Alasdair Gray - Poor Things

When priests and politicians ask for unquestioning faith we know they are thinking first of themselves. Why should we with scientific training ALSO want the people we serve to remove their thinking apparatus and bow down before us? But patients will only stand up properly for doctors — doctors will only stand up properly for patients — when all know the common-sense daily foundations of the healing art.

She wanted all children to be taught basic nursing in their primary schools (“where they can learn it as a game”) and basic medical training in secondary schools. In this way all would learn not only how and when doctors could help them, but how to live more healthily, how to care for each other better, and why they should not tolerate housing and working conditions which damaged the health of themselves, their children and community. Here are some typical reactions from the journals of the period:

It would seem that Dr. Victoria McCandless proposes to turn every British school — yes, even the infant schools! — into training grounds for revolutionary socialists.

The Times

We hear that Dr. Victoria McCandless is a married woman with three sons. This is astonishing news — we can hardly believe it! From her writing alone we would have deduced that she was one of those sticklike, unwomanly women who would benefit from a course of “horizontalism”! Under the circumstances we can only offer her husband our hearty sympathies.

The Daily Telegraph

We do not doubt the adequacy of Victoria McCandless M.D.’s training, nor do we doubt the kindness of her heart. Her clinic is in a very poor part of Glasgow, and probably does more good than harm to the unfortunates who attend it. But that clinic is her hobby — she does not live by what it pays. We who earn our livings by the stethoscope and scalpel should smile tolerantly on her Utopian schemes, and return to our mundane task of healing the sick.

The Lancet

Dr. McCandless wants the world to stop being a battlefield and become a sanatorium where everybody takes a turn of being doctor and patient, as in a children’s game. It is surely obvious that in such a world the only thing to flourish would be — disease!

The Scots Observer

From 1900 onwards Dr. Vic (as the papers started calling her) was an active suffragette, and her work for the movement can be read in histories of it. The war of 1914 shocked her in a way from which she never recovered. She wanted working people and the soldiers to end it by going on strike, but her two youngest sons joined the army almost at once and were killed on the Somme soon after. She split with the Fabians because of what she called “their lukewarm tolerance of criminal carnage”, and appeared on platforms with Keir Hardie, Jimmy Maxton, John Maclean and other Clydeside Socialists (and advocates of Scottish home rule) who opposed the war. She quarrelled with Baxter, her eldest son, who supported the war effort from his desk in the Department of Imperial Statistics. In a letter to Patrick Geddes she wrote:

Baxter performs miracles of falsification, proving that the huge number being killed and maimed in France is less horrifying than the publicity suggests, since it contains many thousands who would have been killed and maimed by accidents in peace time. This comforts the shareholders and profiteers who draw unearned incomes from our war industry. It means that millions of dead young soldiers will soon be as forgotten as those who die in factory and road accidents.

It is ironical that Baxter McCandless died without issue in 1919 at the age of twenty-seven, knocked down by a Paris taxi-cab while attending Lloyd George to the Versailles peace conference.

Like many at that time she thought long and hard about why the world’s richest nations — nations who had prided themselves on being the most civilized because the most industrialized — had just fought the biggest and cruellest war in history. What puzzled her was why millions of men who, taken singly were neither bloodthirsty or stupid (she was thinking of her sons) had obeyed governments which ordered them to kill and be killed to such a suicidal extent. She accepted Tolstoy’s view that human animals are prone to epidemics of insanity, like many thousands of Frenchmen going into Russia with Napoleon and dying there, when their country would have been no better off if they had conquered it. However, being a doctor she knew epidemics can be prevented if the causes are discovered. She knew that people who live and work in overcrowded quarters are as liable to epidemics of belligerence as any overcrowded creatures, but at least a quarter of those who fought and died in the Great War were prosperous with spacious homes, and to this class belonged nearly all who had ordered and officered the carnage. She decided that although the Great War had been started by the same national and commercial rivalries which had caused the British wars with France, Spain, Holland, France, the United States and France, she believed the men fighting and supporting it had succumbed to “an epidemic of suicidal obedience” because bad mothering and fathering had left most of them with a heartfelt belief that their lives were valueless:

What men who respected their bodies could bear to queue naked in rows and have their genitals examined by another clothed man? What man who respected his mind could bear to make money by doing such a thing? Yet the medical inspection was nothing but baptism into the religion of man-killing, in which the best soldier was he who regarded his own body as the least sensitive machine — not even his own machine, but a machine steered by remote controllers. My two youngest sons willingly became such machines and let their beautiful bodies be mangled and crushed into mud. My oldest made his mind, not his body part of the war machine. I now think him as much a victim of self-disrespect as his brothers. Yet for the first ten years of their lives these three young men lived in a clean spacious home and were shaped by the care and example of loving, educated and adventurous parents. I was (as I am) a radical Socialist. My husband was a Liberal. Our boys were all preparing to be peaceful professional Scottish public servants, using the most humane modern ideas to tackle what we knew to be the great task of the twentieth century — to make a Britain where everyone has a good clean home and is well paid for useful work. Yet when war was declared my three boys AT ONCE behaved like sons of an English fox-hunting Tory. They knew I thought this was wicked behaviour. Why did they feel it was right? I refuse to seek the answer in the inherent depravity of human nature or the human male. Nor can I blame the militaristic histories they were taught at school, because that was certainly counteracted by the reading and teaching they got at home. I am forced to seek the reason in myself. For the first six or seven years of their lives I had total power over these boys, for I had plenty of money and a loving husband. Yet I did not give them the self-respect to resist that epidemic of self-abasement which was the 14–18 war. How did I fail? If I cannot find the root of the illness in myself I am no use to others. But I have found it. Please read on.

The previous passage summarizes and quotes from the introduction to a booklet she published in 1920 at her own expense: A Loving Economy — A Mother’s Recipe for the End of All National and Class Warfare. On the title-page is also printed: The Godwin Baxter Peace Press, Volume I. There never was a second volume. It received no serious attention although she posted copies to the leaders and secretaries of all the British trade union branches, in envelopes with and your Wife written after the names of the men, with and your Husband after the few women. She sent it to every doctor, clergyman, soldier, writer, civil servant and member of parliament in Who’s Who. She also posted two thousand copies to equivalent people in North America, but they were seized and burned by the United States customs. In a letter to George Bernard Shaw, who was then on holiday in Italy, Beatrice Webb wrote: