GreatYarmouth History front page
THIS BOOK has now been totally digitised and illustrated and the next thirty years added and now available as the ebook One Hundred years of General Practice – Go to shop to download.
Preface
I started to write this book had least 10 years ago when I had completed 40 years of general practice in Yarmouth. I have now, in 1957, completely rewritten it and brought it up to date. I feel that the changes that have taken place in living conditions and in the practice of medicine are so revolutionary that there must be many experiences in my 50 years in practice that are worth recording.
While my anecdotes are chiefly medical and surgical, I have endeavoured to record them so that they can be easily understood by lay readers.
I have had to rely on a retentive memory and, probably, on an unusual attitude to record visually the scenes and persons I have described.
I have done my best to avoid any exaggeration and embroidery. If I could draw and paint, I am sure that I could, even now, portray "Dicky" Bird - the quaintest and most interesting (I nearly wrote loveable) character that I have ever met.
I'm thinking it was Alexander Pope who said, "the proper study for mankind is man." if he was right then I am sure that there is now a better at school for that's Daddy than in general practice. Pope generalised: the study of women is more intriguing still. I think I might fairly call myself a philosopher.
May I be permitted to end our preface with these lines?
"And I who oft have burnt the midnight oil.
And spent long days and nights, for years, in toil,
To build of it at length a knowledge ripe,
My final fate to fertilise the soil."
Chapter 1
I was born at Exeter on 20th March, 1884, at St. Leonard's lawn in St. Leonard's parish and was more or less inevitably christened Leonard.
In my youth I wanted to go on the stage, but this was sternly vetoed by my father, who said I could be a barrister or a doctor: although he rather urged me to make a use of his fairly large interests in the National Provincial Bank and take up banking as a career.
Possibly that fact that both my grandfathers and the three mates of my paternal grandfather's family had all being doctors influenced me to choose to be a doctor. My father had long before my birth given up practising, as his first wife objected to being left too much alone. He decided to send me to Cambridge and at the age of 17 I duly passed my exams and was entered as an undergraduate at Pembroke College.
My Cambridge career would have little in it to interest present-day readers, and I will dwell on it lightly.
Pembroke, in the three years I was up there, had three Masters; Dr Searle, Sir Gabriel Stokes and Dr Mason.
Dr. Searle's eldest son was a contemporary of mine. He later achieved fame in the "Helen of Troy" case, a soubriquet given to his a "romance" with a tailors cutters wife by the gutter press. I'm afraid in my time Charles' ideas of work were rather lax. I remember one afternoon we had rather exhausted the local fishing places, so he took me to a friend's water at Shelford. I caught a pike, which Charles presented to the owner of the water. He was very angry at our poaching!
Charles had an uncle who lived at some distance from Cambridge. A long train journey away. This uncle had a fish pond which he wanted to stock with pike. Charles volunteered to to do this and we walked to a friend's river some four miles away with our fishing rods some live bait and a sack. We were quite successful in our enterprise. I got a six pounder and another pike about 4 lb in weight. With two others our catch weighed over a stone. We marched wearily home and the catch was duly stored in the family bath. They were kept there for two or three days while we got in touch with our uncle and arranged to transport them. One of the pike jumped out of the bath and was rescued while still alive. Eventually the fish left by train in charge of the guard in a tank with lumps of cotton-wool to aerate the water. The guard was armed with a bicycle pump to try to keep the pike alive by blowing air into the water. One of the pike swallowed the cotton wool and died but three of them were successfully transported and later we heard of that there were young pike in their pond so we must have provided a breeding pair.
A few other reminiscences from that time may prove of interest. Our chemistry professor was a very senile Don, well advanced in age whose experiments were sometimes followed by unforeseen results. In those days a professor would hold his professorship even until he died. This was of course very unfair to his juniors and to the students. The junior he had was a more awe inspiring person. I can still see him standing at his bench in front of some 40 students seated on their tiered benches with the ladies from Girton and Newnham colleges in the front row, a dark saturnine man with a black moustache and heavy eyebrows who never smiled. On the occasion that I remember he was making nitroglycerine, and after carefully explaining that he had enough in his flask to blow up the whole laboratory and that it was very unstable if shaken too violently or heated or cooled too rapidly, he proceeded to shake heat and cool with unbecoming vigour and haste. (The outcome is not stated!)
two other incidents I remember. In one a young man at from Jesus College boiled nitric acid too rapidly and the flask burst and very fortunately he was to escape unhurt but his face was stained a rich yellow colour for some time which caused considerable interest at the ensuing May races. On another occasion we were making Hydro cyanic Acid and had been warned against inhaling the gas (prussic Acid). I inhaled enough to choke me and quietly left the lab thinking I was about to die but at least I was able to return unashamed.
A most impressive experiment we did in heat and light seems worth recording. Imagine a long bench with to concave reflectors and some 12 to 20 feet apart at their predetermined focal points were a match and a candle. The demonstrator explained that if he lit the candle its rays would be carried from the reflector to the distant reflector and would ignite the match. He lit it and almost immediately the match flamed.
An example occurs to me of the imbecile prudery of some people. We were dissecting rabbits in the laboratory in preparation for the biology examinations. All of a sudden there was a buzz of excitement and a rush to the far end of the room. Someone had opened up a pregnant Rabbit. My companion and I joined the movement any to be shooed back and told we were dirty minded young brutes by a senior demonstrator, who ought to have been only too ready to show us the reproductive organs functioning.
I spent three happy but not too profitable years at Cambridge, and went down with a BA degree which I had acquired by taking the general exams in a host of subjects to including Paley's evidence of Christianity", which had only this in common, that they had nothing whatever to do with the study of medicine. I took my special exam in chemistry and passed my 1st M.B. I had in addition dissected an arm and a leg, dissected picked frogs, learnt to Cox an eight, also to fish standing up in a Canada canoe, this although I could not swim. With regard to the coxing, I weighed only 11 stone Eleven pounds when I went up to Cambridge and made a very good showing in the college races, and was given the first Lent boat. Unfortunately I was reprimanded unjustly by other boat's captain and answered back and was demoted.
In the races, Pembroke College had four bad boats ahead of them and four good ones behind. The first night they were overlapping Caius College at grassy corner and our cox had only to hold on and let the wash of their boat bring his boat round. Instead he shot prematurely and missed, went right across the river and was rowed down by Lady Margaret's boat. Which until his blunder had not gained on our (Pembroke) boat. I might have made the same mistake. Pembroke went down every night. Lady Margaret got their "oars" by making a bump every night.
I left Cambridge at the end of the May term 1904, and in June started work at St Mary's Hospital Paddington. Here I found the atmosphere entirely different from Cambridge. Work was the order of the day and the anatomy and physiological laboratories were open practically all the year instead of the three eight-week Cambridge terms. We also came into a new and intimate touch with our teachers. Under this very inspiring regime I worked very hard for six months and by Christmas felt that I could go up for my second and the exam in anatomy and physiology with a fair prospect of success.
Dr Ley's experiences in the first World War should not be missed. I have also added illustrations.