Malice, intention, patience, and resource

There was a time when doctors wrote their memoirs and the public bought them. Whether doctors were better writers in those days or the public had fewer amusements to choose from I cannot say; but Halliday Sutherland’s memoir, The Arches of the Years, published in 1933, was reprinted in Britain at least 34 times and was translated into eight European languages.

Sutherland (1882-1960) was an interesting figure. He spent most of his professional life working on the prevention of tuberculosis, and he wrote books on the subject. He made the first health education film in Britain. He became a firm Catholic and wrote pamphlets against artificial contraception. In 1923 he was sued for libel by the pioneer of birth control, Marie Stopes. He was alleged to have implied in his book, Birth Control: A Statement of Christian Doctrine Against the Neo-Malthusians, that Stopes took advantage of the ignorance of the poor to conduct experiments on them. He won his case (which is still cited by lawyers) two years later in the House of Lords. Stopes called him the most cocksure man in the British empire.

Not long after he qualified Sutherland went to Spain as an assistant to his uncle, who had a medical practice in Huelva. It seems that the young Sutherland was much less troubled by bureaucracy in taking up practice in a foreign country than the average British doctor now has in obtaining a hospital car park permit. In his memoir he recounts how he tried to develop passive immunisation there against leprosy by injecting leprous material into a goat and then using its serum.

It worked, but not in the sense intended. The patients did not get better, but a servant of Sutherland’s started to steal the goat’s milk. Sutherland told him that he had injected leprous material into the goat, and the theft of the milk ceased at once.

Before devoting himself to bacteriology Sutherland also worked for a short time in an asylum (his father had been a deputy commissioner for lunacy in Scotland). “Mrs H . . . was a stout, elderly, white-haired lady with the staring eyes of mania, and she disliked me,” Sutherland recalls. She hid a stocking about her person, filled it with earth, stones, and nails that she found in the grounds, and then one day attacked Sutherland with it. “In her action,” writes Sutherland, not without a certain admiration, “there was malice, intention, patience and resource.” But he realised that, as he put it, this branch of medicine was not for him.

This anecdote took me back to the days when I first worked in prison. There was still a large square battery in existence called a PP9, and prisoners could buy it for their radios. Some, however, bought it for other purposes: they put it in a sock and attacked their enemies with it. “Could you see Smith, sir?” a prison officer would ask me. “He’s just been PP-nined.”

I was never PP-nined in the manner of Dr Sutherland, and the battery was withdrawn, at least from prison circulation. It was replaced briefly, as a weapon, by tins of mandarin oranges. “Could you see Smith, sir?” a prison officer would ask me. “He’s just been mandarinned.”

Yes indeed, malice, intention, patience, and resource.