complained to the governor about floggings at the prison.
Naturally such a stirrer made enemies. Headstrong and quarrelsome, James herself often went to prison for breaches of discipline, but never for long.
In 1845, aged 50, she got the dreaded yellow fever. James forbade her colleagues from calling on her, and asked that if she did die, she should be buried fully dressed. But her assistant did visit while she was delirious and saw that James was no man. When James came to, she swore her assistant to secrecy.
After a year’s sick leave she returned to duty. During the Crimean War, 400 of the 500 wounded in her hospital recovered; another exceptional result. At 62, as inspector general of all British Army Hospitals in Canada, she worked to improve the food, water and hygiene in her camps.
When she died at 71, they found on the bedpost the sheet she had worn to flatten her breasts. Her unsuspecting valet had served her for 40 years.
Had the army followed her request for instant burial in a sack, James would have taken her secret with her to the grave. But they called in a charwoman to lay out the body. She was furious: ‘What do you mean by calling me to lay out a general, and the corpse is a woman’s, and one who has borne a child?’
The army authorities continued the deception; both her death certificate and her tombstone show her as a male. But there were many red faces at the War Office when her obituary appeared in the Manchester Guardian:
Officers … may remember … Dr Barry … enjoy[ed] a reputation for Considerable skill … in difficult operations. This gentleman had entered the army in 1813 … passed through the grades of assistant surgeon and surgeon in various regiments … Upon his death, [he] was discovered to be a woman.
Over 80 years later the Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps gave her a fitting epitaph:
Whoever was ‘James Barry’ she has the distinction of being first—the first woman doctor of the British Isles. Secondly—one who has … served her country in all climates with distinction, and if she preferred to do so by the only way available in her lifetime, by assuming the trappings of the male sex, all the more credit to her courage and pertinacity.
If James Barry was the first known female medical graduate in the English-speaking world, albeit a status gained and maintained in heavy and lifelong disguise, who were the true believers who slugged it out with the medical establishment to gain the first legitimate toehold for women in the medical profession?
Elizabeth Blackwell, an American graduate of British birth, is regarded as being the very first.
The Blackwells were a middle-class family from Bristol, England. Elizabeth’s father, Samuel, a sugar-factory owner, was a religious man and held unfashionable ideas on equality in education and independence for both sons and daughters. She herself was born in 1821, the third of what were to be eight surviving children. When Elizabeth was 11 years old, financial disaster overtook her father, and the family migrated to New York. Samuel died a bankrupt when Elizabeth was 17, whereupon she and her sisters opened a school and paid off the debts.
Although there had never been a female medical graduate in America, she was determined to become a doctor, partly to fulfil her father’s ambition, partly to right the wrong a friend had suffered—the friend had died from a uterine disorder as she would not seek advice from a (male) doctor—and partly to satisfy an urge in her feisty nature to do the impossible.
After 29 colleges had refused her application, Geneva College in New York State agreed to take her. The faculty had initially refused her application, but agreed to refer it to the student body, stipulating that any decision regarding admission must be unanimous. The students foresaw entertainment and notoriety, and voted ‘yes’—with one exception, and he was sat upon until he changed his mind.
Miss Blackwell did the then usual two-year course, graduating as best student in 1849, and by so doing she seems to have set a pattern of excellence that women in medicine have found difficult to shake off since. Nonetheless, at her graduation ceremony she declined to walk in the academic procession ‘because it would not be ladylike’. Her success inspired the English humorous journal Punch to publish some congratulatory verses to ‘Doctrix Blackwell’.
Although she was well received, almost feted, in New York, it was more as a freak than as a serious medical doctor, and openings did not present themselves. Elizabeth went to the more liberated Paris, but found that she could only get a job as a midwife. At work she contracted an inflammation of the eyes, which was diagnosed as gonococcal ophthalmia. In June 1850 the affected eye was excised, leaving shattered any thoughts of her being a surgeon.
Dr Blackwell was welcomed in London. At St Bartholomew’s Hospital she was able to work in every department except gynaecology!
On her return to America she was refused every post at every hospital to which she applied. She began to lecture on ‘The Laws of Life’, became known about town and steadily built up a large private practice, mainly of young and indigent women. Ultimately she opened a hospital staffed entirely by women.
In 1869 she moved permanently to England, and in the teeth of great opposition helped found the London School of Medicine for Women (later the Royal Free). For a short time Elizabeth Blackwell was its professor of gynaecology.
Dr Blackwell never married but did adopt a seven-year-old orphan, Kitty Barry (no relative to her enigmatic predecessor).
Elizabeth Blackwell continued to write on medical issues throughout her life, eventually dying in Hastings in 1910 aged 89. Kitty died in 1936.
The first female medical student in Australia was Dagmar Berne, who enrolled at Sydney University in 1885. There seems to have been no overt hostility from male staff or students and she completed the four-year course without incident. Then she blew her chance of becoming Australia’s first registered female doctor by electing to transfer to Great Britain to pass out as a Licentiate of the College of Physicians of Glasgow and Edinburgh and Licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries of London. Dr Berne returned to Sydney in 1895, practised briefly and died of tuberculosis in 1900 aged 34.
Adelaide University enrolled Laura Fowler as its first woman medical student in 1886. She graduated in 1891, but did not register until March 1892, again thereby denying herself the unique honour of being number one on the register. Nonetheless, Dr Fowler had a long and eventful life, including missionary work in India and being held prisoner in Serbia in the First World War. She died in 1958.
At Melbourne University, no less than seven women enrolled as medical students in 1887. All eventually graduated, but the first two (in 1891) were Clara Stone and Margaret Whyte. They went on the register at once, thereby pipping Laura Fowler at the post and have their names writ large in the history of Australian medicine.
Today in Australia there are more female than male medical graduates.
(GB & JL)
He was a rough-cut genius, a pioneer who moved from one new field to the next, applying methods developed in one to problems in another, often without rigor, yet usually with striking effectiveness (Daniel J. Kevles)
The Art of Travel (1855) by Sir Francis Galton was full of handy tips. If you were a long way from home and feeling under the weather, just drop a charge of gunpowder into warm soapy water and glug it down.
Sore feet? Blisters? Just make a lather of soapsuds inside your socks, and break a raw egg into each boot to soften the leather. You want to keep your only set of clothes dry when it rains? Take them off and sit on them!
Galton (1822-1911) was an English eccentric, explorer, geographer, author, inventor, meteorologist, anthropologist and statistician. Some have called him the father of modern psychology.
Just before his fifth birthday, he boasted that he could read any English book, say all the Latin active verbs and recite 52 lines of Latin poetry.
He must have been an insufferable brat. An expert later calculated Galton’s IQ at over 200 (but gave Galton’s first cousin Charles Darwin only 135 and Copernicus only 110!).
He studied medicine at Birmingham University and King’s College, London. As a medical student, he proposed that there should be an ‘index of curative skill’ to measure doctors’ merit and to regulate their fee.
He did a statistical study of the efficacy of prayer. Findings: though churchgoers all over Britain prayed every Sunday for the lives of the royal family, the royals did not live longer than others.
Galton dropped medicine when his father’s death gave him an independent income.
In 1850 he set off to explore Syria, Egypt and the Sudan; then vast areas of South West Africa.
Hearing that Hottentots were killing off missionaries, he demoralised their ferocious chief by wearing a pink hunting coat, riding into his doorway on a snorting ox and telling him to stop!
Back in London after covering 2,700 kilometres in two years, Galton became a Fellow of the Royal Society.
He was one of the first to discover that we each have a unique set of fingerprints that do not change with age. After Scotland Yard put Galton in charge of Criminal Investigation, his Fingerprints Branch successfully identified over 100 criminals in six months. Today we still use his system of arches, loops and whorls to classify prints.
He devised a method to decimalise British currency; a method which resembled the one finally adopted in 1971.
At home, he rigged up a signal that told everyone when the lavatory was engaged: ‘It saves a futile climb upstairs and the occupant is not subjected to the embarrassment of having the door rattled.’
Galton often said: ‘Whenever you can, count.’ He saw measurement as the basis of science.
This passion for statistics enabled him to prepare weather charts more accurate than any before; he also discovered and named the anticyclone.
Galton wanted to compare the number of beautiful girls in British cities. First he invented a pocket counter; then he toured the cities pressing the button every time he saw a beauty. London had the highest beauty quotient, while Aberdeen was lowest.
But his life-interest was heredity. We can only speculate whether the infertility of his own marriage spurred this obsession.
His genetic work on peas closely resembled that of Gregor Mendel, though he didn’t then know of Mendel.
Galton was the first to separate the effects of nature and nurture by studying both identical and non-identical twins.
In 1859, Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection spurred Galton to look for ways to improve the human race. The idea was not new. Plato’s Republic idealised selective breeding. To prevent the human race from degenerating, Plato urged us to apply to humans the methods of breeders of dogs and birds.
In Galton’s own work Hereditary Genius (1869), he concluded from a mountain of statistics that, given a fairly similar environment; most differences in ability are inherited: ‘nature prevails enormously over nurture when the differences of nurture do not exceed what is commonly … found among persons of the same rank of society and in the same country’.
Moreover, Galton believed in one general ability, rather than in specific talents or aptitudes.
When a historian argued that it was their specific specialised abilities that had made Caesar a great commander, Shakespeare a great poet and Newton a great scientist, Galton quoted Samuel Johnson:
No, it is only that one man has more mind than another. He may direct it differently or prefer this study to that. Sir, the man who has vigour may walk to the North as well as to the South, to the East as well as to the West.
Galton argued for selective breeding between healthy people of ability. ‘It would be quite practical to produce a highly gifted race of men [obviously women didn’t get equal attention] by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations.’
He urged the state to run competitive exams for hereditary merit, applaud the winners at a public ceremony, celebrate their weddings at Westminster Abbey, and give them grants to encourage their breeding!
There was a downside as well. Galton advised ‘stern compulsion … to prevent the free propagation of the stock of those … seriously afflicted by lunacy, feeble-mindedness, habitual criminality and pauperism.’
He coined the term eugenics (Greek for ‘good breeding’). In 1907, he founded the Eugenics Education Society, which influenced birth control, abortion reform, sex education, marriage guidance, family allowances and taxation. But Galton did not want revolutionary change. He would have approved of genetic counselling, but he would have been appalled to see eugenic ideas used to defend the Holocaust.
Galton died in 1911, at the age of 88. His estate funded a Chair of Eugenics at University College, London. (GB)
Jeanie, Jeanie, full of hopes,
Read a book by Marie Stopes.
Now, to judge by her condition,
She must have read the wrong edition.
(Skipping chant, London 1924)
One of the books sent to Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip as a wedding present in 1947 was Married Love. It was a gift of the author, Marie Stopes, who in a covering letter said: ‘It seemed best to wait until you were married, and I now send it in the hope that you may be able to read it together.’ It needs some gall to be so presumptuous, and Stopes had plenty of that.
It was hardly surprising that, as with the copies sent years before to Queen Mary (mother of seven) and the by then 10 years widowed Queen Alexandra (five children), the gift elicited no response. Yet since its appearance in 1918 the book has sold well over a million copies and been translated into 13 languages. In 1935 American academics voted it 16th out of the 25 most influential books of the previous 50 years. It was just behind Marx’s Das Kapital and just ahead of Einstein’s Relativity.
Dr Marie Stopes was a determined, single-minded, querulous and highly intelligent woman whose public behaviour became more eccentric as the years passed.
She was born in Surrey in 1880. She studied botany at University College, London, graduating with first-class honours, and then went on to Munich where she obtained her doctorate. Her speciality was palaeobotany, and she was later to write the definitive work on the constitution of coal. She never had any formal medical training.
As a young woman Marie had a number of suitors, but they were only entertained on a cerebral level; if passion did exist, it was confined to skittish and ebullient correspondence. She did chase one man to Japan, but it came to naught. On the rebound she married a pallid and sensitive fellow-botanist, Ruggles Gates. That was 1911. When they were divorced five years later she was still a virgin.
But she had not completely wasted her time, for during the final arid couple of years she wrote what was to be her best-selling sexual treatise, Married Love. In the circumstances it would appear to have been something of a paradox, but maybe it helped set out her yearned-for ideal.
The book was published in March 1918. Three months later she married Humphrey Vernon Roe and finally was able to test theory against reality. The wedding was solemnised by the Bishop of Birmingham, who, in a madcap moment of abstraction, had himself asked for her hand a short time before.
The book was the first ‘sex manual’ in the English language and its mere 116 pages meant that lusty teenagers could easily hold and read it under the bedclothes. Alternatively, it could be folded within the covers of the Anglican prayerbook. At one London club it was in such demand that members were allowed to read it for only an hour at a time.
Today we wonder at its innocent, even puritanical, nature, but then it was dynamite. It spoke of ‘stirring a chaste partner to physical love’. It blamed a wife’s ‘coldness’ on the husband’s ‘want of art’, and called for the ‘profound mutual rousing of passion’. It contained contraceptive advice and extolled the liberation of women from the yoke of childbearing and male insensitivity. Its hitherto unknown free-thinking ethos was heady stuff and ensured the book’s immediate success. It ran to six reprints in six months.
Dr Stopes became a national figure with a vast correspondence, much of which revealed the depth of sexual misery and prejudice within the population. Clergymen featured large among the letter writers. An Essex vicar wrote about his frigid wife: ‘She is slow to rouse, once or twice a year … I am afraid I bore her … Single lust is a feeble squib; I want fireworks.’ One from Gosport: ‘If I have touched my wife near the entrance she is much more “lively” … I feel dreadful having written so frankly.’ Another from Newark: ‘how best to arouse … my Wife always lies with her back to me, I make a “tender advance” … and the end of the poetry is “I do not like your breath on my face”.’
A comi-tragedy unfurled, which was sometimes leavened by missives from the likes of the ubiquitous ‘Disgusted’. One such with nine children angrily wrote: ‘If God sends the babies, he will also send their breeches.’
Perhaps the most poignant was from a Yorkshireman who wrote about alternative methods of contraception. For him it amounted to ‘rubbing “stuff” out of penis by hand of either self, wife or a middle aged widowed cook in absence of wife’. The mind boggles.
The medical profession was divided. Apart from obstetrics, sexual physiology was not taught at medical school; indeed there was precious little to teach. Knowledge of hormones was in its infancy, and all, including Stopes, thought the ‘safe’ period was in the middle of the month—we now know that this is, in fact, the most fertile period.
To the profession’s amused contempt Stopes opened a birth-control clinic in 1921, mainly fitting cervical caps. It made a slow start but enough to outrage the Catholic Church, which intensified the scorn and vilification it had heaped upon her for the previous three years.
Though she had been denounced as immoral, Stopes held her hand. Then Dr Sutherland, a staunch Catholic, wrote that she was conducting ‘a monstrous campaign of harmful methods’ (cervical cap), and ‘a class conspiracy against the poor’.
Although Sutherland’s words were mild when compared with the usual abuse, she snapped and sued for libel. Sutherland won, but obtained a derisory £200 damages. Stopes appealed and the judgment was reversed. The Catholic Church was not to be denied, however, and appealed to the House of Lords inviting monetary contributions from ‘right minded people’. Three of the five Law Lords were over 80 years of age, and Stopes lost 4-1. Sales of Married Love reached the half million mark.
Over the next 20 years Dr Stopes undertook numerous other legal battles with varying success. She also wrote two more big sellers, Wise Parenthood and Radiant Motherhood (both before her only child was born), but Married Love stands supreme.
She and her second husband became estranged after 10 troubled years of marriage. She treated her son, Harry, in a bizarre way, not allowing him to read until he was 10, forcing him to have only carrots in the morning, and dressing him in knitted frocks so as not to interfere with the growth of his genitals. In the end mother and son fell out and she cut him out of her will.
Although she was certain she would live to be 120, Marie Stopes died in 1958, aged 78. While regarded by many as paranoid and/or a deluded megalomaniac, it was the very nature of her overdrawn personality and unappeasable pugnacity which allowed the emotive subject of sex to be thrust into the full sunshine for the first time. It remains there today.
(JL)
I was supposed to get married … to justify my existence
(Elizabeth Kenny)
How can we explain this woman who was called both a fraud and a medical genius, a cheap quack and an unhappy martyr, a raging old tiger and a merciful angel?
(Victor Cohn)
Elizabeth Kenny was born in Warialda, New South Wales, in 1880. After several moves, the family settled on the Darling Downs in Queensland.
She planned to work as a missionary in India, but at 33, she became a volunteer nurse in a local maternity hospital. Next she was an unpaid visiting bush nurse in Queensland, by necessity often acting also as doctor and midwife.
In 1911, when Kenny was 31, she saw a feverish girl aged two, who was paralysed in one arm and both legs. By telegraph, Kenny consulted her friend Dr Aeneas McDonnell, who could only advise: ‘Infantile paralysis (polio). No known treatment. Do the best you can … ’
Kenny tried poultices without result, so she applied bits of blanket soaked in hot water. Soon she started moving the paralysed limbs and also encouraged the girl herself to try to move them. Moving limbs affected by polio was medical heresy, but Kenny did the same with five other children. Dr McDonnell was surprised to hear that all did well.
In 1915, she enlisted in the Australian Imperial Forces. From Nurse, she rose to Staff-Nurse, and later to Sister. While serving in France, she herself was wounded, and won a British War Medal.
After the war, Kenny returned to bush nursing. According to the accepted teaching of the day, since polio weakened affected muscles, these weak muscles needed splinting. Without splinting, people believed, the unaffected strong muscles would pull the weak ones out of place. Doctors ‘knew’ all this. With her usual total confidence, Elizabeth Kenny disagreed: ‘No, I see only tight, shortened muscles in spasm—your splints and casts are illogical; throw them out.’
She invented and patented a stretcher that enabled people in shock to receive treatment while being transported.
In the polio epidemic of 1933, she used her royalties to open a free clinic in a Townsville backyard. There she treated patients disabled by polio. She replaced the conventional splints, braces and callipers with salt baths, foments, and exercises.
The following year the Queensland government appointed staff to work with Kenny to research unfantile paralysis. The ‘Kenny Clinic’ was the first nursing research clinic in Australia.
Her results impressed a few doctors, but most opposed her vigorously; one of the latter wrote: ‘This quack must be exposed.’ But Kenny clinics opened in Townsville, Cairns, Rockhampton, Toowoomba, Newcastle, Sydney and Melbourne.
One headline acclaimed her as ‘A new Australian Florence Nightingale’.
Her public support grew and grew, and not only in Australia. Grateful parents of children she had helped paid her fare to England, where she cared for inpatients at Queen Mary’s Hospital in Surrey.
In 1935, the Queensland Government appointed a Royal Commission of doctors to review the treatment of polio. After three years, they reported: ‘The abandonment of immobilisation is a grievous error.’ However, the report was never requested nor presented to Parliament.
The government nevertheless gave her a ward at the Brisbane Hospital. Here she could treat early cases of polio, who might respond better than older cases.
Kenny’s few medical friends convinced the government to pay her fare to the United States. Many American doctors rejected her explanations, with some accusing her of using hypnosis. But she did gain the use of beds at the Minneapolis General Hospital, and the support of three orthopaedic doctors. One of these, Dr John Pohl, wrote:
Before she came … you would have seen little kids lying stiff and rigid, crying with pain … We’d take children to the operating room straighten them out under anaesthetic, and put them in plaster casts. When they woke up, they screamed. The next day they still cried from the pain. That was the accepted and universal treatment … She said, ‘That’s all wrong.’
In 1941, the American Medical Association endorsed the Kenny treatment that the Queensland Royal Commission had rubbished five years earlier.
Doctors and physiotherapists from Greece, Russia, Turkey, Belgium, Germany, Sweden and China flocked to learn her methods at the Sister Kenny Institute in Minneapolis.
The New York Sun named her the world’s ‘Outstanding Woman of the Year’. In 1950, America awarded her Free Passage across its borders; an honour Elizabeth Kenny shared with French General La Fayette.
Many grateful people remembered that for over 20 years, she never took a penny for her work.
But Elizabeth Kenny herself and her teachings remained controversial. Her dogmatic belief in her own God-given gifts actually hindered her cause. She was merciless with anyone who dared to doubt her. Had she been gentler, could she have been more effective? Or would the critics have just ground her down?
She published two textbooks on her treatment of polio, as well as an autobiography and was awarded three honorary doctorates from leading American universities for her contribution to polio research. In 1951 she retired to Toowoomba, where she died a year later.
The Sydney Morning Herald mourned ‘the loss of one of our great ones’.
The influential British Medical Journal said:
The influence of Sister Kenny on the treatment of infantile paralysis has been exceedingly beneficial…in an empirical way she hit on much that was good in the treatment of poliomyelitis, and…wakened orthopaedic surgeons and physiotherapists the world over.
Sadly Elizabeth Kenny herself did not live to see this blessing by the medical establishment. The world has gradually accepted modifications of her teaching on the treatment of polio.
(GB)
Dr Paul White, the Jungle Doctor from Australia, earned for his work in the 1930s in Tanganyika, East Africa. There, despite his lifelong asthma, he was far more than a medical missionary: he was a surgeon, anaesthetist, pathologist, pharmacist, handyman and building supervisor.
Dr White learnt his first lessons in hygiene and public health as a small boy in Bowral:
Before dawn, each Friday, a shadowy figure would come to our outhouse and play his key part in our pan-and-fly hygiene system. He was also our mayor, carrying off all his ceremonial duties spruce and shining in his robes of office.
At a Christmas party, one of my mother’s staidest friends asked me for a poem. I recited one our mayor had left us:
‘Although the police keep order
There’s no more useful man
Than the bloke who comes at sunrise
And juggles with the pan.’
To my amazement, they stopped me.
In 1921, his widowed mother and young Paul moved to Sydney. At Sydney Grammar School, he became a runner, cricketer and active Christian. He started his medical course in 1929, at the height of the Depression.
Paul gained a University Blue in 1931 and 1932.
In my third year, I ran in the Intervarsity athletics. A Melbourne runner, Wellesley Hannah, beat me over the mile. Then I found that he was also a committed Christian. This friendship was to change both our lives.
As medical students, we followed the desperate search for weapons against the great killers like pneumonia and meningitis.
I felt especially bitter about meningitis which had killed my father.
By the time I graduated in 1935, I’d decided to work as a medical missionary in East Africa. First I spent one year at Royal North Shore Hospital, where our training included infectious diseases and obstetrics. For anaesthetics, we used the old ether with a rag and bottle.
As interns we earned eleven [shillings] and threepence a week and had every third weekend off.
In my spare time, I practised tracheotomy [emergency opening of the windpipe to bypass blockage] on an old piece of garden hose. Soon after, I had to do the real thing on a small boy who had severe diphtheria and couldn’t breathe.
He met many challenges during his preparations:
Most of our equipment was borrowed: if we couldn’t get it, we had to make it; if we couldn’t make it, we had to go without. Mosquito nets were crucial, since mosquitoes transmit malaria, yellow fever, dengue and elephantiasis.
Among the things he learned: keeping a corrugated-iron roof cool, making a surgical retractor from two bent spoons, driving through mud or sand, and plugging a hole in a radiator or petrol tank.
In 1937 Dr White, with his wife Mary and son David, sailed to Dar-es-Salaam, the capital of Tanganyika (now Tanzania). Then to Dodoma and Mvumi.
Sechela the head nurse welcomed us with her story of a cobra emerging from its hole to watch her delivering twins.
Over 100 people came for my first outpatient session; some walked 50 kilometres. Relatives led the elderly who were blinded by cataracts. We had so few medicine bottles that people brought their own.
Those with malaria shivered in the scorching sun. Our only antimalarial was quinine, which we bought from the Tanganyika Post Office for two shillings per 100 tablets.
Our operating room of granite, cement and corrugated iron cost 120 pounds. A burly African pedalling a jacked-up bike which charged a battery, gave most of our light. We built our anaesthetic machine from a pickle bottle, a car footpump, a football bladder, the Y-piece from a stethoscope, an eye-dropper glass and rubber tubing. It worked really well.
I removed many cataracts; trachoma I treated with surgery and zinc sulphate drops that cost threepence.
Twelve times a day, out two water carriers made their round trip of over three kilometers. Each carried 36 litres in petrol cans. Twice a week, the mailbag came, along the paths where lions and rhinoceros prowled.
The dry season lasted eight months and ended in October with torrential rain. Within minutes, a parched riverbed became a torrent. Within two days, grass would grow. We built water tanks to see us through the next dry, only to see them cracked by an earthquake. In one hour, we helplessly watched three months’ water disappear.
Once sulphonamide drugs were discovered, we could fight the next epidemic of meningitis.
Our second child Rosemary was born in 1939. After my wife’s illness forced us to return home, Wellesley Hannah came to Tanganyika to take over from me. He stayed 20 years.
Dr White’s Jungle Doctor books numbered 54 and have appeared in over 100 languages. In 1977, he published an autobiography titled Alias Jungle Doctor. Later he was awarded the Order of Australia Medal (OAM) for services to religious welfare. Dr White died in 1992, at the age of 82.
(GB)
I did not set out to be a reformer; I … became involved with a law which was inflicting human suffering (Bertram Wainer)
Melbourne, 1968. She was 21, and had already had a baby at 15. Now she was pregnant again. Terrified of telling her father, she took an overdose and landed in a psychiatric hospital. Then she threatened Dr Bertram Wainer that she would kill herself if he didn’t terminate her pregnancy.
Not only did he do the abortion, but he told the Press, the Homicide Squad, the Chief Secretary and the Attorney-General. Dr Wainer was relying on a 1969 judgment of Mr Justice Menhennitt: ‘A lawful abortion is one believed by the doctor to be necessary to preserve the woman from serious danger to her life or her mental health.’
Dr Wainer’s challenge did not provoke any legal response, but it marked his entry into the campaign that Australian women were fighting for the right to legal abortions done openly by capable doctors.
In the 1960s there were about 70,000 women having abortions in Australia each year; many abortions were performed by unqualified abortionists.
Dr Wainer fought against strict abortion laws and their narrow interpretation. He fought also against the police corruption that he felt was a consequence of those laws. By proving the extent of police corruption feeding on undercover and backyard abortionists, he forced society to face both issues.
His efforts helped to clean up the Victorian police force and to bring about a more liberal interpretation of abortion laws. (Nowadays, in most states of Australia, a woman can get an abortion on demand, in the early stages of her pregnancy, if her physical or mental health is in danger.)
Wainer’s outspoken views brought him abuse, vilification, threats and even attempts on his life. The Australian Medical Association found him guilty of unprofessional conduct. Rumours said he was mad and had a criminal background. Criminals shot at him and tried to run him over. For years he lived in fear of his life.
What made a man fight at such personal cost for the right of Australian women to have safe and legal abortions?
His background gives us some clue. His father died soon after Bertram Wainer was born in Edinburgh in 1928. His stepfather was an illiterate alcoholic. Bertram’s mother’s sweet shop failed during the Depression, forcing the family to live in the slums of Glasgow.
The Second World War added more traumas. During the Blitz, young Bert and his mother were caught in an air raid away from home:
… bombs (were) exploding around us, ack-ack screaming … fires devouring houses, incendiary bombs blazing … then the relief of reaching an air-raid shelter. We were told: ‘You can’t come in here, this is a private air-raid shelter … We have carpets and heaters and food. We can’t let just anyone in.’ The door slammed …
Bert Wainer never forgot this experience.
He left school at 13 to help his mother, and was still underage when he entered the army, where he served for the rest of the war. In 1949, the family migrated on free passages to Australia.
Supporting himself with a remarkable range of jobs, he somehow managed not only to matriculate but also to study medicine at Melbourne University. By the mid-1960s, he was a lieutenant-colonel in charge of a large military hospital.
After leaving the army in protest against the Vietnam war, Dr Wainer became a GP in St Kilda. In 1969, he went to the Press with evidence of backyard abortionists paying senior police large bribes for protection.
In June of the same year, radio station 2GB invited him to Sydney to debate abortion law reform. Before he left Melbourne, Dr Wainer told reporters that he planned to put before the New South Wales Chief Commissioner of Police (Norman Allan) evidence on abortion and police corruption in that state.
The threatening phone calls increased: ‘If Wainer goes to Sydney, he will never come back alive.’ The evening before the trip, a man offered to sell him protection in the shape of a shortened shotgun.
Dr Wainer and two trusted friends booked a flight on TAA, but actually took a tiny charter plane from Moorabbin airport. It might have been safer, but the unpressurised Piper Aztec took about three hours each way.
From Mascot airport, they took a convoy of cabs to the back entrance of 2GB. Sydney police didn’t know that Dr Wainer had arrived until they heard him on air.
Then they rang and invited him to police HQ, but he made them come to 2GB. Mr Allan did not come himself, but sent Superintendent Donald Fergusson and Detective-Constable Roger Rogerson.
According to Dr Wainer’s account, he went to hand Fergusson a sealed envelope with his information. The latter asked who his two friends were. When he heard they were journalists, Fergusson said it would be unethical to accept the information in their presence.
Dr Wainer replied: ‘The only possible reason … is that you will be forced to act upon it. [If] I want to report a crime or a murder in Sydney, [do] I have to crawl into a wardrobe with a policeman and whisper it in his ear?’
The tension rose, Fergusson refused to budge, and the futile meeting ended.
Leaving 2GB, the visitors didn’t risk ringing for cabs, but picked two at random. At the airport, Dr Wainer waited in the pilots’ room. Then, steeling himself for the impact of a bullet, he forced himself to walk, not run, to the plane.
Despite the dangers, he did return to Sydney. In March 1970, Dr Wainer appeared on the current affairs television program Four Corners. In May, on another television program, prominent journalist Michael Willesee asked Chief Commissioner Allan if he believed there were abortionists operating in Sydney. When he said ‘no’ Willesee offered him Dr Wainer’s list. When Mr Allan would not accept that, Willesee showed him films of an abortionist’s surgery, reportedly within one block of police headquarters, then interviews with patients who had had abortions there.
Instead of receiving Dr Wainer’s information in front of two journalists, Mr Allan had to do so in front of two million viewers.
New South Wales police then raided many abortionists, forcing Sydney women to turn to backyarders. As a result, more and more women came to public hospitals with severe infections from their abortions.
Police raided the Heatherbrae Clinic in the Sydney suburb of Bondi and charged the two owners and three doctors on ten counts of unlawfully using an instrument to procure a miscarriage. If found guilty, they could face 10 years in gaol. But the implication was that in some cases, procuring a miscarriage could be lawful.
In 1972, Mr Justice Aaron Levine in the Darlinghurst Court House, ruled that, for a guilty verdict, the Crown had to prove that a doctor did not reasonably believe the operation to be necessary for the woman’s physical and mental health: ‘The termination of pregnancy by competent use of instruments in the hands of medical practitioners is not an offence in this state.’ This ruling reinforced the Menhennitt ruling of 1969 and drastically redefined key sections of the Crimes Act.
In 1986, in response to the liberalisation of abortion laws and their interpretation, Wainer said with surprise: ‘Do you know what I am now? I’m almost respectable!’
He died of heart disease in January 1987. Friends organised what amounted to a state funeral; an opera singer sang A Scottish Soldier. His close friend Evan Whitton called him ‘the most extraordinary man I ever met’. In the eulogy, it was said:
Dr Wainer’s legacy to the people of Victoria from his great eight-year campaign was … a relatively uncorrupt [police] force, and the consequent failure of organised crime to get more than a toehold in this state. One’s only regret must be that Dr Wainer did not happen to live in Sydney.
(GB)