Later notes from a backblocks hospital

Smith, G. M. (George McCall), Reed, Wellington, N.Z., 1949

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The original publication details are as follows:

Title: Later notes from a backblocks hospital

Author: Smith, G. M. (George McCall)

Published: Reed, Wellington, N.Z., 1949

ABOUT THIS BOOK

This is a collection of notes on various subjects taken from the note books of a New Zealand country surgeon.

It is Dr. Smith’s book and was written the year before he left Hokianga, where he had worked for 35 years.

“I left Hokianga,” he says, “to increase my satisfaction, by refusing bureaucracy.”

L If you liked his previous books, Jyou will like this one. It's the |pame sort of a book with the same [notions as before, but now more abg|ac£ and “transcending in f i:h of unityr\ ...

JaTnt> 'lndie contributes an Introduction ancl there are repro' duction of paintings and line draw' ings by Olivia Spencer Bower.

DEDICATION

To my brother Bryce in Scotland, who likes my havers, or so he says; and my grandson Bill on my knee, who seems to like having a crack about Whitehead, but can’t say so just yet.

Later Notes from a Backblocks Hospital

LATER NOTES from a BACKBLOCKS HOSPITAL

by G. M. SMITH

NEW ZEALAND

A. H. & A. W. REED

WELLINGTON

A. H. A. W. REED

182 Wakefield Street

Wellington, N.Z.

December, 1949

Printed and bound by Hutcheson,

Bowman and Stewart Ltd., Tory

Street, Wellington

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Dr. Graham Kemble'Welsh helped me in the preparation of this book. He wrote a considerable portion of the chapter on Tuberculosis and typed the whole manuscript. I am much indebted to him.

Olivia Spencer Bower did the illustrations. She took infinite pains to interpret, by her drawings, my notions. I am very grateful to her.

G. M. Smith

CONTENTS

Introduction by James Bridie 9

Preface 13

PART ONE

Specialism 15

The Dogma of Rest 27

Tuberculosis Clinics 34

Room 45

Tuberculosis 54

Political Tuberculosis 68

Tuberculosis in Animals 72

Summary on Specialists 78

Organic Philosophy 81

Mackenzie of Tekapo 89

Nurses in a Co-operative Clinic Medical Service 96

PART TWO

Grace Notes III

ILLUSTRATIONS

Dedication Frontispiece

Rawene Facing page 44

Whitehead 45

Coffee 108

Process and Reality 125

LINE DRAWINGS

Mackenzie of Tekapo 91

Grace Notes 111

Prehensions 119

Cosmology 123

A Vicious Dualism 135

Time 160

Process 169

Security 178

Organism 195

INTRODUCTION

J KNOW practically nothing about New Zealand, though I quarrelled for six weeks with a noble old Doctor from that country during the First Battle of the Somme. On the other hand, I know a great deal about Doctors and quite a little about the ideas of one Scotch Doctor who is working in a place called Hokianga in the far Antipodes.

The first impression one gets from studying those ideas is that Smith is the Last of the Empirics. In the play. Dr. KnocJ{, a character is asked how he managed to pass him' self off as a Doctor without any qualifications whatever. He replies, “By the usual method: trial and error.” That may give you some idea of what is meant by an Empiric. Take them by and large, Empirics have never been reckoned as Scientists. It is here that our first impression of Smith falls down. He is a Scientist.

Science is not, as you might suppose, a rite carried out by a priesthood in spectacles and long white coats in a Holy of Holies of glass and stainless steel. It is a way of looking at things. It is a reasonable way of looking at things with the purpose (if it has any purpose) of manipulating those things in the best possible way. The least trace of Mumbojumbo or priestly gravity kills Science; for Science is Commonsense and nothing more. The greatest Scientists have always been the most sensible men of their period and field of activity. We are apt to forget this.

When the newspapers say, “Science says this and Science says that,” they are talking nonsense. What they mean is that one of Science’s numerous hangers'On has filched some half-chewed viand from a Scientist’s platter and is throwing it to the Public to increase his own notoriety or importance. Scientists sometimes talk, though Science is dumb. Sometimes they talk well and sometimes they don’t.

9

INTRODUCTION

For Scientists are practical men and the practical man is seldom a good talker.

Smith happens to be a good talker —in print at any rate —I don’t know the man. All through his pages we hear him shouting and cajoling; persuading and jeering; thumping on the table; sweetly reasonable, comic and downright rude by turns. He has, above all, something to say.

What is he saying? Among other things he is saying that Modern Medicine, thanks to the routine repetition of jargon, the accretion of superstition, the incubus of the big drug houses, politics, bureacracy, and sheer lazy-minded' ness, has accumulated a pyramid of rubbish that must be cleared away if the Sick are to be properly looked after.

He is not a red revolutionary. He knows that Medicine must progress carefully and painstakingly, like the page of King Wenceslaus, in the footsteps of its master science, Biology. That is to say he is a scientific Tory. His attack on the accumulated raffle is not intended to be destructive. Wherever he clears a space he puts something in it. What he puts in it is mainly material tested by his own experience. In the welter of professional and nomprofessional nonsense in which medicine is wallowing, one’s own experience is almost the only safe guide. For that very reason Smith puts himself at some disadvantage. If one’s own experience is the only safe guide one must not trust blindly to another man’s experience—even Smith’s.

I used to be a doctor, but I’m not, thank God, one now. If I were still a doctor I hope I would use Smith’s approach and, because I was using it, question every single one of his methods and conclusions. As it is, I have the general inv pression that where they are at odds with common medical opinion they are in the right and common medical opinion is wrong. Modem medicine is such an enormous thing that nobody can find his way through it without an instinct for what to reject. Smith’s instinct seems to me sound. In the easier matter of selection he seems to me sound too. He has

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INTRODUCTION

as useful a nose for what is good as for what is bad. He is no fusty old reactionary refusing to look at anything new because it is new. Indeed there are very few important modem discoveries that he has not taken into use and mentioned in his book.

What else has he got to say? He tells us that the horrid system of a row of little shops with brass plates in front of them pretending to sell a vague commodity called Health and in cutthroat competition with one another is a bad system. He tells us that the new system of transforming the doctor into a minor official under the control of papeneating authorities and departments is no better. To either of these systems he prefers team work by welhtrained doctors and nurses who know what they are doing. To the patient this must appear reasonable. To the taxpayer it must appear more reasonable still, for, curiously enough, the cost to the community is only a fraction of that of either of the other two systems.

Finally, he is one of the few doctors who talks like a gentleman about nurses. A modem nurse is as highly trained a professional person as a modern doctor. She is paid the wages of a lavatory attendant and given the social status of an inmate of a Victorian workhouse. There is a conspiracy among hospital governors, Government departments, the medical profession and her own seniors to prevent her play' ing her proper part in the social life of her time. Smith calls the bluff of that conspiracy and more power to him.

JAMES BRIDIE.

PREFACE

A PREFACE is a prudent presumption.

Dean Swift once said that Dryden had often said to him in confidence that the World would never have suspected him to be so great a poet if he had not assured them so frequently in his Prefaces that it was impossible they could either doubt or forget it.

And Swift might have agreed for he wrote in a preface “It was to supply such momentous Defects that I have been prevailed on after long Solicitation, to take Pen in Hand, and I venture to Promise, the Judicious Reader shall find nothing neglected here, that can be of use upon any Emergency of Life.”

A friend, writing me the other day, said, “What on earth are you going to write about now? Your last book had just about everything in it.” I replied, “The same things, of course.”

I believe that every man is bom with his peculiar bees in his bonnet. If he keeps alive (as distinct from merely going on living) they go on buzzing. His bees are always the same bees; but if he’s lucky, they put up a queen from time to time, and some of them hive off and take up their abode in somebody else’s bonnet. All I ask of my judicious readers is that .they shall not keep their bonnePstrings tied too tightly.

And we are trite and iterate, iterate, iterate, just as Bees do. For we take a few simple notions from our usings and musings, notions which to our taste appear fundamental (but aren’t really), hammer and compound them to round' ness by continuous mixing and rolling, and finish up where we began, hoping we and you may pick up something new -—usually by dropping something old —as we knock the familiar condiments around.

That, I believe, is the philosophical method—l know it’s

IJ

PREFACE

the way of Kitchen Philosophy. It’s the strange way cooks go about their job and then, stranger still, go away.

Sometimes our bees, to sweeten you, bring quite a palat' able honey; sometimes they just drone with salty, pontifical profundity and deafen you —it all must depend on the weather.

Maybe not all our bees are feathers in our caps, still less the kind of busy bees that feather their own nests.

In truth our book is just a note book of Kitchen Philosophy—so it should be a handy sort of book as a guide for speculating on many events; and if you like that sort of book, this is that sort of book.

If there is any paragraph you can’t understand, attribute that to my profundity and not to your stupidity.

And I believe that every preface ever written, is much the same as ours, and usually longer.

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PART ONE

SPECIALISM

JyfEDICINE today is in one of its rare moods of shifting its outlook, for the mere compulsion of tradition with its archaic nuisances seems to have lost its force.

At a similar moment of imminent change a poet sang—

“There’s a time for peace and a time for war,

This is the time for War.”

So the time has come to medicine at long last, and “the itch is on me, the itch is on me” to join up. And we will fight as partisans, for we are partisans —not being members of any regular forces —free to select our own immediate objective of blowing up our own objectionables.

Before embarking on an expedition of spoliation, the ancient Greeks, a very sensible people who left nothing to chance, consulted their oracles. So being on similar pleasure bound I consulted the oracles —the poets and philosophers—selecting those where each was a bit of both. The first, a poet, was snappy and didactic —

“Do not nail the pansy (pensee) down

Truth is a shifting sand”—he sang.

The second —also a poet —said much the same thing in rather a long'winded dolorous way —

“There is, it seems to us

At best only a limited value

In the knowledge, derived from experience:

The knowledge, improves a pattern, and falsifies

For the pattern is new in every moment

And every moment is a new and shocking

Valuation of all we have been”—he droned.

The third, a philosopher this time, was more precise and concrete than the poets, unusually so for a philosopher, I

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LATER NOTES

thought. “The doctrines,” he said, “which best repay critical examination are those which for the longest period remain unquestioned." He spoke with decision, as if he really knew. That was Professor Whitehead, the most important philosopher'scientist of our time, some say since Plato. All three I accepted as the touch of the spur to go on.

“So why are we frightened

At all, at all?

Perhaps it’s just

Because we’re small

And alone today

And can’t get our way.”

In darkest Africa the Pigmies are the professional elephant hunters, for the bigger folk are frightened of elephants, having more to hurt. As elephants never forget, so they say, the little folk are brave indeed. (But maybe I whistle too much.)

Thus banishing fear —for the moment at least —we decided the times were opportune in lightest New Zealand. That is the explanation of this book, and our first objective will be the tuberculosis experts who advise Governments.

For all my professional life I have appraised, then opposed, the traditional dogmas of the orthodox tuberculosis experts, lumping them as unsophisticated thinkers. But the Wheel of Faith looks as if it had made a complete circle—though unnoticed by most —and I find my heresy in effect has become quite orthodox amongst the scientific workers, and the orthodoxy of yesterday has become the heresy of today in their eyes.

This offensive is really a heresy hunt, and we are in full cry after the new heretics —the old orthodox —the talking and teaching T.B. specialists of Britain who have been responsible for our New Zealand policy. Our New Zealand T.B. specialists have accepted the British policy, a policy 'which we, on the other hand, believe is not consistent with recent knowledge. And for the first time I must confess

i6

SPECIALISM

to a glimmer of doubt about my notions, for I can’t help being suspicious of orthodoxy. That, I imagine, was the real reason of my consulting the oracles before the event, and not after the event, as is my usual habit when in search of ethical justification and moral support if there is too much fuss (a habit I acquired I think from politicians). And this being my first heresy hunt as the hunter, I have employed two assistant detectives —inquisitors I suppose is the right word —trained in that art, and many documenting Watsons (mostly famous men).

In this book we want to talk —I talk, I can’t write —to the politicians, to the general public, to hospital boards, to nurses, to the rank and file of our own profession, to all the world in fact (as all authors do though their book be but a monograph on ingrowing toenails) about specialism; and in particular at those T.B. experts who decide the policy for Governments in the prevention, cure, and alleviation of tuberculosis.

We cast our net widely, with a special variable style of baited mesh, to entice and hold big fish and little fish.

And those who don’t love us, because they don’t know us, can’t accuse us of advertising our professional wares for sale, for we are but lowly paid salaried doctors of a Co'op. clinical medical service, and “a horrible example” some 7/6 doctors say.

And now let me explain why medicine is changing its outlook. There is a schismatic tradition in medicine which is unwholesome. The schism began in the near East-alas! the land to-day of cut-throats and not of magic thoughts—where most schisms did and do still. There the magical intuitive wisdom of the Greeks matured and manifested in Hippocrates of Cos, the Father of medicine (probably Hippocrates is a portmanteau man —a symbol—the knowledge attributed to him was really the combined knowledge of a medical guild). In Alexandria this knowledge came up

i 7

LATER NOTES

against another race with a background of thousands of years of practice as craftsmen and metallurgists. Men with poorer minds, maybe, than the Athenians but with better hands, and more practical. And so the schism in medicine opened, as physicians versus surgeons. In the West we find 2,000 years later the same schism, more decided now and very acrimonious indeed, Physicians versus the Barber Surgeons (more correctly I think Surgeon Barbers, although not so euphonious). The former screamed at the latter “Low cut-throats” with the Barbers hurling back “Vendors of coloured waters and poison potions—poisoners! to a man!”

The Physicians were the prototype of our justly worldfamous New Zealand bottle doctors, now serious challengers of the All Blacks’ priority in fame and privilege. These able fellows, who have succeeded in putting all the people in New Zealand —every mother's son of them —on the bottle. Not one, but two —yes! three bottles, the Minister says, all except the breast-fed babies, gallantly protected by Plunket nurses armed with soothers with a spot of honey on them, up their sleeves, who deny all bottles to their charges.

So the disintegration in Medicine went on and specialism as we know it was bom. For as knowledge and technique increased the specialities increased by crude parthenogenesis. And each polyp, having separated, retired to his special cave, where communication was poor—it always is in caves! Symbiosis existed only under compulsion, for aggressive parasitism was the biological order of the stage. A state of civil —in fact uncivil —war existed on all the borderlands with frequent incidents. “Who was King?” “Who was not King?” here! and there! It was a disorderly age, an age of confusion. The Specialist was debased and derided by some as “the man who knows more and more of less and less, and less and less of more and more” —and exalted and lauded by others.

“Perchance, then, thou art the expert on the leech?”

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SPECIALISM

asked Zarathustra, “and pursuest the leech to rock bottom, thou conscientious one?” “O Zarathustra,” replied he, “that were a vast thing? How should I dare undertake it? The thing whereof I am master and expert is the brain of the leech. That is my world! and it is a world! But forgive me if herein I express my pride, for there I have no equal. There' fore I said, ‘Here I am at home; for its sake I cast all else aside, for its sake all else has grown indifferent to me—and close by my knowledge dwelleth my dense ignorance’.” Thus spake Zarathustra.

He indeed was King of the cave dwellers, though he lived in a swamp with the other leeches. So the practice of medicine tended to become rather a fantastic mosaic. And the people suffered. The general practitioners hated the specialists because their patients bypassed them and so insulted them instead of consulting them. The patients were confused and ignorant though they thought they were wise. For they often rang with blind and dangerous confidence the wrong bells for their particular complaint, and were not told it was the wrong bell and told to ring the right one. All was grist to the mill of some specialists. Of course it was not all like that. There were notable exceptions, but as a general description it is reasonably accurate.

Some of the trouble, possibly the worst trouble, was due to the Pseudo'specialists, who, masquerading as specialists (sometimes having neither the academic qualifications nor technical experience, and sometimes the one without the other), humbugged to live.

“It is our privilege to try to be whatever we wish; but it is serious to pretend to be what we are not” (Ortega y Gasset). The genuine specialists behaved as well as men working for their living in a highly competitive society usually do, but the guild conception was completely absent. I have been greatly indebted to individual specialists all my professional fife, and so have my patients. When in trouble they have come at once, however inconvenient to them'

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LATER NOTES

selves. Their generosity to me has been great and their material reward practically nil—but their emotive reward greater than I was at the time able to express, so here I have attempted to add to it. Specialism was necessary, and still is, and no-one but a fool dare say otherwise —but now in quite a different way. And the leaders of our profession, knowing all that, have at last realised that the reputation of their profession is in such jeopardy as never before.

Now let me explain in some detail the making and habits of a specialist in a way that laymen can understand—fantastic, on purpose, but fundamentally correct. My de' scription is true of many kinds of specialism and not only of medicine. To master a technique, isolation and concentration are essential, for a time, and sometimes for a long time. But having gone as far as one can alone, the specialist should leave his sheltered cave, and come out into open country, and live on the slope of the crater, for the sake of his soul’s wholesomeness. Peering probably, amazed and dazzled at first by strange bright guiding lights, he fears the open field. There he should select new ideas, concrete and abstract, from the outsiders’ knowledge. These he adapts, modifies, and finally adopts, to improve and add to his own special ideas and technique. In exchange he must give to the outsiders —by outsiders I mean nothing derogatory—the benefits of his knowledge, acquired while in his cave; which of course was great, being unique.

That was the way it was supposed to work out, but unfortunately it didn't always in medicine. For men get attached to their caves and dig in, and ultimately through living in the dark, they become dragons—one-eyed monsters —the very worst kind of dragon dangerous to themselves and others.

The pundits of our profession realise that the cat is out of the anaesthetic bag—Aneurin Bevan cut the string —and have spoken out, and told not only the doctors, but the public, that the reign of that kind of specialist—in fact the

20

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SPECIALISM

sovereign reign of all specialism—is either over, or nearly over. They must be dethroned. As the ruling dynasty in our profession they have become effete.

Close in-breeding, their refusal to work in co-operation with those whom they thought beneath them —“outsiders” —their isolation, and their determined denial of the concept of the universality of organism and process has been their undoing. In a word, they couldn’t adapt themselves to a changing environment, the inevitable nemesis of all specialism. They refused to help in the re-integration of medicine, when the time for re-integration had arrived, and like the Pharaohs of Egypt —another famous (or infamous?) dynasty who made just the same mistake for the same reasons —they will survive only in their pyramids, the stately old houses in the streets of the specialists.

The new species of specialist, conceived by driving necessity, is about to be born —less picturesque perhaps but more efficient —and will by contact with more, know more, of more. The old type of specialist in reality “cooked” his results because he mistook the part, his part, for the whole man. He was just a cook, and like the cook “Saki” had trouble with (a good cook as cooks go, and as cooks go, she went) they will go.

The new kind of specialist, by always paying heed to the whole, won’t cook his cases. He will be controlled by the Master Physician, and Master Surgeon, whose duty will be to master, and of course mother, him. Their habitat will be the Health Clinics, cohabiting with the rank and file of doctors. Their selection, education, and training—above all their results —will be controlled as well as their fees. The Pseudcespecialist will disappear. The new State medical service of England is now functioning and the status of the specialist is as I have roughly sketched. The controlling bodies are composite boards of medical men and laymen, the doctors being in the majority. The absurdity of hospital boards controlling—yes! sometimes actually directing—

LATER NOTES

medical men in their medical work, is fast drawing to a close even in New Zealand, I believe. Life may be less exciting, especially in Auckland, but it will be safer.

But I pause —“Are we like madmen preaching to locked faces?” Do I hear a muttering something like what Roy Campbell, the South African poet, said—

“We like the quiet restraint with which you write,

Yes! you use the snaffle and the curb'all right-

But where's the bloody horse?”

Well, “the bloody horse” is the T.B. specialist, our chosen objective as I have already said. He has been a favourite hobby horse of mine for thirty years. Sometimes I have tried to use the snaffle and the curb all right, and sometimes have used the spur, and sometimes a mighty wallop of the whip behind, but alas! progress has been mostly in reverse, for the brute balked, then backed in the wrong direction, just when I thought I had got him going right. And in spite of Roy Campbell’s impatient poetry, and though I may have tarried rather long on the bath mat, I consider the preliminary was necessary —for in a preliminary, you view the whole field, all the horses being present —you can collect facts that matter and so pick the good horses. That’s the idea, and it’s a sound idea if you could know all about the horses. Unfortunately, Professor Whitehead says, “all facts have ragged edges” and the ragged edges on the race-course are not the “goodness” of the horses, but the “goodness” of the owners, trainers and jockeys—and you sjust know “the whole” to pick the winners. And to be omniscient and win every race you must not only know them as they are, but why they are as they are—the. compleat Philosopher, the compleat detector of winners, the compleat detector of tuberculosis experts’ failure to stay the course. And all that applies yes! to every thing in the world.

I will now tell the story of tuberculosis specialism in Scotland, as I saw it. I was not present at its birth—that

22

SPECIALISM

■was premature —but was present during its adolescence. Tuberculosis dispensaries for the poor in the cities were opened, and sanatoria for the rich in the most God-forgotten high-up, cold, bleak spots of Scotland. They were on the Swiss model, and becoming the financial vogue, soon were as common as distilleries, which had been overbuilt, unfortunately. For the results from the sanatoria in Switzerland had been excellent (I mean the financial results).

Of the audit of medical results, we knew nothing—“ And how his audit stands who knows, save heaven?” That information was curiously delayed in the medical press. But I knew, and I think all the doctors in Edinburgh knew, what Dr. Alex James, consulting physician (a master physician and acknowledged as the authority on diseases of the chest in Edinburgh at that time), thought of the new tuberculosis experts —those men with an inch of fact within a league of Edinburgh conjecture —and their clinics, and sanatoria. He looked on them as “upstarts,” “ignorant fellows,” “hotel keepers,” etc. —and said so to their residents often enough to fix it. He disliked sanatoria intensely, and all the years I knew him, I never heard of him sending a patient to one.

No statistics giving the five-year mortality results were ever published from sanatoria in those days. (Are they now?) Of course we read blurbs, masquerading as results, but having no resemblance whatsoever to what we mean now by statistical investigation. It was years before we got that (and then not from the superintendents of sanatoria), and when we did they were bad, very bad indeed, and more than confirmed what Dr. James had told us.

I had learnt a good deal from my own experience in practice, and a month in charge of a sanatorium in Scotland. I think that was the saddest month of medical practice in my life. I felt —in fact I was quite certain—that the poor unfortunate inmates were being humbugged, and I could do

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LATER NOTES

nothing for them, not even tell them the truth, which might have helped a few to escape.

Today, of course, sanatoria have changed. The Spartan days in most are over- —and in New Zealand anyway, the patients in our Government sanatoria are made as comfort' able as is humanely possible, I am certain of that. That’s not what’s wrong with them! It’s their results.

Tuberculosis experts got away to a bad start in Scot' land and they have never caught up. They couldn’t, for they chased a phantom. So “they still smell of their mother’s milk” as the Chinese say. They have never been popular. Doctors in their idle moments, if pens were idle too, have never been able to leave either alone. If you want to really know about sanatoriums —that is to really taste their flavour, short of being an inmate, and I could never advise that —I advise you to read Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. It is about a Swiss sanatorium —but it’s about every sanatorium. It was written twenty'three years ago —but it was written today.

A private institution —in that unlike ours in New Zea' land —but exactly the same in other ways. Treatment was the same, pneumothorax being the “mode” as today, and the results were the same —bad! I confess I never finished the book. It was all so horrible, just too realistic. But it is a famous novel, written by a famous man —a good man, a philosopher—and one who has been, and I notice still is, playing an important part in world politics as a leading Socialist. I know Thomas Mann was a hero, almost a saint I thought, in our Mr. Fraser’s eyes. He once told me so. I don’t believe he has changed his faith, for Mr. Fraser is not “a Peter” —he who denied the greatest of all and was made a Saint, afterwards. No man with the spirit and the muck of the Black Isle still in his bones and between his toes, could be that sort of man. I urge all socialist members of Parlia' ment to read the Magic Mountain. Mr. Fraser I feel

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SPECIALISM

certain has, but I want him to read it again, before the next debate on Tuberculosis in the House. It is a long book — two volumes —but they should have plenty of time to spare when not sitting—“when the cows are out,” as the farmers say up North.

I have not suggested that the Tory members should read the “Magic Mountain” —that would have been quite useless for it was written by a socialist (as well tell a lover of Soviet Russia to read George Orwell’s Animal Farm). I had to tell some socialist members it was written by a socialist to get them to read it. That is the tragedy of party politics, of the Tyrannosaurus of the cave, and the crime of T.B. specialists.

The T.B. experts seem at the moment to have suffered a sea change—into something rich and strange. But the sea changes while you’re looking, and only changes to deceive, as every sailor knows. It’s that brokenness that leads to drastic change that’s a lasting change that we must get, and can only get by twisting—in the case of the T.B. specialists their tails should be sufficient—to begin with anyway.

Now having given you a mixed modicum of information of varying relevancy, sufficient to enable you to understand what follows, we now lay our formal indictment against the Tuberculosis Experts who are responsible for the policy of Governments towards that disease.

I believe that we can show that the truth of our case is self-evident, thus requiring no proof. But we will go further and use documentary evidence, largely of an empirical nature, as proof of the rightness of our case, so that even the blind can see we speak the truth.

“I have created the Smith that bloweth the fire of coals and bringeth forth a weapon for his work; and I have created the waster to destroy”—quoth Isaiah, and that being holy writ, we needs must proceed.

LATER NOTES

(i) They have accepted as true the theory of the im' portance of “the massive dose” of infection, and proceeded accordingly.

(2) They have exaggerated the practical significance of the contagiousness of the disease, in prevention of the disease.

(3) They have ignored, and some have denied, the vastly greater significance of the genetic lack of resistance as a determinant in prognosis.

(4) They have accepted the archaic Hippocratic belief in the supreme efficacy of Rest, as the fundamental basis of all treatment.

(5) Their absolute belief, declared ad nauseam in the public press and platform, of the diagnostic infallibility of X-rays, as commonly used, has been childish and audacious.

(6) They have exaggerated the value of sanatoria, and Tuberculosis Clinics, and misled public bodies and the general public.

(7) They have paid but lip service in the advocacy of the far greater importance of acquired environmental resistance —of good food, good houses and good work.

(8) They have, by misleading Governments, wasted the people’s substance. They have even sometimes turned their antidotes to bane, and done more harm than good.

(9) They have supped of the intellectual folly of solipsism, swallowing their own tails (tales) like serpents.

(10) They have given names to things, then acted as if they understood those things, and so misled the people.

(12) They are not scientists, they are not philosophers.

(13) They are business men, in private practise.

We will try to shoo these birds off the grass, with solid bricks of common sense.

26

THE DOGMA OF REST

THE DOGMA OF REST

'JTJBERCULOSIS experts, accepting the archaic teachings of Hippocrates on rest, are still wrapt in the confusion of accepting superficial aspects, as fundamental principles of the widest generality, in the treatment of tuberculosis. The dogma was swallowed with greater avidity than ever before —the disciples proving more faithful even than their master —a common habit of disciples. Now, if rest is the funda' mental in treatment of phthisis (disease of the lungs), why is it that sanatoria where it has been practised with the greatest pertinacity cannot show results that prove the efficacy of rest, in the long run? For an axiom that is still accepted and taught as an axiom by the schools is, “if rest does not succeed, then give more rest”—and so on till the final rest. That comes inevitably, in spite of rest.

In the New Zealand Herald, June 10, 1947, I read the opinion of a New Zealand expert. “Far transcending climate was the factor of lung rest and facilities for its complete and continuous application.” The only possible explanation that I can conjure up is that sanatorium treatment is in some other way so bad for phthisis, that the patient is unable to stand up to the double foe of sanatorium plus the tubercle bacillus, and the healing power of rest is cancelled out. And as that explanation—tbe best I can offer them —is not likely to be fostered by sanatorium superintendents, we can, like them, ignore it and need not argue it for them.

And why is it that the most fixed part of the lung—the part that gets most rest —succumbs so much more often to the attentions of the tubercle bacillus than the free parts of the lung that get so much less rest? Is the T.B. just a fool? Unfortunately we can’t ask him what he thinks about it, but I imagine his ideas on rest are more like mine than the experts', and like me pooh-poohs it as the fundamental determinant. But suppose a New Zealand T.B. could speak. I imagine he might say something like this—

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“You New Zealanders! Some of you live in Wellington where it is always blowing cold air, and there is little rest, but more of you live in Auckland, where there is less blowing, and the air is hot, and there is more rest. And you live and prosper as parasites on the country people, equally well in both cities. Well! we T.B. are just the same as you, rest does not decide our habitat or our welfare for we, like you, are adaptable parasites. You humans! you don’t understand us yet —not even those you employ to hunt us and call comically T.B. experts —trying to find out what harms and what arms us.”

No! the T.B. are not fools. They know something even the T.B. experts don’t know yet —that something which matters so much to us —why some humans taste good and some taste bad to the T.B.

Having interviewed the loquacious T.B. and heard his point of view, let us return to the human point of view. (By the way, my imaginary conversation with a T.B. is in tune with the modern notion of antibiotics —e.g., the sulphonamides and penicillin—a notion developed by consideration of the organism’s point of view.)

Does rest in a sanatorium, or anywhere else in bed, really rest the lungs any more than many of our less strenuous occupations in which the lung movements are hardly increased or the heart rate accelerated? Is rest really real? I don’t believe it, for I can’t believe it. It is true that in many modem sanatoria the patients are allowed to do almost as they please, and that I think is a very great improvement. Probably the experts would deny that rest in bed is now their first consideration, and assent that air-collapse treatment has completely outmoded the bed rest treatment, in a large and rapidly increasing range of cases. But what is that but rest? Not quite so much rest as the layman and some T.B. experts lead us to believe, for the air still enters the bronchi, and the collapsed lung moves. In an X-ray the lung

THE DOGMA OF REST

looks still and is still when the photo is taken —but only then.

The same mistake is made in other regions of the body where we are apt to forget we are photographing moving things not under voluntary control and that the shadows revealed are really moving shadows, not stationary ones. Now let us review tuberculosis in other parts of the body—still remembering the axiom of the T.B. experts: “Complete and continuous application of rest.” The mastoid bone is a common site for T.B. and it is a very restful bone anatomically. Glands in many parts of the body are very restful —nevertheless T.B. invades them and breaks them down in spite of the fact that the odds on the factor of rest are all in favour of the man and against the T.B. —if our experts are to be believed. Now, what is the truth about T.B. in bones? We see a great deal of bone tuberculosis amongst the Maoris and have seen it for a long time. We have seen a great deal of healed tuberculosis that was rested only when it was too painful to move. No doctor, let alone an expert, ever had anything to do with its treatment.

The Maoris probably treated it with “leaves” to begin with —but only to begin with, for unlike the sealous T.B. experts continuousness of fervour is not a feature of their cures. They soon get tired of it and Nature is left to do or die, unaided. Of course Nature does not always decide in favour of Man —we always seem to take it for granted that Nature is biased in our favour and we forget that T.B.s are just as much in nature as man is, and have their rights. It is a foolish notion, and misleads us.

The anthropocentric delusion, that Man is the only pebble on the beach, should be avoided for many reasons. Possibly the Anthropophobia of T.B. is the result of man’s unwarranted “good conceit of himself,” in thinking that he alone has the gift of choice, whereas he should know, as the T.B. knows, that all life owns in common the right of

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trophism. Still, nature decides in man’s favour far oftener than I was taught to believe, or T.B. experts give her credit for.

Of course doctors, and especially Specialists, are always making out to themselves, and to sick people, that nature is full up to the teeth with anthropophobia—but that is because she would do them virtually out of a job if the sick knew that was not true, and that would never do! I wonder how that knowledge would affect the social security sick benefits funds? I believe it would save, if acted on, at least 75 per cent, of the seven-and'sixpences; and that would be “fair ridiculous.”

I have found out that tubercular bone disease does not require nearly as long or as absolute fixation as we have thought. For example spinal cases with extension in some to begin with, and kept lying on their backs continually—without any other fixation in some, and sandbags in others, with or without some splintage, can be cured in six months. In fact I dare to say that more fixation delays the cure. For these cases are usually just “broken backs” by the time we see them, and you can overfix a fracture sometimes, as surgeons are just beginning to realise.

I see lots of dogs with broken legs, and the rapidity of union if left alone, with often very little permanent dis' ability, amazes me. And upper arm fractures, with little or no fixation, depending on the weight of the limb and the natural balance of muscles unmolested by splints, are best' treated the dogs’ way. These aeroplane splints that a genera' tion of broken arms have been subjected to —due to the flight of imagination of probably one pundit—are absurd in the vast majority of cases. A recent case is illustrative:—-

A bull, a valuable sire—l forget what he cost, but it was a lot judging from the language his owner used over the phone—broke his leg. I saved him with difficulty from a stupid bullet. I visited the bull. He was ordered to be left,

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to hobble around as best he could, in a good paddock—without holes (if there’s a hole in a paddock, a sick beast is sure to find it and end in it) —swinging his broken leg in time to his pace. This year he has ably demonstrated his efficiency as a sire, Nature’s efficiency as an orthopaedic surgeon, and my wisdom in placing my trust in the former, rather than in the latter.

Again, a tuberculous lesion being treated with “rest, long continued and absolute” in a lung—anywhere in fact — often becomes indolent. The war becomes a phoney war, difficult to say which way it is going, as it is not going on at all.

In these cases, if the man ignores the T.B. and what is more difficult, the T.B. specialist (for they are zealous as well as jealous, I declare I think sometimes almost pro T.B.!) and is quite reckless, sometimes that man will win. It is cer' tainly worth “giving it a go.” Robert Louis Stevenson did, and by it he won health. Groeddeck did the same in most diseases, even though the coffin had been ordered, and he claimed successes. Groeddeck’s contributions to medicine have been considerable. I have found that notion more often right than wrong, and besides, there is usually in these cases no alternative but death in a T.B. shelter. In other cases, activity may bring on an acute exacerbation- —a pleurisy for example—-that sometimes, somehow, stimulates the patient’s resistance, and when he recovers from the pleurisy his general improvement is often rapid. And what about the experts’ weary and pathetic cry, “Only bring us the early cases. Let us diagnose them (with our X'rays), then repose them and the results will speak for themselves!” “From the grave” of course is not implied. Well! they get them; the majority of these cases are early cases, for they don’t have many really advanced cases in sanatoria. Now a' days these are treated in shelters, and many of them in their own homes. But the results in these cases that I call early.

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and they used to call early, are still not good. Now they want them earlier and earlier, diagnosed by super-specialists richly endowed with the gift of imagination and aided by super X-rays possessing the same gift—cases that, I swear, are so early as not to have it at all, or if they have they are already cured. These are the cases they call “symptomless,” symptomless to all but them! They are presumptuous, for they don’t know their clinical medicine —that diagnostic, intuitive sense of eye and ear of the good physician, in them has been X-rayed out of existence—it has atrophied from disuse. The “ignorant” G.P.s are fairly safe for they know that a man is not just a pair of lungs needing no trousers. But the T.B. specialist is doing his damnedest to get his hands on these undiagnosed cases, to give their lungs complete and continuous rest by lung collapse. He knows that he could then show better results and I am prepared to agree that he probably could —but I deny, and that denial I don’t qualify with “probably”—that his results would be any better than if they were left alone, but for the helping environmental hands I have described above.

The experts have taken the word “rest” as synonymous with cure for phthisis—but it isn’t. Their doctrine depends on the facts, and their facts on their doctrine. We know no cure for phthisis, a fact the T.B. experts are continually forgetting, though unable to refute. And that is the worst feature of the whole case, for sometimes it spells ruin of a man or a woman’s life. Treating a man who has not T.B. as if he had, makes him a Consumptive, ruins his youth, sometimes his life, through all that horrible word means. I know of such cases, and they increase in number as the mass X-ray folly gains momentum.

Of course a holiday in a sanatorium does some people with nothing much else to do —and with nothing wrong with their lungs but an imaginative diagnosis of something wrong —no harm. I know of such cases too, but the former group

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THE DOGMA OF REST

are very much larger, and I would like to write this in stone that by far the largest majority of people whose lungs are infected with tuberculosis recover unaided by anyone, ex' cept the hands that feed them well, and shelter them well, and the good God who keeps them well by keeping them ignorant of the T.B. in their bodies.

And before summing up my case on Rest, let us approach the case from a purely scientific point of view, thinking of lungs and just lungs, not of man with lungs. Now science starts with observation particularly of coincidences (in time and place) and of resemblances. Then science proceeds to generalise them into a Law, and then we act in accord' ance with that law. So let us analyse the rest cure of Phthisis according to the scientific method and observe the symptoms.

Do haemorrhage and activity coincide? I don’t think so, certainly no more frequently than coincidence could account for. Is T.B. more active in active or restful locations? Again the answer is “NO!” Is there any similar chronic disease that is benefited by completed and continuous rest? I can’t think of one, but even if you could conjure up some observations in support, I am certain you could never conjure up sufficient to generalise them into a law of funda' mental importance that could stand up to the empirical test. And if no scientist could, lacking facts, formulate a law in support of their case, there remains but the confidence man, or a very expensive council, to manufacture a likely case based on unlikely evidence.

Yes! They have talked—

“Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,

This many summers in a sea of glory,’

—but far beyond their depth.

Now, I must not be misunderstood. Some sanatorium beds are required—l know that! They are necessary, for those who can’t work for a living, and have no home of their

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own. And accommodation for advanced cases, under similar circumstances, is required. And some rest is required in some cases that are not advanced. No one is foolish enough to deny that. But I claim that sufficient self-evident facts — that is truths that the layman can appreciate, requiring no proof—are available to show that the rest “complete and continuous” is not the determining factor in deciding whether a man or woman or child dies of Tuberculosis or lives on.

The truth is that the experts have mistaken superficial aspects for fundamental principles, and have sometimes applied them not wisely, but too well. And we believe in activity more than rest, activity of mind as well as body, for boredom kills quickly. We don’t know how to cure phthisis, but we know how to give them more help than the “complete and continuous rest” school do, and we are so much cheaper!

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[ SPEAK of North Auckland. What is done at these clinics? X-ray photographs! Having said that I have said all. But let me elaborate my answer, gathering up all the circumstantial scraps of evidence in search of proof of their efficiency. They classify the cases after they have been diagnosed by X-rays, clinical examination and family history being a mere detail. A few are sent to sanatoria, some of them to shelters and infirmaries for advanced cases, but the vast majority are sent home to fend for themselves, after being given excellent advice on how to live while doing nothing on a pension.

What happens to them then? Just nothing, directly due to the tuberculosis clinics that can alter their ultimate fate! But, indirectly, quite a lot sometimes.

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A man (or woman) who has been earning his livelihood and getting on not so badly, now gets a pension, or social security, and usually in the case of the Maori, spends his life in bed or sitting by the fireside, spends his pension on trips in motor cars and buses and such like, and what’s left over from that on “grocery” food. And he dies quicker and well! I must acknowledge in fairness to the clinics that there is a case for argument there, not on the fact but on whether his dying quicker is a good thing or a bad thing. District Nurses do the best they can, but they can’t enforce suitable food or provide suitable houses or work. There is often no co-opera' tion with the general practitioners who don’t, and won’t in some cases, have anything to do with them. “Not our pigeon!” I’ve heard one say. These cases visit the clinics at fixed intervals. More X-rays, more good advice, etc., but it’s all no good! The Maoris enjoy the trips and the X-ray-ing. (They think it's treatment, just as they used to say to me “Put the horn on it doctor,” meaning the stethoscope and feeling immediate benefit accrue.) They also attend regularly, because they fear for their pension if they didn’t.

Not for one moment do I blame the T.B. officers for the futility inherent in their work. They are administrative officers and not responsible for policy. They carry out the ordered procedures of the “high ups,” and “the powerful never know what it is to misunderstand events.” These clinics are a perfect example of “standardization of error.”

I am certain that these T.B. experts who work in these clinics do their work conscientiously, though it is useless work. And lam also certain that if they could speak their own minds, they would say the same as I do, and say it with more bitterness, for nothing hurts a man of spirit as doing useless work and knowing it. No! the tuberculosis clinics can show no results to justify their existence, as things are. But I think it is preferable to do nothing in the clinics than sometimes to do harm, by adventuring with lung collapse at

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the clinics and then sending the patients home, in defiance of the Hippocratic oath of their profession—“ Above all do no harm.”

Charge 7 of our Indictment reads: “They have paid but lip service in the advocacy of the far greater importance of acquired environmental resistance —good food, good houses and good work.”

Let it be written —A NeoTiippocratic Prescription suit' able for a case of Tuberculosis in Christchurch, 1949:

“Go up into the mountains of the Mackenzie Country, and if you can take a good cow with you, that would be a good thing to do. Drink the cow’s milk morning, noon and night and between whiles if she is milking well. Eat the flesh of the wild ‘moutons’ of the mountains thrice daily—you can’t catch them but you can shoot them. They won’t be missed in the Mackenzie Country for all the sheep there were once stolen sheep. Merino mutton is prime for phthisis.

“Build yourself a house with your own hands, and frorr your own plans, for your own life.

“When you have built your house, then plant your garden all in potatoes, beans and peas. These are the only vegetables worth eating as food —all others are but pigs’ food which the pig will only eat if he can’t get potatoes, beans and peas. If you have a surplus of milk, merino, potatoes, beans and peas, give them to the pig, then kill the pig and eat him. By doing this you will get all the good of your surplus in a concentrated tasty essence of roast pork, a food natural and favourable to the carnivorous metabolism of our species.

“Having arranged your food, shelter, and conveniences, you must now get suitable work, not only to pay for the house, the cow and the pig, but for the good of your soul. So hire yourself out to a rundiolder as a musterer of merinos, demanding of course, as you are a hard'working go-slow New Zealander of today, higher than the highest possible

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wages from the ruivholder, and if he demurs strike at the busy season.

“Then erect a ‘Poison’ notice. I notice they’re always after poisoning something in the sheep country. If it’s not rabbits, it’s dogs. If it’s neither it’s socialists. I often hear, on the air, a man from there spraying poison in the House for all socialists. It would seem they want to exterminate them (which by the way is more than they want to do for their own rabbits which often pay better than the merinos, though they don’t let on about that). Let your poison notice read —

“Poison Laid. —For all doctors trespassing in search of 7/6 —Doctors who ta\e it are certain to die, But some, unli\e Socrates, are Hemlock shy. These will be shot without asking why?”

(Signed) Hippocrates of Cos.

Of course Hippocrates himself would approve of the bit about poisoning or shooting all poacher doctors, he being a doctor himself, and a member of the G.M.A., from the patients’ point of view and not the doctors’. But lam not so sure if he would like the bit about the big wages, for in his day masters didn’t bother about wages, and the run'holders would like to be like that again, as they used to be.

Now, I have itemised and carefully explained in detail the purpose of all the various ingredients in the NeD'Kippcr cratic prescription, and other doctors don’t in their prescriptions.

It seems to me that in a democratic country people should know what they are drinking, and I think that if they really did know, they might drink less humbug, and more milk.

Still I can safely claim there is more sense in this non' sense prescription than in most prescriptions. I have never seen more robust'looking men, women and children than in the Mackenzie Country. It must be magnificent country for early cases of tuberculosis.

Another district which should be mentioned is Taupo

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It is flat mountain and better I would imagine for the cow than the Mackenzie Country. If you don’t mind living on the slopes of a crater, or dodging blow-holes, and their professional boosters (whose survival from murderous assault I can never understand), and skinning tourists instead of rabbits as in the Mackenzie Country, and an occasional anticipatory conditioning of fire, dust and ashes in this life, then I think Taupo would be an excellent place for a tubercular patient.

But I know better, and love better, a far better place than either the Mackenzie Country or Taupo for phthisis, especially the more advanced cases. It is true that we in North Auckland are weak in mountains, but we’re rich in more valuable things. It is never really cold, so you can always feel comfortable out of doors, though perhaps in a bushman’s coat. And though it is true it does rain sometimes, in a mild determined sort of way, it’s never the wild distracted angry cold rain, or sleet, or snow of the Mackenzie Country or dust and ashes of Taupo. And it’s not a God-forsaken country, it’s a Garden of Eden, if Adams and Eves care to cultivate it, and stick to the rules. We have plenty of suitable work for all who care to work. We have no sanatoria, nor do we want them, because we don’t need them.

The truth is, our Europeans don’t die of phthisis in Hokianga if they stay here, but will quite easily if they leave here. They may have it, a few I know have, but they don’t die of phthisis. They live, and work, then die as others do, of other things—mostly old age —but not, I repeat, of Tuberculosis.

Since I came here we have had perhaps two adult cases die of phthisis, both newcomers and both advanced cases when they arrived. And I know of only one man, a recent case, belonging to old Hokianga families who died of phthisis and who had spent most of his life here. I have lived here

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thirty-three years and the story before I came is the same as mine. In the other Northern counties I believe the story is much the same. But amongst the Maoris tuberculosis is very common and a common cause of death. What is the explanation?

We know that tuberculosis amongst the Maoris is, compared to that in the Europeans, a new disease. Nature has had too little time to carry out the biological technique of killing off these people who have in their genetic makeup little resistance to tuberculosis, which is probably (but it may not be!) the same as a susceptibility to the disease. We know that there are in our midst susceptible families. We have watched them long enough to see them being gradually exterminated, whilst the resistant families are swarming. Another factor is that the Maoris have not had long enough to acquire resistance developed from long-continued haphazard inoculation with living T.B.—a method copied by health authorities using a strain of T.B. of known virulence, and injected in a measured dose into children. This has been largely done in Europe, with, they say, excellent results. I have always thought it should be done amongst the Maoris, but so far my efforts to carry it out have been in vain. There are difficulties I know, but I also know they could be overcome. That would be a job that our T.B. experts could do here, and I think a worthwhile one.

The Maori as a virgin field for T.B. is just the same as an isolated island of primitive people which has proved to be a virgin field for measles, scarlet fever, etc., etc., resulting in an almost decimating death rate. Repeated epidemics make the disease less and less virulent, through acquired resistance, and finally the island becomes as resistant as other lands. And of course the shocking environmental conditions which the Maoris so often subject themselves to, play an important part in their lack of resistance, due to a racial sense of values that places health very low indeed on their scale. For the

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Maori is not capable racially of “seeing in absence” so that they have no abstract conception of health as the European has. That genetic failure of “seeing in absence” is the fundamental cause of the Maoris’ difficulty in living like the European. Miscegenation is of course the remedy and that today is decreasing, rather than increasing, in the North. These environmental conditions are much worse than they were when I came to Hokianga.

In spite of all that, I believe that tuberculosis has decreased and would gradually become as uncommon —or rather unfatal—amongst the Maoris, as amongst the Pakeha, if we leave the problem to Nature to solve. For Nature will carry out her highly efficient and ruthless (to the individual) biological campaign of killing off all those families who genetically are very poor resisters. That is what has happened in Britain—that is the major reason why the death rate has fallen there, and the same thing will ultimately happen here amongst the Maoris and the Europeans if we don’t interfere, and we can’t interfere with the major cause because we don’t know how to. Of rather we don’t know how to, in a way we want to, for if we applied the method we use in animals and prevented the breeding of genetically susceptible families, we could without a shadow of doubt solve, or nearly solve, the tuberculosis problem. But you can’t very well go about preaching castration as the Bagomil heretics did in the Middle Ages.

Don’t misunderstand me —I think we can even with our knowledge very little greater than in the days of Hippocrates, save many lives. Although the genetic explanation is the major one, it is not the only one. Both explanations are required—Nature and Nurture—to account for all the cases. Nature is Nature’s “pigeon.” We can’t interfere, for the price of victory would be too great, as I have already said. Nurture is man’s “pigeon.” In that role —for though in Nature and part of it —he can often alter it to suit his pur-

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pose. We can't prevent the “bad" Maori families breeding, therefore we can’t prevent the members of these families being infected; but we can prevent a lot of them from dying of the infection. Now-—and this is the crux of the whole question—all the efforts of our public health authorities have been in the direction of preventing infection, and as that is impossible as T.B. is übiquitous (as we explain elsewhere) the obvious thing is to forget about infection and think all the time about how to help the infected. So let us scrap the old line we travelled on for so long that never got us anywhere. Let us make a new line and call it “The good Food, good House, good Work Co-operation Unlimited” —all “take tickets” on it and use them.

Of course the experts have talked a lot about the new line which is the oldest line of all, in a casual, very mildly interested sort of way —but they have got no farther on in the construction of the permanent way, the laying of a few sleepers, which sometimes snore to waken others.

For the T.B. experts only know that man needs a pair of lungs, and forget he is the better off for a pair of trousers, and the latter are easier patched and kept up than the former. Now the Maoris have plenty of money to buy good food, and they don’t even need money to buy it for they mostly can produce it themselves, in abundance. But that does not interest many of them, and again I repeat that good health, which can prevent T.B. getting the upper hand, is measured as if of little value on their scale of values. Still let us see how far we can go towards altering their lives to fit their health.

We can’t possibly alter their way of thinking and make them think of jam tomorrow as well as today, although many who don’t know them, and think they do, think we can. But we can do this, and it is very well worth doing—provide school dinners for all children. For 2/6 a child each week paid out of the family allowances—and the Maoris of our

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district have voluntarily agreed to have the 2/6 deducted from their child allowance —an excellent dinner of meat, kumeras, potatoes, beans and peas, followed by rilysticking suet or milk pudding washed down with malted milk, can be provided. The dining room and cookhouse need be but a shed of simple construction with a concrete floor. Given the materials the Maoris will—they have said so —build the dining rooms themselves. I know they can, and know they would make a good job of it.

Mr. Mason promised the Maoris and myself he would get this done, but the months, then the years, have come and gone, and the plan and the plans are still in the Moa Holes of Wellington. It’s too bad! And the trouble is, that although at the time I started the idea, the Maoris were full of enthusiasm, delay has stilled it.

And about their houses? —the same sorry tale. We designed them and the Maoris agreed that our plans and our ideas were good. They wanted them, not “the Maori De' partment box houses.” The Health Department agreed with us that our type of house, the “Pakanae house,” was excel' lent, and ideal from the health point of view. The Maoris agreed that another 2/6 a week per child from their family allowance should be deducted to pay for the houses. This sum, we were able to show, would provide a sound financial arrangement to all parties.

The Maoris said they would, and could, build them under Government supervision, if the materials were supplied, and again Mr. Mason agreed to have two sample ones built, one on one side of the Hokianga and one on the other, so that all could see them. They have not been built yet, but some more “box ones” have. And at Pangaru when Mr. Mason spoke to the Maoris, he was told of dead Kauris in the forest behind Pangaru that are of no use to others — but sufficient to build all the houses the Maoris need. Why should the Maoris not get that timber out and mill it? A

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simple inexpensive itinerant mill would quickly get the timber ready for use, and when that settlement was provided with timber, then the mill could go on to the next settlement. There is not a settlement in Hokianga where even today there is not sufficient standing Maori timber to build houses.

All the details and costs of these Maori houses have been worked out and the Government know the whole story, told not by amateurs but by experts. And if we —“we” I repeat —don't know enough about working and milling timber and timber houses, no one in New Zealand does because we taught them all —all they know.

So there is so far no “whatness” yet in what the Govern' ment has promised to do about the environmental conditions that exist amongst the Maoris today in the North, promises that would lessen the grip of the T.B. on the throats of the Maoris to quite an appreciable extent. What is the good of the Government “making up their mind that” if they don’t “make up their mind to”? The former does not signify intention so is devoid of practical reason.

But surely we in New Zealand don’t do as the Chinese did,

“Families when a child is born

Want it to be intelligent.

I through intelligence, having wrecked my whole life,

Only hope the baby, will prove ignorant and stupid,

Then he will crown a tranquil life,

By becoming a Cabinet Minister.”

(Waley’s rendering of an ancient Chinese poem.)

And nothing that, in my opinion, could be conducive to the real welfare —that is would make them five happier, better, and longer lives —was asked for by the Maoris when they met Mr. Fraser. And the truth is they are badly led — that is all! The Maoris individually know what they need, and most of them just want what they need; but unfor' tunately that is often not what their leaders want, and that

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is a long story —the short story is “the leaders are self' appointed and lead by misleading.” Fortunately they usually only lead for moments, and not for sustained movements. And the administrative officers of the Government know just as well as we do what the Maori needs; unfortunately they don't grade as soothsayers but as hand'servants. (By the way don’t let me mislead you —the Maoris want new houses, not because they would be good for their health, but like children with new toys, because they are new houses. And they agreed to the school dinner idea because they know their children would like a good dinner, and not because that dinner would help to prevent their children dying of phthisis.)

Now the European has the faculty of abstract thought, that is “thinking in absence,” which is rudimentary in the Maori. The Maori makes jam and eats it all the same day (“While it’s hot!” so a Maori woman said at a meeting we had the other day.) Then the Maori has no jam for tomorrow and tries to bag the Pakeha’s jam. The Pakeha makes jam and puts it in the cupboard and stores it, doling it out after it’s cold in small quantities —how small, especially strawberry, all small boys know —till the next season’s supply becomes available and the cupboard is renewed, the old jam being now exhausted. So he has a modicum of jam today, and a modicum of jam tomorrow, all the result of “thinking in absence,” functioning properly, seeing not only the here' andmow but the there'and'then.

Of course the small Pakeha boy would behave, if allowed to, like the Maori and eat it all today—or burst. So the small boy is kept in the nursery to acquire precision of the symbiosis of “jam today” and “jam tomorrow,” and the Maori adult is still in the nursery with him, learning to accept the Pakeha philosophy of symbiotic fife—in truth their search for God. The small Pakeha will some day

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through training escape his nursery. The Maori never will to the same degree.

The Maori has the gift of wit, which is reason of a kind, and one of the best of reasons, I think, but has not the gift of abstract thought genetically dominant enough to ever make the Pakeha way of life his way of life, except by com' pulsion. It will be an unnatural way for him, for a very long time. And—“the philosophy,” Whitehead says, “of a science is the endeavour to express explicitly those unifying characters, which pervade that complex of thought, and make it to be a science.” And that, I think, just means that to really understand an idea—anything in fact —abstract thought is as necessary as a knowledge of the concrete facts.

ROOM

J USE the word in the sense, inter alia, of space for growth and expansion to turn round in, and to be alone in when you want to be alone. Time is included so it is spacetime correctly speaking, and not space.

I believe that room is a fundamental environmental de' terminant for the well-being of man, beast, cabbages and electrons, anatomically, physiologically and psychologically. I use the word environment in the sense of everything in Nature outside one’s ego, soul, spirit, personality, call it what you may.

Now, as I can’t define it, let me show what I mean by examples. The lungs can’t have well-being if the chest wall does not give them room to expand properly. The liver can’t have well-being if women pull their bellies in as they used to after Queen Victoria did hers, with tight lacing and squeezing her liver out of its room, thus shaping not only her figure but fixing her expression of “not being amused” at all! at all! at her subjects' best efforts. Shoes with no room

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for the toes and built up on stilts result in deformity—corns and bunions —and there is not much well-being living with them. And the mind of man can’t have well-being, if hedged in by dogma, creeds, and compulsions having no room in life —meaning space-time to develop growth by thinking for himself—

“He sold his earth having no use for room,

Harold’s real property is gloom and doom.”

And the spirit of man can’t thrive unless it has room to use its emotive longings as well as its appetitive materialism. A man living from childhood alone without communication —even on a roomy island —is but an animal, because in his house there is no visitors’ room. No room for love! no room for hate! There can be no joy without room, there can be no privacy, there can be no solitariness and therefore no Religion—so Whitehead says, and I am certain that is true.

Our so-called civilization has raped room. It is a pernicious paradox, because you can’t be civil (and that is what civilization really means) without room—pushing and elbowing one another, stinking one another to high heaven physically and mentally. You can see the nakedness and indecency of the rape of room on every hand and in every land, but in some more than in others. Its incidence is roughly in direct ratio to the incidence of our civilization — and that is the same paradox.

Let me present a few specimens from our New Zealand pathological department—our roomless cities, towns, and villages; our private-room-less hospitals; our roomless vertical alcohol drinking bars, and “sitting hard” milk bars; our roomless country picture shows; our roomless stores and factories, our roomless public conveniences—urinals, trains, trams, etc.; our roomless houses, our roomless schools, and roomless school buses. These last three I want to talk about in particular.

By the way, only in the churches is there too much room.

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a fact which should make all men who love man —who believe man is the measure of all things—to think deeply.

OUR ROOMLESS HOUSES

How much room is there in a New Zealand State house? I lived in one recently with two children —a three-month old baby and a boy aged fourteen months. The weather was bad, very bad. Neither of these children had been out for a week. As State houses now grow, it was a good specimenmore room than most —but no verandah, not even a porch for a pram to park in with a horizontal baby. And “There on its playground may a child be lost.” There were several hundred people living on the station, which I was told was infested with children. I never saw one though I heard many. They were all in their holes or nests. And that was in a semi-tropical climate, where it is never too cold outside to be comfortable, but often too wet to be roofless.

A concrete verandah the whole length of the house, with a concrete wall and a gate, and the working mother in her kitchen with an occasional look from the window when a noise suggests murder, would do more to build up the resistance of our children to T.B. and all other infections, than any other environmental variation I can suggest. And the mother, should she not be considered? It would halve her work and double her temper.

A concrete verandah coloured in harmony with its surroundings is preferable to wood, suitable verandah timber being almost unprocurable. It is easily hosed down. It is warmer than wood for it holds the sun better. And there are other impervious materials available that are durable when the site makes concrete impossible. The verandah wall of a house with an eight-foot wide verandah need only be a cheap partition wall and not weather proof.

Why should our houses be designed for everything but

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health? Architects hate verandahs, but love a tiled sort of platform with no roof and no purpose unless for the precipice on three sides being guaranteed to break the neck of all toddlers. For the same purpose, I suppose, as Hilaire Belloc suggested the keeping of a tiger —“Mothers of large families, who claim to common sense, will find a tiger will repay the trouble and expense.”

And these platforms, now common in private houses and institutions, without a doubt are the architectural mode of today, and a symbol of our time and space.

Now now! My pen is dipped in black gall and never was gall so bitter, for we have been forced to accept such a platform instead of a verandah on a new tuberculosis annexe. The plan of the annexe is an exact copy of a similar institution in Helsinki, Finland, so designed for an Arctic climate. And not even the orientation has been altered to suit the habits of our New Zealand sun!

No! tuberculosis experts won’t tolerate any alterations in their plans, even of the sun. They consider such, just a solar impertinence. But I can dare my pen no longer, so let us leave that platform and venture out in search of the sun the T.B. experts have mislaid.

They draw their plans for Wellington and build the house in North Auckland —backside-foremost —just like our Helsinki tuberculosis annexe.

“The sitting room or living room,” they insist, “must face north or north-east to catch the morning sun.” That's all the sun they think there is. But in a working man’s house you neither sit nor live in that room when the sun is in the north. Sitting rooms in New Zealand, for the most part, and the part that matters, are sat in when the day’s work is over and the sun has gone to bed, and the children, too, “Thank God!” as their mothers say. And a bedroom? “Oh well it does not really matter so much about them, it's the public rooms we must get orientated correctly,” they chant.

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On a cold morning, even in North Auckland, a bedroom with a north exposure is rather nice as you shave, and for an invalid—nicer still.

But in North Auckland the problem is not how to get the sun, but, for the most part, how to get away from it and keep your rooms cool. A bedroom without shade with a westerly exposure, if you are in it in the afternoon, is urn bearable in the hot season.

The only really efficient and practical method (a “turn' table’’ house of course would solve all problems, even our Helsinki one) is a wide verandah with trees close up. In North Auckland we like a verandah with trees or other tall things growing right up against it. I don’t care two hoots about orientation except when I’m shaving in winter.

We aim at cross ventilation, open doors and open windows, whether it rains, hails, snows or blows a hurricane. Above all we seek protection from the sun. And I like to pick fruit from my verandah —peaches, nectarines, grapes, oranges, loquats—all these and more are possible. And when in bed, I like to see the birds, especially the fantails, those lovely things that fly so near you and fear not man. I like to dump my wet coat and dirty boots on the verandah along with other odds and ends. And it is a good place to see patients if you don’t want to see too much of them, in space or time. A glassed-in verandah is the greatest abomination of all and the only kind architects tolerate. In truth the joys and uses of a proper verandah are infinite, but remember you must have the trees and shelter of growing things and love of living things, or you will gain nothing but lose all.

About bedrooms! —they should be cross ventilated, and the smaller the room the more important is the cross ventilation. But bedrooms should be large, especially for children. We fuss and boast about large sitting rooms or living rooms, but the average number of hours they are used is small indeed compared to bedrooms. Children are in bed ten to twelve

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hours a day, sometimes longer—though they shouldn't—and an adult about eight hours. The sitting room is occupied, or not at all, in the worker’s home for just a few hours in the evening, and I repeat again—when the sun and children have gone to bed.

From a health point of view, which I think is the most important orientation of all, bedrooms are the most important rooms in the house, particularly from the children's point of view. But, I repeat, from the architect’s point of view bed' rooms are the least important rooms. Maybe architects never sleep but just go on planning for shows and purses, though not for health and wholesomeness. And every house should have a nursery, or a verandah, and the poorer people are, the juster their claim for a nursery, because they need them more, having more children to put in them, though less money to build them with. The rich are nursery shy but bathroom proud. Why?

In North Auckland the verandah is the nursery, play' ground, scooter track and tricycle main highway, and should be the family dining and sitting room in summer, much more than it is. We don’t make use of our semitropical climate, as the peoples of Europe do, but that is another story.

I suggest that improved accommodation for our children as a social security benefit would benefit our children far more than some benefits we already have, e.g., our pharmaceutical benefits. These harm for the most part, and the abuse has become so frequent, so persistent, and so generally tolerated, that it can no longer be called abuse but custom.

The design of our new State houses, from the “health of our children” point of view is very bad indeed. The Government are building these houses as quickly as they can, and as far as I know without much enlightened criticism, from friend or foe. I think “hanging is not bad enough and flogging would be fair” for this abominable crime. The Government are not the only villains. Private architects

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and doting parents seem, just as much as our Government architects, to hate children. They set booby traps for them, steal their fresh air, deny them the right of privacy and escape from adults’ senseless chatter and cocktail rattle.

No one ever seems to orient houses in the slightest degree to the children’s point of view. And it’s the correct view, the true orientation I think, if we want to make the most of our children when in the nursery. It’s also the best view and the best orientation for the mother, although not very many seem to notice it. I want to see a thirst develop for the correct orientation —the childish point of view—not only in houses but in all things.

OUR ROOMLESS SCHOOLS

Many of our country schools are roomless to a degree that endangers health.

“Adenoids” were unknown in Scotland before com' pulsory state education. We know that from the portraits of our greatgrandfathers and greatgrandmothers who looked far from “Adenoids."

I recollect Professor Noel Paton, the Physiologist of Edinburgh, lecturing on the subject. “The old clinicians,” he said, “had never described adenoids, and they were far too skilled to have missed them.” And they did not have X-ray shadows to blind them in those days.

Schools are responsible for a great deal of disease, directly and indirectly, and we have paid a high price for our highly valued State education, if judged by degrees of ill health. Our new schools in North Auckland are obviously designed in Wellington for Wellington, and built in North Auckland by mistake. The “morning sun” fetish is again responsible, and the big window and the big glasses even in some of our new schools, add to our children’s discomfort. Some of the Native schools, genuine open air schools, are magnificent,

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and why our board schools in the North are not of the same design, I can't imagine.

The long corridors in these schools very largely destroy the cross ventilation. They have no verandahs for shade and shelter, and on a wet day children have to crowd into a roomless receptacle to eat their lunches. All these schools should have great wide verandahs so that beating rain can’t get into open windows and open doors.

I understand “noise” is the objection to the open-air schools. I suggest that teachers should modulate their voices because they make the noise in the class rooms, not the children. And of course every school should have a school dining room, and none of them have.

OUR SCHOOL BUSES

School buses are the perfect sprayers of “bugs.” They are most efficient and reliable vehicles for that purpose. They are overcrowded and, on wet days, sealed. Country children sometimes spend hours daily in that horrible atmosphere. Because of these buses and the damage they do to the health of our backblocks children, I have opposed with no effect the modern craze for centralization of schools. I sometimes wonder if parents really love their children, they do such funny things for them. From an educational point of view, I believe a stronger case can be presented against centralization than for it, but of course that depends on your sense of values. From what I can see, more good can accrue from educating the parents —though it is harder, I know, requiring more patience —and letting the children do what Topsy did, and not vice versa, as we do at present.

Some day parents may be sufficiently trained to allow them to revert to their natural function, of engendering and training their own offspring, instead of passing the buck so completely to the scientists and professional teachers as we do now. For soon we will have buses running for hori-

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zontal babies, from cots to central schools; and knowledge of “nappy" technique will become not a frill but an essential diploma for all teachers.

And as in this world we can’t be sure of very much, I dare to look into the dim, dim distant future, knowing that if I make a mistake, unlike Confucius, no one will have the pleasure of letting me know. And I can see, and overhear quite plainly, anthropologists examining the ancient ruins of our age and being slightly puzzled by what they have urn earthed in New Zealand.

“Why did these strange people,” they ruminate, “who thought they were so highly civilised, build in their semi' tropical regions the same sort of dwellings as in their cold regions? And why were the houses so small when they had plenty of room, ample material and a qo-hour work week? We know that from the size of their hospitals, their asylums, their prisons, their churches, and their tunnels. Was their birth-rate very low or did they practise infanticide? For their is obviously no room in their standardised houses for children. The only logical conclusion for us to come to is that they were indeed a stupid people and it is no wonder that they died out so quickly. These stupid things about their houses were important to them and invaluable to us interpreting them. Because, small though they may seem, they were obvious and significant symbols of the fundamental poverty of these archaic people, in that they did not realise that culture is no ornament, but a strict functional necessity if human life is to go on. And they obviously lacked a certain minimum knowledge of that which is vital or they would have survived longer than they did.

“What they called civilization had no culture in it, for apparently they had no plan of the universe to guide them —to see where they were, and where they were going to, and what they should do. Yes! They were real islanders—in a word they had a vicarious sense of values.”

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Are efforts to alter our sense of values doomed to dimmering like sunken moons? I don’t think so! The curtain has rung down before on backboneless bureaucracy planning delays—it can do it again. So I say unto them that “to hearken is better than the fat of Rams” (Samuel).

Poussin’s picture of David rolling home with the head of Goliath stuck on the end of a pole suggests a pleasing symbol to end this foray of our resistance movement.

TUBERCULOSIS

r pHE tuberculosis specialists may have built their house* on rock, but with atomic alchemy a commonplace these days, all rocks may turn to quicksand and suck down the structures on them.

The argument for the modern methods of fighting tuber' culosis goes like this:-

i. If you are infected with a few tubercle bacilli your natural resistance may save you from disease, but if the dose is big enough no amount of resistance will serve to save.

a. Therefore people having the bacilli in their sputum should be isolated so that they cannot give a massive dose of the bacilli to other people.

3. Once phthisis has developed the only hope of cure is rest —general rest to the body and specific rest to the lung by means of surgery.

Let us examine these items in detail:—

1. “The danger of the massive dose” (a phrase never far from the lips of a tuberculosis specialist) means that although a person may withstand the attack of a few bacilli, if the germs are numerous enough they will sweep over all re' sistance, and inevitably cause phthisis.

* Some call it “sanatorium.”

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The story sounds quite likely, and furthermore there are some animal experiments which (if not examined too closely) apparently support this point of view.

So, with the combination of a facile explanation and a “solid background of experimental work,” the theory of the danger of the massive dose is widely accepted and has been publicised by specialists in a great many countries (usually with support from governments). They have done their work so well that there is an almost universal belief in the deadliness of breath from an infected person, and tuberculosis is feared above all other sickness. The public have been induced to accept the idea that casual contact with an open case may be fatal, and that prolonged contact will inevitably lead to the grave along the dismal road of sanatorium and chronic hospital.

From this medical belief and lay fear there has arisen legislation hatched by specialists and fostered by politicians to make isolation compulsory for T.8.-positive people, those people whose sputum contains the tubercle bacilli. They reason that as the only source of human tubercle bacilli is from the discharges of a person already infected, then such cases should be put away. Already in some of the United States of America and in Northern Ireland any person with the misfortune to have tubercle bacilli in his sputum can be detained and locked up until he loses those bacilli. A great number of the patients never do lose them, and so they are imprisoned until they die. In New Zealand not even murderers are subject to such a fate.

Assuming for the moment that the story of the massive dose is true, let us look at the effects of this course of action on the patient (for it is still supposed to be the doctors’ vocation to take care for the sick). We know these days that the psychological attitude of the patient has a marked effect on the course of tuberculosis. Frustration, anxiety and all sorts of maladjustments appear to be the triggers which

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start off attacks, and are factors which make them worse. These things are in the very air of prison, and the consump' tive who hears the gates clang shut behind and knows his sentence is at best indefinite and probably eternal, must be often launched upon a decline that ends six feet underground.

Yet these things are done today in Northern Ireland (and I hear they are contemplated in New Zealand) and no one protests. The papers reported an English doctor as saying that he’d ended the sufferings of patients with an overdose of morphia, but I have seen no doctor protest about the mental hell to which these people are deliberately condemned. People who rave protests when a dog has its stomach re' moved under an anaesthetic are silent on this issue concern' ing humans.

The situation’s monstrous! Even were its basis true it would be a severe test of humanity, but as it’s founded on thoughtless adherence to an unproven theory it’s quite intolerable.

There is no such thing as the danger of the massive dose.

All species of animals react differently to tuberculosis, and to argue the case of man on premises derived from guinea pigs infected with injected germs is neither scientific nor sensible. Only by observing what happens in human contacts can we draw any conclusions about human reactions.

It has been said “a very good indication of the risk which a person might run as the result of massive infection ought to be given by the incidence of tuberculosis in persons whose life partners suffer from the disease.”*

After citing an investigation of 53,069 families (selected because husband or wife had pulmonary T. 8.) in which the other partner was found to be no more likely to get phthisis than any member of the public, Dr. Underwood concludes, “It cannot be said therefore that there is a marked tendency

* Manual of Tuberculosis: Dr. E. Ashworth Underwood.

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for one partner in a marriage to contract tuberculosis from the other.”

We (the doctors) are all taught that “husband-wife infection is very rare,” and that is just a reiteration of the statement above. It is accepted and unquestioned, just as is the story of the massive dose.

But the intimacies of marriage give the greatest possible opportunity for repeated prolonged and massive infection, so if it is found that under these circumstances there is no increased risk of infection, it must be that repeated and massive doses of the bacilli are no more dangerous than the fortuitous contacts of everyday life.

The attractive theory must give way to the observed facts. It is not possible to maintain that a proposition “A” is at the same time true and false. Neither, except as an act of religious devotion, is it possible to hold that “A” is true when all the evidence shows that it is false. In this case “A” is belief in the danger of the massive dose. Those who still persist in it are raising their theory of tubercular infection to the level of religion, not to be touched by logic, nor questioned by the uninitiate. The arch-specialist can intone (in deep bass), “Beware the massive dose,” and the congregation can respond (on a higher key), “Husband-wife infections are no more frequent than infection rates from all the population.” Both of them are apparently so drowned in their devotions that they do not see that the two things are incompatible.

i. Isolation of sputum positive cases; —

Of course we do not question that tuberculosis is an infectious disease. There is no way of contracting T.B. except by contact with the bacilli from an earlier case. If every case of tuberculosis were locked up in a cell out of which nothing but sterilised air could come, and if he never came into contact with anyone (not even the doctors, nurses or attendants, and especially not visitors) then in one or two

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generations there would be no more tuberculosis. This is the assumption on which the antituberculosis services work and it is quite true —but it is also quite absurd. In the first place it would surely tax the ingenuity of the most ardent planner to devise a means of caring for a helpless patient without ever having the chance to come into contact with any of the patient’s germs. Secondly, if this could be done, then the planning officer would have to solve the problem of not letting any of the tubercle bacilli escape in the air from the hospital, for guinea pigs in the ventilators of sanatoria have been found to die of tuberculosis caught from the germs in the air going up the ventilator. Thirdly, after these things were done there would have to be some radical change in the number of beds available to tuberculosis patients. Already in New Zealand there are at least 2,321 known active infectious cases, and it is probable there are at least as many more who are not known. To accommodate these there were at the end of December, 1945, 1,822 beds in hospitals and sanatoria. This means that at least 500 known infectious cases, and probably 2,000 more unknown ones, are at large in the community. With our hospitals hard pressed to staff the beds they have already-—and sometimes having to close down wards —I see no prospect of 2,500 beds for tuberculosis cases being found or built. And even if the beds were there I don’t believe that all the patients would consent to occupy them.

To arrest the spread of tuberculosis all new cases would have to be discovered and isolated before the tubercle bacilli appeared in their sputum. As phthisis is so insidious, and as the sputum can become positive at a very early stage, the task would daunt the Gods.

I think that the whole population would have to be examined by extraordinarily skilful doctors at least every six weeks. One doctor could not conscientiously examine more than 40 people a day in investigating so subtle a disease as

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early tuberculosis, and so we would need i ,000 doctors working full time at this, with all the X-ray technicians and laboratory staff as well.

It seems foolish to contemplate the possibility of such things being done, but let us for the moment don fools' motley and assume that every open case is shut away in hospital—what then?

In about twenty years there would be no more consumption. Within a generation we would have a world where no one had ever encountered tuberculosis: it would be a virgin population—so far as tubercle bacilli were concerned. Then I fear that a bacillus lurking neglected in an infected cow at Waima would emerge and rape the virgin. One person would succumb and then another and another; gathering speed like a forest fire, lit from a single match, an epidemic would sweep the country. As is usually the case when a disease strikes a community unaccustomed to it the mortality would be terrible, and our successors would have cause to curse the thoughtless theorists who pursued the vision of the massive dose as though it were the Grail.

As things are, the death-rate from tuberculosis is falling steadily and there are figures of the decline (in England) since 1838. I have seen it claimed by a tuberculosis specialist that this fall was due to the widespread introduction of the methods boosted by his confreres. As these methods did not get going before 1920 the fall before that date cannot be attributed to them, and as since then there has been no increase in the rate of fall, it seems that this claim is not justified. How can it be said that anything is doing good when it has no effect on the condition that it is alleged to benefit? Furthermore in countries where nothing is being done about “the tuberculosis problem” the death-rate is falling just as fast as in those places where the specialists flock most thickly.

3. The official teaching is that if you are infected with a few bacilli your natural resistance may save you from disease,

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but if the dose is big enough it will overcome any degree of resistance.

We have seen above that the size of dose is not important, so the course of the tuberculous infection is in fact deter' mined by the patient’s resistance —resistance to infection and invasion by the bacilli.

Resistance can be considered in two aspects —the funda' mental inherited resistance and the modifying influence of the environment producing acquired resistance.

A sample of quotations from authority will show that the importance of inherited (genetic) resistance is admitted.

“There can be no doubt that certain races and certain families have exceptionally low resistance to tuberculous infection.” (Text Boo\ of Medicine: edited by J. J. Cony' beare.)

“Karl Pearson by statistical studies has shown the im' portance of heredity.” (Synopsis of Medicine: H. Lethaby Tidy.)

“There is the possibility that though the disease itself may not be inherited, a tendency to be infected easily may be so ... a decreased ability on the part of the child to develop immunity to the disease may be inherited.” (A Manual of Tuberculosis: E. Ashworth Underwood.)

Each of these comes from a standard text book, yet having made the barely perceptible gesture towards truth no further mention is made of the influence of genetic factors.

Drs. Kallman and Reisner (who are Americans working on the tuberculosis problem), by an investigation of 308 families in which there were twins, one of whom had de' veloped pulmonary tuberculosis, have underlined this genetic determination of the response to tubercular infection. There are two sorts of twins, monozygotic (developed from one egg) and dizygotic (from two eggs). It is obvious that the genes in each member of a monozygotic twin pair must be the same since they started off as one egg; but there is no

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more genetic similarity between the two individuals of a dizygotic twin pair than there is between any other two children of the same parents. The special significance of studying twins is that as they are so commonly brought up in physically identical conditions, the influence of environment on disease is as far as possible annulled.

In this investigation they found that in the family of an infected twin: —

7.1% of marriage partners developed T.B.

11.9% of half brothers or sisters developed T.B.

16.9% of parents developed T.B.

25.5% of full brothers or sisters developed T.B.

25.6% of dizygotic cotwins developed T.B.

87.3 °/o of monozygotic cotwins developed T.B.

There are three things of special interest to be seen in this table.

Firstly the increasing incidence with the closer genetic relationship.

Secondly that siblings and dizygotic twins (who are genetically siblings, and twins just because their ova of origin happened to be fertilised at the same time) have the same rate of infection.

Thirdly, that the rate in monozygotic twins is three and a half times more than that in dizygotic twins. Kallman and Reisner conclude that this can only be due to the genetic identity of the monozygotic twins.

Further, if both members of a monozygotic twin pair develop pulmonary tuberculosis, its course, extent and outcome are usually the same in both of them. This might happen in any two people, but in monozygotic twins it is sixteen times as common as in dizygotic twins.

These figures leave no doubt as to the great influence of genetic resistance in the development of phthisis.

Acquired resistance is that which is developed in a person from the moment of birth onwards (or to be purists we

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should say from the conception on) and is the result of the interaction between the person and his environment.

In a condensed review of tuberculosis in Europe published in 1946 in the specialist magazine Tubercle, it was said that the mortality rate in Belgium fluctuated with the food supplies, and in Holland where there was famine for a time there was a prodigious increase in the tuberculosis death rate. At the same time surveys showed that there was no increase in the infection rates so that what happened w r as that the lack of food lowered resistance and people who would normally have overcome their infection were defeated by it.

During the 1914-18 war it was shown that if people were herded together under conditions of poor housing and worse hygiene and sanitation, so long as there was plenty of food there was no increase in the tuberculosis death rates. But if, as in some areas, the living conditions were unaffected while the food supplies were cut down, the death rate went up.

So we see that food is the most important factor in determining the level of acquired resistance. Milk, meat, eggs, fish and cheese are the props of resistance.

It is a general rule that in infectious disease one infection increases resistance against subsequent attacks. We are all (thanks to Health Department propaganda) familiar with this principle as applied in diphtheria immunisation, and it is equally true of tuberculous infection. The first time that you encounter tubercle bacilli the tissues of your body react in such a way that any subsequent invasions have a much harder time. In some Scandinavian countries this is used as a definite weapon in the fight against T.B. and susceptible people are inoculated with a very mild strain of the bacilli to increase their resistance (in the same way as vaccination with the mild cow-pox is used to raise resistance against the dangerous small-pox). It is very probable that

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this resistance wanes unless it is boosted from time to time by further contact with the bacilli, and this could be used as an argument against rigid isolation of people with positive sputum.

We know that by the time of adult life most town' dwellers have been infected with tuberculosis and have never known it. They recover on their own, without the aid of X-rays, sanatoria or lung collapse, or even major chest surgery. They are able to do this because they are resistant.

If now we look back to the argument with which this note began we can see that:—

i. The massive dose is not dangerous.

2. Therefore there is no theoretical argument for the rigid isolation of all sputum-positive patients, and anyway such a suggestion is foolishly impracticable.

3. The course of tuberculous infection depends upon resistance. Resistance depends on food. And rest is fine but prime steak is finer. So live to eat but eat to live.

REFERENCES

Tubercle, issues of 1946 and 1947

Taylor, C. A., N.Z.M.S., 1947,18.

Tuberculosis in the West Indies, N.A. and T. publication.

X-RAYS

1. A s is the case with most great advances in science, X-rays were discovered accidentally by a man who had the vision to see the possibilities inherent in the unexpected phenomenon which he had observed. “X” is the algebraical symbol for the unknown and so the very name of “X-rays” bears witness to the mystery which surrounded them then, and which far from being dispersed has grown with the years.

It was on November Bth, 1895, that Professor Roentgen

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made his discovery and within a few weeks the news and rumours had swept around the world. The public had seised upon the drama in the imagined power of the new rays and a London firm was offering “X-ray-proof under clothing” to its glamorous customers.

The first reproduction of an X-ray plate (called Roentgenogram) of a human lung was not published until two years later by a man called Rosenfeld of Breslau, but long before that everyone (that is to say everyone who didn’t really know what he was talking about) had decided that X-rays would reveal everything. That attitude, unadulterated by the fountain-waters of knowledge, and untouched by the fetters of actual achievement, has persisted up to today, and tomorrow I fear it may still be with us.

At a medical meeting about 1897 a devotee of the new toy (as some called it) —or the only certain method of diagnosis (as others believed it) —was showing some roent' genograms to the audience. When he had finished another doctor got to his feet and said “We have all heard Dr. say that the heart is here and the lungs are here. Now, I can’t distinguish anything and to tell the truth I don’t think that he can either!”

Today we know that the focus of practical use for X-rays lies as usual between the two extremes.

2. One factor in the distorted popular idea of X-rays is that roentgenograms have come to be called “pictures” and so people think that a radiologist looks at some sort of photograph on which their inwards are revealed as clearly as a landscape in a good panorama —but in fact all that a radiologist sees is a record of some shadows.

X-rays may be compared to light. They pass through the soft tissues of the body like light going through a window, and they are obstructed by the dense tissues (bones especially) as fight is obstructed by the window frames. Bright light shining through a window will throw the

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shadow of the window frames on the floor or wall; X-rays passing through the body throw the shadow of the bones oft the sensitive screen of the fluoroscope, or on the X-ray plate.

If there are flaws in the glass there will be odd blurs on the floor, and if there are density differences in the body tissues there will be unusual shadows revealed in the roentgenogram. Some diseases alter the density of tissues and they can be picked up with X-rays; other diseases (the majority) do not, and leave no record on an X-ray plate.

If something is pasted across the glass of the window it will throw a shadow on the wall; and if preparations opaque to X-rays are introduced into the body in various ways they will make shadows which outline the organs or spaces which they fill.

3. The problem of the radiologist is to diagnose from the shadow the nature of the obstruction which causes it.

Suppose that you live in a country where snakes are common and some are deadly. It is a bright sunny day and you are taking your ease inside the house. Suddenly you see a shadow on the floor that looks just like the shadow of a snake. You can't turn to look. You must decide from the shadow alone. Is it a snake or is it some harmless thing like a strip of paper blown against the glass. If it’s a snake, is it safe or deadly? And is it pressing against the outside of the window, or is it inside with you? Your life depends on how you answer the questions. In the same way a patient’s future often depends on how the radiologist answers questions about the shadows that he sees.

4. Diseases are not static things. They are improving or becoming worse all of the time, and a single X-ray plate is no guide at all as to how things are progressing.

Imagine that you are looking at a motion picture, the climax of a Wild Western. There are two men (the hero and the villain) quarrelling, and like a flash they reach for their guns. The hero (of course) is quicker on the draw and

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the villain meets his end. All very straightforward. But suppose that you've not seen the picture and you are asked to look at the frame which shows both men with their hands on their pistol butts. From that, what chance do you think you'd have of telling who was good, who was bad, and who would shoot who —apart from saying what lead up to the situation and how things would progress? Very, very little! Yet every time that a doctor puts all his faith in the report of a single X-ray examination he implies that the radiologist can do just those things.

5. In the preceding paragraphs I have tried to give an account of the limitations of X-rays, and also of their capabilities.

They will show differences in density in tissues, and also help to reveal any process in the body which makes normally soft tissue dense or any condition which rarifies tissues usually opaque to X-rays.

Remember that it is useless in the diagnosis of the majority of human illness, because the changes in the body are not of such a nature that they will cast shadows on the X-ray plate.

Finally, when anything is seen on the X-ray plate it must be interpreted with skill and caution. Above all it must never be used as the sole method of making a diagnosis—even radio-location needs to have cross bearings. It is essential to treat the person and not the radiological appearance.

If this rule is ignored you get tragedies such as the one recently reported in a medical journal where a young man was subjected to a most severe and extensive operation purely because of what was seen in a single X-ray film. Some time later it was discovered that the apparent lesion shown on the plate had been due to a hair that was on the film when the picture was taken. Comment is useless —folly is obvious.

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6. I now want to give an idea of the public conception of radiology as I see it here in the Hokianga.

Firstly the Maori idea, for they form 62% of my patients. I doubt that any of the Maoris here know what X-rays can and can’t do. They build notions from such fleeting acquaintance as this—a man playing football gets a kick on the ankle and is unable to walk. The doctor says, “We must get this X-rayed,” and off they go to hospital and a mysterious room, full of boxes and wires, cables, switches and tables. After some adjusting and manoeuvring they are told to keep quite still, and then there is a buzz and a click. After an interval they’re told if the leg is broken or not, and if it is they are given an anaesthetic and it is set —a most impressive performance that firmly fixes the mana of the X-rays.

They have enough acquaintance with medicine and are influenced enough by Government propaganda to know that there is some connection between X-rays and tuberculosis, so every Maori patient with a cough (and there are mighty few without it) announces at some time or other that he wants an X-ray.

But the reason that they want one is not for diagnosis. It’s because they think that the rays will cure them! Yes, most of them are pretty certain that the only way to treat consumption is to have X-rays, and have them often, otherwise they will “be the worst.”

The Pakehas have a little better idea of the powers of radiology. I’ve not met one yet who expected a cure from it. But they put all their faith in the rays to show up every ailment, and a lot of them think that they are being neglected and deprived of the advantages of modern medicine if they do not get a roentgenogram with every examination.

It is the old story of the patient coming along with a well-fixed idea of what is wrong and what the doctor ought to do about it. If they happen to have guessed right they

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think the doctor is very clever because he agrees with them. When their fantasy is miles wide of the mark they always decry the doctor as incompetent. Similarly when patients demand an X-ray in conditions where it is quite useless they are so convinced of the omnipotence of the rays that it is impossible to persuade them that the examination would be useless and they go away disgruntled.

7. X-rays are shadows. Shadows are not substance. Do not trust your future merely to a shadow.

POLITICAL TUBERCULOSIS

'J’HIS is not a lesion of the bones or of the lungs but of the brain; and not of the meninges (the usual site of tuber' culosis in that region in ordinary humans) but of the cortex, the part of the brain which contains the higher centres, which constitute the peculiar mind of man and which permits him alone, of all animals, to wonder and reason and understand, and not to wander. And so he can ask questions which are the right questions, asked in their right order, and only from those whom it is reasonable to believe know more than he does. Next this special brain area compels a sensible man to sit down and ponder on what he has been told and not on what he is to say next, as infected politicians do in the House.

The disease of Political Tuberculosis is caused by the tubercle bacillus of Koch, but indirectly by T.B. experts, so we cannot exactly blame that bacillus. Of course if we exterminated ordinary tuberculosis we would exterminate this particular disease. Unfortunately we can’t. So another approach is needed. It is not a fatal disease to the participant although it has disastrous effects on other people, actually doing more harm than any other form of tuberculosis. This

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is unfortunate—l am speaking of the participant —and when you have firmly grasped the description of its symptoms and its general effect on the community, especially on sufferers of the ordinary forms of tuberculosis then I feel certain you will grieve with me over the low case mortality rate of Political Tuberculosis.

It is interesting to note that, as in the case of ordinary tuberculosis, the genetic tendency to the disease is the predominant factor in its causality. In fact it is correct to say that this disease is the genetic imperative of our present Parliamentary form of government.

It is, as far as I know, unknown in the dictator countries. It is difficult, indeed, to see Stalin, for example, having to deal with it, and if by chance a case of it was detected in Russia, it would be “nipped in the bud” with a rapidity and efficiency (you wouldn’t know he had done it) which unfortunately we can’t here hope to emulate.

Let me first briefly describe this very definite Syndrome which I call Political Tuberculosis. We will take typical cases. It is a seasonal disease, and breaks out invariably and violently when the estimates of the annual report of the Minister of Health is being read out in the House. The observation that “truth must be seasonable” does not apply. Occasionally minor outbreaks are experienced at other times, but always when Parliament is in session.

Symptoms: It is usually bi-lateral (in their jargon nonparty) but often one side is infected more than the other, or to be strictly accurate, more acutely. Listening to the chest sounds—you require no stethoscope and X-rays are useless —you hear coming from both sides loud rattles, sometimes resounding and sibilant, sometimes sonorous and weaker. They vary, even in individual cases, apparently depending on the time of day. I have observed these curious variations in the temperature and have suspected the presence or absence of visitors in the House, to be the aetiological factor. Other

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observers have noticed and reported on “the air” as the causal factor of variations. These distressing sounds are often accompanied by froth and gasps for lack of breath, due to the violence of the effort. Listening in on my radio it sounds like this: —“Tuberculosis must be exterminated,” “It can and it must,” “The white plague,” “Something (or any' thing) must be done about it,” “The Minister has neglected his job and should be sacked.” (This theme with variations recurs frequently.) “More sanatoriums!” “Compulsory mass X-ray for every living human being in New Zealand.” (Including all foetuses is, I suppose, implicit.) “Ambulatory and stationary, miniature and maximum X-ray machines!” “More and more surveys and graphs.” “More specialists.” “More clinics.” “More research, that’s the stuff!” (By whom, of what, when and where not mentioned.) “Pasteurizing of all milk.” (Including the cat’s and bobby calves’ is implicit.) “Complete and absolute isolation of all open cases.” “Open cases spread the disease like fire in the fern.” “No one is safe in this country anywhere, even in this House, no, not even in Church —the House of God.” “It’s a disgrace to any country and to our civilisation.” “People are dying like flies.” “Nip it in the bud,” etc., etc.

Yes! All these suggestions and slogans and a great many more, including personal domestic observations of an intimate nature on the subject, have been heard and will be heard again till Political Tuberculosis is exterminated.

Treatment: These cases are, beyond all dispute, highly suitable and only suitable for treatment by T.B. experts. I can’t be too emphatic about that. And in Central Chest Hospitals—specially equipped with “all the latest and best available in the world” kind of equipment.

The steps of the present mode in treatment employed are as follows: “Complete, continuous and long sustained rest by air collapse, and if that fails an extensive rib resection,

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and the more ribs and the more of the ribs the better. If that fails, then ‘lobectomy’—and if that fails, then total re' moval of the lungs is indicated and essential (one at the time, I suppose).” The last one means that the ideal has been attained, namely “a complete permanent rest to the lungs.” For lung specialists think that a man is lungs, not a man has lungs, and life in that conception is but an appendix and should be ignored or removed if it gets in the way of the lungs getting complete rest. Applied to Political Tuber' culosis I am in cordial agreement with that concept.

Now Political Tuberculosis is a horrible disease indirectly affecting many people, and very radical methods are justifiable for its extermination. It does more harm in general than any other form of tuberculosis does.

After Effects and Follow Up: It is the aftermath of the disease, the spread of the “poison”—by contact, froth, car' riers, Hansards, Press, platform, and above all “the air,” and the effect on the mental health of others with the inevitable distortion of their vision, that does the damage. For example, the P.H.D. are, I suspect, forced by the politicians’ “You must do something, or . . They have got to say things and do things that they know are useless. Elsewhere I speak of these things in detail.

But the most amazing thing of all is that hardly a word is said, except by an occasional speaker, on the subject of improving the environment of the people from a resistance point of view; e.g., houses with room in them, open-air houses with verandahs and, above all, altering and improving the food habits of the people.

These are the only things that scientific medicine of today believes will really help to alleviate the curse of Tuberculosis. However, I am confident that if all cases of Political Tuberculosis (which has at present a very low direct mortality rate) were to submit themselves to the care of T.B. experts without reserve, all the “sitting” cases of Political Tuber-

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culosis would be ultimately exterminated. If they refuse to hand themselves over unreservedly to the hands of the experts, then I suggest compulsory legislation to compel treat' ment by experts should be introduced. Politicians suffering from Political Tuberculosis are the most open of all forms of Tuberculosis and the only open cases that are a menace to the people.

TUBERCULOSIS IN ANIMALS

UR knowledge of Tuberculosis in domestic animals could be correlated to our knowledge of tuberculosis in

humans more than it has been in New Zealand, with benefit to both animals. Many questions —highly proper questions —could be asked; someone, somehow and sometime, should be able to give the proper answer.

For example, why are some animals practically immune, and others highly susceptible? Why are the carnivora so immune? I suggest —though I acknowledge it does in a sense beg the question —that the explanation lies in the tastes of the tubercle bacillus. Or if you like, the tastes of other animals to the tubercle bacillus are apparently attractive or not attractive. Are not T.B.s organisms, just as we are? Have they not the gift of selection, or at least the privilege of selecting their own habitat?

It is known that there exist differences in the proteins of the various tissues, not only in different animals, but in different parts of the same animal. Crabs and oysters, red herrings and swordfish, owls and eagles, goats and sheep, cows, horses and asses (I don’t know about mules, though I should love to) all have peculiar proteins. To the T.B. some anirpals, and some parts of those animals, taste good, and some taste bad, just the same as we human beings prefer

TUBERCULOSIS IN ANIMALS

“under cut” to “over cut” of a bullock, and to any cut of a hippopotamus. And that, I think, is sense so far as it goes; but it does not go far enough.

If a human being does not, though exposed, get infected with T. 8., it is said that he is “strong.” But he may only be nasty, meaning not tasty, from the T.B.’s point of taste. The 8.0. of a billy goat should be able to keep any T.B. at bay—any one who knows goats can scent that —and it is reasonable to suppose it’s because of “that strong virile smell,” to quote a memorable description that May Sinclair, the famous novelist, once attributed to a vicar.

Smell led to the evolution of the human brain, and we all know how smells recall associations. So we need not be surprised at the T.B. and the billy goat not agreeing. And I think the recent identification and significance of antibiotics supports these notions.

But it is of T.B. in cattle I want to speak in particular. It is common I would say —just about the same incidence as in our Maoris —and the resistance of cattle to bovine T.B. genetic and environmental, seems to be also very similar, with the former playing the more important role as in man.

Let me give you an example—

A dairy farmer with a hundred cows, all bred on the place, but using bought-in pedigree bulls bought twelve heifers from a near neighbour (who has a very superior herd of high grade, very inbred Jerseys with a high herd incidence of tuberculosis).

These heifers, all by one sire and very inbred, were run with the home-bred heifers. They were “well done.” Six of them developed T.B. None of the home-bred heifers did.

On this farm sporadic cases of T.B. had occurred, but in a long course of years very few indeed.

The farmer very quickly and wisely got rid of the surviving heifers, and T.B. has now resumed its former very low rate of incidence in the herd. Dozens of similar herd

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histories could be unearthed. Breeding from T.B. susceptibles is disastrous and farmers should take far more care than they do in the selection of T.B.'resistant sires, that is a sire with a good family history of resistance.

And it is quite a simple matter to eradicate T.B. from a herd by selection and every farmer should do it, but the lure of “a good looking 'B' with a long pedigree” often proves only too effective and the T.B. family susceptibility is ignored and accepted.

Most farmers accept as true the same fallacy as the T.B. experts, and attribute the incidence of tuberculosis in their herds to contagion —a single beast infecting a lot of others. The Government’s procedure of destruction and compensa' tion is based on that assumption—although it is not true, or only very slightly true, and can with complete safety be ignored in herds living an all the year round outside existence as our herds do.

The key to the whole problem is simply—don’t breed from them. Don’t breed from them, I beseech of you!

If this truth was accepted and acted on by the farmers, T.B. in cattle would practically die out in a very few cow generations —and one cocky’s. That has been proved again and again in famous pedigree herds, but its significance and true explanation has usually been ignored.

The first Aberdeen Angus cattle that came to the North were notoriously tubercular —the particular strain were lacking in resistance. That strain has probably now all died out and the incidence in the breed is much the same as in other breeds.

It is interesting, however, to note that the incidence of bovine tuberculosis in humans is very much more common in the home of the Aberdeen Angus in Scotland than any' where else in Great Britain, although the Aberdeen Angus is not much used for milk production. But the aggregate of human and bovine infection in humans is just the same as

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elsewhere in Scotland. If that is so it means that any child who contracts bovine T.B. would still have contracted human T.B. infection, other things being equal. On the whole I would prefer bovine tuberculosis to human tuber' culosis. So when you hear politicians ranting in indignation, or wringing their hands in political grief over the inch dence of bovine infection through milk, please tell them that they are talking nonsense. Human infection and bovine in' fection are apparently very rarely found together, and that I think is a suggestive fact.

I have recently noticed that although T.B. in cattle is very common in South Africa, bovine tuberculosis in humans is almost unknown, although practically no milk is pas' teuriced. Human tuberculosis is very common amongst the native populations of the Rand. It is often of a very acute and rapidly fatal type due to the usual lack of natural genetic resistance of a native race, and the bad environmental condi' tions of the mines.

Devon cattle in North Auckland have an excellent re' putation for immunity to T. 8., the reason being that the particular strain that came North were genetically resistant and have kept resistant as there has been very little imports' tion of stock. Being run cattle means that the environment is better—e.g., the calves are reared on their mothers.

Tuberculosis in cattle is notoriously misleading and is found where least expected. We often see and hear a farmer curse when in their returns from “the works” maybe “the best bullock of the whole damned mob” is condemned and goes down the chute. You can see a prime fat bullock with perfect coat and no obvious glandular involvement about the ears, neck or shoulder, a bullock that has “driven well,” but on the hooks is just riddled with T. 8., mediastinal and abdominal glands just caseous masses, with often multiple cold abscesses in the lungs, and extensive pleural adhesions.

An X'ray photograph of that bullock would make a T.B.

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specialist “bust.” “No animal could live five minutes in such a state and didn’t,” he would say—but the bullock did, and throve well for long enough to be “the best beast in the mob”. And I have seen humans look and do remarkably well with lungs that were riddled like the bullock’s.

A Keith dealer was coming to buy our runner calves. My father was called away and left me, busting with importance, to deal with the dealer—the price £8 a head. They were grand calves! The dealer came, saw them, was told the price, and shook his head. I looked determined —then, “I just want one of them, and I’ll give you £l6 for it.” My mouth gaped, I scratched my head for help, got it, I thought, and closed the deal with a hand clasp. He pointed at the Blue Heifer calf—the only blue, and it was maybe a little bigger than the others, but not much. The others were “all blacks” and he said they were no good.

Under two years old, my blue heifer won the Champion' ship at the Edinburgh Fat Stock Show and went on from there to win the Championship at the London Fat Show, the bluest blue ribbon of all.

She was sold for £7O, a fabulous price in those days, to a fashionable West End butcher, its roasts intended to adorn the Xmas platters of Mayfair. For all that she was doomed to be burnt to cinders, not in a Mayfair oven by a fool of a cook, but by a fool of a Health Inspector in an incinerator is unfit for human consumption owing to very extensive general tuberculosis.

And we see, just as in humans, the influence of environment on tuberculosis in our cattle. For the commonest type of beast that our butchers see badly infected in the North is the little undersized Jersey steer, reared by the Maori on the bucket, with little enough ever in the bucket—just the half-starved, miserable, dry-coated looking Maori calf, the familiar ornament of almost every Maori home in the North.

How any of these calves, and most of them don't, ever

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survive to grow into meat fit to eat I often wonder, for they are far more underfed that our Plunket babies.

A butcher talking about these little steers to me the other day said, “Of course they catch the T.B. from the Maoris. They’re always about the houses and they’re rotten with T. 8.” That remark was worthy of a T.B. specialist—and would I suppose be endorsed by him, to be consistent, but of course that’s pure nonsense.

A fact well worth noting is that a tubercular cattle beast that is well fed and sheltered and put in a fattening paddock, will often fatten to prime beef. If “hard done” that beast will die, and humans are just the same.

I suggest that the T.B. experts should give “complete and continuous rest to lungs” a rest, and devote their attentions to cowyard investigations of T.B. genetics in cattle, and the environmental effect on T.B.'infected calves of running with and “on” a cow in the mountains, as our Father of Medicine recommended to men so long ago.

In three words—“Consult the cockies”—I advise

For all this makes me suspect that the connection in the field between our domestic animal specialists—whose work I think is admirable —and our human health specialists, is not as intimate as it should be.

Let me give another example—

Tubercle bacilli get into the milk, not from a tubercular udder or the lungs of the cow, but from the dung in the cowyard and on the udder, and usually through dust. Machine' milked tubercular cows should be perfectly safe, by evolving proper precautions based on that truth. It’s a notion of practical importance that the T.B. specialists could confirm or deny—from an empirical test. But I’m afraid it would mean playing truant from their tuberculosis clinics for a while, to frequent and master the habitual cocky technique, and then evolve a better technique for the cowyard, with the above object in view.

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And this last example—

The condemning of tubercular carcasses as unfit for human food is just nonsense. No T.B. can survive even a modicum of freezing, let alone boiling, frying or roasting. When I think, as I often do since I came to New Zealand, of what a sirloin roast of my famous blue heifer would have tasted like, I was just as pleased about her fate. The greedy English! she was too good for that.

And things like that are done in the name of science because experts decide questions which they don’t under* stand, through not thinking enough or not at all. Politicians accept their decisions, also without thinking, and regulate our lives by adding to our follies accordingly.

It is only fair to state that recently some of the regulations have been relaxed, but my blue heifer went down the chute holus bolus all right! I can swear to that.

And that’s enough to make any man turn vegetarian and take to the pigs’ food that New Zealand’s dietitians so adore, and which the reading-thoughtless swallow.

SUMMARY ON SPECIALISTS

QN reading over what I have said about specialists I am not satisfied. I get from it a flavour of Yes! too much onion or maybe too little onion—which means I have written badly. So I write this brief note as a summary of notions and a correction of my emphasis, to try to remove that taste of too much or tastelessness of too little.

Firstly, the specialist is essential to his own job; at it he is better than anyone else. It is his judgement of the whole that lam suspicious of. Not all of all specialists, but much of many, especially the younger ones. Enthusiasm is magnificent but it can also be very dangerous.

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“The folly of intelligent people, clearheaded and narrow visioned, has precipitated many catastrophes,” Whitehead said, with maybe a larger field in mind, but a field that in' eluded the field we try to cultivate.

I feel—in fact I know—not only intuitively, but from actual experience, that looking over the shoulder of every specialist as he works (like the daemon of Socrates) there should be someone to say, “So far —no further!” and some' times, “Not that —but this!” and sometimes even the Molotov “No!” For the pure specialist is just a technician, a man who can do a certain thing better than anyone else out of his class. But as a philosopher or a scientist, call that what you may —the man whose job is to “think things to' gether”-—the specialist may be a perfect ass, and may never live to be anything else. For “they are one flock and no shepherd.” A specialist in that sense should never be allowed out of the nursery alone. They must be made to see “that to live they must die,” before they can be bom again and go on living.

And I don’t see sense in the specialists’ answer to “Can you cure phthisis?”—“No! but we know how to give the lungs rest!”

For “if you pursue analysis properly, you will not be dis' covering anything you did not know before, but you will be finding out the meaning of things you already know.” I believe these lines so true they should be in stone. Now the T.B. specialists have not done so. That is obvious from what they say and do. They have accepted false premises, e.g., a part for the whole, “taking their premises as shoppers take a tram,” as Auden says. They write a mystic language of their own around it, that darkens knowledge though professing clarity. But we claim we have tried to analyse our notions and our facts —and that is our case. To be perfectly candid —that is to be rude in a polite way—or to be more

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exact in as polite a way as possible—the T.B. specialists don't want to analyse their beliefs—they dare not!

If they did so openly, they would be laughed out of court and out of a job, that is, the job they are doing just now. If they could only see that there are plenty of relevant not useless jobs for them to do, at the same job, and there may still be more in the days to come.

And they don’t need to change their designation, only their notions, their behaviour, and their exaggerated idea of their own value.

Their service to society is suffering today from professional and political fabricational excess; they have built them' selves a “crow’s nest” needing only a “sparrow's.”

“To see the world as it is not, is man’s greatest triumph,” Whitehead says. I commend that epigram for their attention to the future welfare of their world. Alas! lam still not satisfied for I can’t make words worthy of the idea. There must be, I often think, in the production of ideas, a ferment which interferes somehow with their bottling. The most we can hope for is to have our ferment bought by those who bake their own bread.

And a philosopher said the other day, “the wisest as well as the most foolish must leave something out. The distinction between wisdom and folly lies in what is omitted.”

Maybe it’s a job for a poet “to transfer emotion (to what I have written) not to transcend thought, but to set up in the reader’s sense a vibration corresponding to what was felt by the writer is the peculiar function of poetry.”

Although not optimistic of converting them openly to our views, we are optimistic that if they deign to consider our views, they will find their beliefs are not so firm or em during as they had supposed. To retain dignity, conversion must of course be gradual; for their self esteem the change must be apparently unconscious to themselves and—what is

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more important—to retain the esteem of others. The truth is—the bad news must be broken gradually that they were wrong.

But I want to end on a kindly note to the specialists, in truth an offer of our services, and it has the wisdom and the magic of the East as its justification. For there is much truth in what the master guru said to the Seeker of the Way.

“Are you,” he said, “a seeker?”

“Yes."

“Then find a guru (a shepherd) and stick to him. Suecess is one-pointed: in many minds there is confusion.” And that is explicit enough, and I trust that what is implied is also implicit, and enough. And I say unto them, “Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams.” (Samuel.)

ORGANIC PHILOSOPHY

is Philosophy? My answer, an old answer, is that “Philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom”.

Now pursuit, with no qualification, means trying to catch something that is elusive —not “catching something”— but just trying to catch something. So “something” being elusive, process in the “something” must also be implied, as well as in you, for if the object pursued “stayed put,” then you, the pursuer, would catch it if it was humanly possible. But you can’t, because it doesn’t stay put —it’s always on the move—that’s the trouble!

And Wisdom means this: “Capacity of judging rightly in matters relating to life and conduct; soundness of judgement in the choice of means and ends,” the opposite of folly.

You must notice it means a lot —in truth the whole gamut, “Birth, copulation, and death”—so wisdom’s worth watching—it’s worth pursuing.

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Now that, I think, is the way an ordinary Kitchen Philosopher approaches Philosophy. But it’s not the Pundit Philosopher's way of course! And, I think, although all that doesn't get us very far, that the ordinary sort of mind wouldn't “mind our company.” He would feel quite at home. Anyway, we know what we are after, or rather we know its name—we have agreed about the Symbol—we have called it Wisdom.

I must now describe what I mean by the word “process.” Process means change; and everything, “every occasion,” is always trying to change into something else. Give a child a piece of paper to play with and he quickly changes it into bits of paper —he analyses it as the scientist does. The small boy does the same with his first bicycle, changes it into bits—if he is allowed to —I know I did. An egg changes into a potential chicken if the hen is pursued successfully, and she usually is—she sees to that —and the fresh egg is changed into a real chicken if the attitude of “sitting still” is pursued assiduously. If not it changes into a rotten egg, and you all know what can happen to a rotten egg. It can change an election and fear of it changes an expression of opinion.

An ape once by monkeying about with its chromosomes changed itself —quite by accidents, they say —into a man although not into a complete man yet. Maybe it would be correct to speak of two apes, with the same notions and attributes, who by mixing, and some way wheedling their chromosomes, and breeding true, made a determined effort to change apedom.

And in what we inaptly call the inorganic world, change also is dominant. A mountain changes, by going down hill with flooded streams full tilt, and full of silt, becomes a plain, and the plain, because of that silt, goes up in the world and becomes a young mountain. An acorn, given half a chance, will change into an oak tree, which man, given an axe, with half a chance, will change into a chair.

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And every time man learns anything new, he changes his mind, although strangely enough there is nothing he hates more than being called changeable. The waxing popularity of the Conservative party, at present, confirms this. The persistence of the name Conservative is a peculiar political phenomenon, and is a conservative absurdity; for it is quite impossible for them to get what they want —no change.

The scientists say the universe as a whole is running down—like the Gadarene swine, I suppose, although it is true that they quarrel about the pace downhill; I notice recently they are inclined to be more optimistic, and have changed down into second gear —so why worry? Anyway it is changing, and maybe some day they may change into reverse, which will bring to all good cheer.

A realisation of the universality of change prehends an' other notion that there is no such state as being alone. In fact I think the state of change demands association with other things, for, if there is always change, something must cause the change, so association must be universal and lone' liness impossible. It's a biological and physiological absurdity. So you can’t be the only pebble on the beach, however much you want to —it’s very annoying! The word “sym' biosis,” which means association for the purpose of mutual benefit, describes what I mean. So the state of symbiosis, being an essential to process in existence, is universal in snacetime and not a mere temporary occasion of convenience like going to bed. But note, process may mean a further complication, or it may mean a further simplification. The new jet engine is the result of process leading to simplification, whereas the turning of steel bars into a machine'gun is a process of elaboration.

Evolving from the thought symbol of process, we get the notion of organic—organicism —organism. I want to com centrate on the word “organic” as meaning the organising of separate parts into a whole, e.g., organising individual efforts

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into one composite and whole effort —for example, to form a party —a festive party, I mean, not a Conservative party.

Or again, take a human organ like a kidney. It can’t live alone on a platter, it requires all sorts of juices, and hormones, and vitamins, for survival. It can only live in an amicable symbiotic relationship with all the other organs which go to make up the composite organism we call man If one part gets out of tune, or misses a beat, or a meal or a drink too often, the whole organism is affected, and feels “not too good.”

Now this condition of organism is essential, not only to the living, but also to what we call the “dead”—the Inorganic. But if our notion is correct, there is really no such state as the Inorganic, so the word “Death” and “Inorganic” are nonsense words. If the molecules that go to make up a wooden chair are in constant state of change and movement—and if words have any meaning—how can we call a chair dead and inorganic? Would you call a mountain dead?—if you do, what do you call it when it reveals the element of surprise we call a volcano? No! there can be no fundamental difference between the dead and the living—between organic and inorganic. Every thing is a process, a creation into something new, of electrons, protons and neutrons processing, and these are just electrical occasions of sorts, processing to satisfaction. That is creativity. And our thoughts, our notions, our feelings, our spirit, are fundamentally the same, just electrons, protons and neutrons living in association and symbiosis, like a hive of bees or a colony of nudists.

So Philosophy, which is the pursuit of wisdom, is just an organised attempt like every other process of creativity, to find out how, when, where, and why “occasions” organise. For that reason, the only realistic Philosophy, that is a Philosophy that realises what the true nature of our

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universe is, must be organic Philosophy; that is, the Philosophy of Organism or process.

And if I now give another definition of Philosophy, namely, that Philosophy is “the science of thinking things together,’’ we will also have evolved a methodology for our Philosophy. That means—or rather I mean—a technique we use to bring all our thoughts, and what we call facts and feelings, together, so that we can learn the whole truth, and so attain wisdom. General Smuts called that “Holism,” but there was nothing new about the notion. It was as old as man, for man has always thought abstractly, although some races of men much more than others. Western man, with the genes of the man of Ancient Greece in his chromosomes, is specially endowed as an abstract thinker.

And now, having established the reality of process, change, organism and creativity —I must qualify and endow “my occasions” with an element of permanency, as well as change—to make my conception conform with organic reality. Now, although a mountain, even a quiet mountain, not a volcano, is in a continual state of flux —processing to change and new creation —the quality of being “mountainy” is eternal; for although a mountain may slide down the mourn tain side —that is, on its own backside —to the plain below, and cease to be a Mount Cook, another mountain will arise in its stead. In fact, that particular mountain, Mount Cook, in a sense lives for ever, as a mountain, although not as the same mountain; and it may be under the sea. So you can see that the poet’s conception of mountains being eternal is correct but not just the way the poet thought. And again, colour is everlasting, and is an eternal body, so any actual entity with any colour in it has at least a colour degree of etemality. That modem obscenity, “a colourful personality,” has a degree of etemality—l hope in Hell!

Geometrical shape is eternal; for example, a triangle. This truth is popularly recognised, curiously enough, by

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society, in the common expression “the eternal triangle.”

The ethical qualities of Good, Bad (unfortunately), Love, Hate (I am afraid so), Absurdity, Kindness, Maternal Love —all these are eternal. They are part of nature, part of man’s spiritual genetic make-up, and although not fundamentally the result of culture, of course capable of increase by cultivation, just as an acorn can be made to change more quickly into an oak tree, but no amount of cultivation can make it grow into a kauri. In the same way, some cabbages, and some men, have the eternal quality of “bigness” in them genetically—quite apart from culture.

Many inorganic things, such as rocks, have a high degree of permanency, and are decidedly conservative.

The different degrees of Permanency in nature are very extraordinary—l mean the visible physical rapidity of change and process. The poor Mayfly, that always succumbs on her honeymoon, to me seems to be the supreme essence of tragedy, although I know the mayfly may understand what I can't, and doesn’t mind, maybe.

Now all these notions are, I think, almost selfevident, but unfortunately I have not yet answered the most difficult question of all. I think I can understand what life means and I can understand creation, if I can understand what an electron is and how it behaves. I can understand order in the universe—l can see it —but who, or what, keeps order in order—that is, keeps order rational and purposive? I believe the only rational answer is God —not the Western Christian conception of the all-powerful God made in Superman’s image, for that, to me, is inconceivable, and absurd, for reasons which I note elsewhere, but rather a limited sort of God, an influence—the God of limitation, a God of persuasion that holds things together, the supreme Gloy, the power that co-ordinates values. Some of that quality of God exists in all men, as well as in God, in some more than

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others, for there have been saints, although I doubt if all the saints have been saints.

I believe the realisation of the reality of God is essential to man’s survival as man. I believe that no Philosophy can be whole, and so organic and realistic, without a conception of God as the supreme eternal body of Persuasion; a God that somehow maintains order in the universe and keeps man out of complete mischief, and gives him a true sense of values —the supreme harmoniser! I believe that belief, or a belief somewhat similar, is genetic and natural to man. It's an instinct that is eternal. That man has always made Gods, is much easier to believe than the belief that God made man. I think God and man must have been created together because they so need each other. I further believe that man makes his God according to the pattern that is most suitable for the contemporary society he lives in. His genes compel him to do so, just as they compel him to do other things, such as love or hate. A rat, made by man a diabetic rat, will ration himself to maintain the correct balance of protein, carbohydrate and fats necessary for health. Man is not a very perfect contraption yet, so it is reasonable to think that his notions of God are slightly sketchy and hardly note' worthy. I think it is quite reasonable to say that man can know nothing of God, but I don’t think it is reasonable to say there is no God.

Of course the name “God” is unfortunate, and associated in our minds with all sorts of ridiculous preconceptions which handicap thought. (It’s an ugly word —the ugliest word I know.) Man’s difficulty in understanding the conception of God will only be overcome when man evolves into a higher mental type of man and becomes less of an ape. He needs the new sense —the sense to know the empty space where spirit lives —as well as more of the kind of sense he already potentially has. That means that he needs Wisdom, and as Philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom, he must pursue

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Philosophy to win even a problematical glimpse of God. And a Philosophy is useless to man if enough men can’t under' stand it, and it is also useless to man if, even when he under' stands it, he doesn’t use it in his everyday life. Like the politicians who make up their minds that certain things are advisable, but don’t make up their minds to do them, when they could quite easily. Philosophy is not a lot of high' falutin’ notions. It is the pick and shovel technique of ordinary living.

What about the Christian Theologians? Well I place them in the same ethical and mental category as the T.B. specialists; in doing so I can’t decide which I insult- —maybe both—maybe neither —for I may have flattered them, and if I have, I hasten to add that I consider them both absurd, and advise you to flee them both. They pose as specialists of subjects which are not special, but general. They should both be avoided as mentors but studied as interesting human phenomena of passing importance.

Now in this attempt, although it hardly needs saying, to explain Organic Philosophy, my approach is at quite a different level of intelligence to that of Professor Whitehead’s.

He is a famous mathematician and also a famous logician. He maintains that logic can be proved to be of the same kind of truth as mathematics. His imaginative spiritual intuitions of the nature of the universe are highly subtle and logical and complete. So much so that his fellow philosophers hesi' tate to cross swords with him.

Some of them follow him, but others dodge him, and say, “how very interesting” and go on cutting their own peculiar capers. Now lam in the habit of talking to school children, and what I say to them is much the same as I have said to you. I know they understand at least something of what I say. I know I can interest them. They have one great advantage over adults, they have no preconceived

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notions on the subject. They are as ignorant of Philosophy, and of the Christian religion, as the newborn child. I believe these children are hungry for religion, or rather, I should say, hungry for a Philosophy that can make them at least appreciate the universe, and from that acquire some belief in spiritual things.

MACKENZIE OF TEKAPO

From the lone shieling of the misty Island,

Mountains divide us and a waste of seas,

Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland

And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.

—(Unknown)

“JF then Socrates, we find ourselves . . . unable to make our discourse in every way wholly consistent and exact you must not be surprised. Nay, we must be well content if we can provide an account not less likely than another; we must remember that I who speak and you who are my audience are but men and should be satisfied to ask for no more than the likely story.” (Plato.)

It was a dark, dreary sort of day, unusual for Tekapo, a Lochaber day I would call it —I was alone and it was late on in the afternoon. I saw an old man sitting on a stone at the side of the road.

I stopped to have a crack with him. I had heard all the stories of Mackenzie and his dog a dozen times, and I have heard better dog'fish stories, and I was now hearing them again. So I wasn’t listening much and I hadn’t looked much at him —I mean into him —and he just gabbled on in the dull sort of way “old identities” do, telling stale tales.

He paused, and I handed him my tobacco pouch, knowing a “borrow a fill” was due any time now, for he had a

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pipe in his hand and it wasn't going. It was a big pipe, but I have seen bigger ones amongst the shepherds in the High' lands.

And then I noticed something that really did interest me —I had been taking a sly look at him as he filled his pipe, a habit of mine, when I give a man a fill —not letting on, of course. He handed me back my pouch—it had been nearly full, now it was nearly empty.

Somehow I was not surprised. I took a straight look at him and said, “Who taught you how to fill a pipe?” He looked straight at me and said slowly, “My father,” and with a sort of cunning'proud note in his voice, “There’s a knack in it.”

“There’s nearly two ounces of my John Cotton in it,” I replied. (Maybe that was a bit bad mannered of me but I was annoyed with myself, for I also knew “the knack.” It hurts when you make a mistake twice.)

“Maybe you come from the Highlands yourself,” he said.

“Maybe,” said I. And then in a demanding voice I pounced. “Why did Mackenzie steal sheep?” And-suddenly' the'scene'changed, like a sea change (as Shakespeare saw), strange and persistent, exciting and tragic; sort of working up for something to happen—or maybe it had happened. I just can’t tell you what, you’re so apt to make up things, even when you’re telling a true story —but maybe you know what I mean.

Yes! in all ways there was change—the man had changed and I had changed, though I didn’t know it. He was no longer an old blithering botachan sitting on the side of the road near Tekapo in the Mackenzie Country—that man had gone, disappeared I don’t know where!

In his place was a bigger man, lean and hard, who as he spoke kept his head bent on the side in a funny sort of way, as if he was hard of hearing or maybe because he wanted to hear more than others hear—maybe the things that have no

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words. His colour was all one colour, the colour of the tussock, of Tekapo, his eyes the strange colour of its loch, so that if he was but a little away, no man could see him. His tongue was my own.

But I, in my mind, saw him elsewhere and the time was long ago, coming out of a bothy near Drumouchter in the Heart of the Highlands of Scotland, where he shepherded for my father, a hirsel of wedders. A man I knew “when I was a boy with never a crack in my heart,” with whom I had much talk, poached with, and lived in his bothy—a man I knew well and liked well, though not so well when he filled his pipe from my pouch, for he also had the knack. Yes! he was that sort of man, too, and his name was Mackenzie.

And somehow I knew that the man I was talking to at Tekapo knew what I knew —what I have just been telling you—and he knew without my telling him, he was that sort of man.

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And then he began to answer my question—“ Why did Mackenzie steal sheep?” Slowly at the start, but getting more and more urgent.

“It was this way,” he said. “I missed things, things I had been used to in Badenoch. You know them!” and he peered at me with his head the way I have been telling you, waiting for an answer.

“Maybe it was the whisky, the braxy, the black puddings and the West coast herrin’ from the West coast man”—l had ventured my own longings.

“No! No! You’re wrong, altogether wrong, that wasn’t it at all, at all. I can get plenty of whisky here, I can still it here —I’ve done it, I’ve made it good and strong —the Merino tastes sweeter than the best braxies and the West coast herrin’, as you should know, was aye rotten before it got through Drumouchter Pass. No! No! It’s no that.” He came nearer me, pushing his words into me, “It’s that there’s no shelter, the wind aye blows from all airts, as it listeth —no wind-tight stane dykes, no heather; no moss! just wire fences! tussock! the bloody matagowrie! and the bloodier Spaniard! that could ruin a man for good.

“No good for man nor beast! no comforts! nothing handy! and on a cold night if a man might be wanting to make himself comfortable, God! it’s cold —your hurdies get scaulded with the cold. How much wind will a wire fence stop?” he snorted. “How would you like to have to use tussock there being no moss to pluck?”—he made me feel it was my fault.

He amazed me, he was so serious and kept on saying the same things in a different way again and again about these intimate, and, to most minds, trivial things.

And then his fire kindled into tune and he sang an old Highland ballad in a funny sort of wistful, sort of half talking way as if I wasn’t there—but there was magic there.

“And I have even heard the English daring a tune on

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the pipes. My God! No English breath should ever dare befoul and choak the pipes. There is no music in the likes of them, no soul, but blasphemy, but blasphemy, and they put kilts over their fat-soft sassenach hurdies. Such as them hasn’t the right to the kilt, only the Highland gentleman has that—nor do the gomerols know how to dress the kilt, backside foremost! too long! too short! and my God these ’good-for-nothing-but-the-short-knife’ even put pants under their kilts.

He was tenser now and rather frightening for he was hating hard and ranting hard. Maybe the thought of the insult to the pipes and kilt had infuriated him. Yes! I honestly believe it was “the panties” mostly that had done it. And I wasn’t surprised at that either. But in all he said nothing offended me.

He paused, and then went on, and he seemed calmer.

“It’s not justice that I should be hurt by insults like that, and they do what they like, squat comfortable and have what they want at hand and I can’t do and get what I want and need. But a Badenoch man is a strong man, and I used my strength and my cunning to level up and took from them what they loved, and wanted, but didn’t need. For I took the sheep of the rich Sassenach—a greedy people that boast of their sheep, and a poor people.

“And was it stealing to drive starving Sassenach sheep over the range, by secret passes to pastures new, that only I knew? Only I had the wit, and eyes to find the passes, and only I the guts to use them!

“Besides I did what the Highlander has always done, left his glen and with God’s blessing gone down over the passes, to take all he needed on four legs—and that was what he could drive conveniently. Yes! I did as our fathers did in Badenoch. And it made me feel again a Highland gentleman.”

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He was right. Yes! gentlemen and raiders these High' landers were to a man. And they were more cultured than those they raided and always very civil in deed —if it hadn't four legs—and polite in the tongue. And he made me feel —and it didn’t surprise me—in all he was saying that maybe “his vices leaned to virtue’s side.” It was growing dark now, so I had a look at the time. Good God! Good God! It was 80 years slow.

It was Mackenzie Mackenzie of Tekapo himself the sheep stealer, I had been hearing and talking to, and he had stolen —my time —my time away. That he had only come back to borrow a fill was my first thought, if I had a thought at all, for the trivial will surface at such moments.

Then I looked up, and he was gone. And he hadn’t his dog with him, I can swear to that, and he never said a word to me about his dog—and it’s not likely the story about his dog is true. Then I felt in my pocket, and my tobacco pouch was almost empty. That helped me a lot. And that was the only time in my life I was glad my pouch was nearly empty —so that tells you how queer I was feeling.

And “You who are my audience are but men, and should be satisfied to ask for no more than the likely story.’’

Requiem

Mackenzie of Tekapo won. He stole fame that is the everlasting satisfaction, from the men of the “fat'soft hurdies” as he stole their sheep, and without their knowing -—so this time they’ll never catch him, or steal from him his fame.

No! not even a Mackenzie could get away with the Mackenzie Country. It’s his for ever. For has he not given his name “Mackenzie” to one of the most beautiful and wonderful places in the world, and, what is better still, a grand place for ill people, for if they can put up with the

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lack of conveniences and hardships Mackenzie told me about, and I have told you?

And his Highland fire and bitterness, now surely tamed and softened, by the inevitable caresses of the worm, to but a ghost of what it was, gives place more oft I think to a mood of Highland dreariness. For I can hear him sing, another tune —sadder maybe, but more beautiful.

“But I hae dream’d a dreary dream,

Beyond the Isle o’ Sky,

I saw a dead man win a fight

And I think that man was I.”

Alas! we put parrots —the most interesting of our birds —behind bars, and so we often do to the most interesting of men. When I was a boy, my father was instrumental in getting an old sheep stealer arrested for stealing our sheep, a lot of them that time. My father could, and had, put up with his stealing a few at odd times for many years. The sentence was a savage one of twenty years, and my father spent years of his life trying to get the man out —but he failed—and he felt horribly guilty.

Like Mackenzie of Tekapo—the sheep stealer of the Mackenzie Country—the old sheep stealer of Dallas, Morayshire, went to prison. Could anything be more awful than the sheep stealers of Tekapo and of Dallas in prison, not dead but dying?

But I’ll never stop again for a crack with an old botachan sitting on a stone at the side of the road at Tekapo with a big empty pipe in his hand —even if he’s there, and I have a full pouch of John Cotton in my pocket, and plenty more at home. No! not even for the Mackenzie Country would Ido that. Is it likely I would risk my time again doing a foolish thing like that? Later on maybe I’ll enjoy a crack and a smoke with him —there’ll be plenty of time, so they say.

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NURSES IN A CO-OPERATIVE CLINIC MEDICAL SERVICE

An Address delivered by Dr. G. M. Smith before the Bay of Islands Branch of the Registered Nurses’ Association.

J HAVE written so much, and talked so much more, of the Hokianga Medical Service, I blush to mention it.

For try hard though I do, I can be but a bore, like all who ever have dared, or ever will dare, to do what others don’t and talk persuasively about it.

To put seeds in the ground and wait twenty-five years for the harvest has been my lot in life. But this time your Association is responsible. You selected my subject realizing maybe, that no matter what, I would slop over inevitably like a tidal bore to the Hokianga Medical Service, inundating all other subject matter. Or is it rather because the situation has so changed—for I am talking today to Nurses who, whether you love the Hokianga Service or hate it —will have to practise it ultimately if you remain in New Zealand and live by District Nursing.

Of course you will improve it beyond recognition, and so in time be able to forget your humble origin, and regain what custom calls your self-respect—and I have another name for. I offer that as solace to those of you who need it.

As for us, we are overcome by our unaccustomed respectability through our prospective association with you.

Somehow I feel my second explanation of your attitude to me, and all I stand for, is probably the correct one. Alas! what is inevitable needs must be acceptable. And it may further help those of you who are too fearful to be philosophical, to know that we in Hokianga fear the apparently inevitable extension of our methods far more than you possibly can do.

For now we have to adventure afresh into the unknown. And we have been getting along so well in our isolation and

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ignominy. We have been such a happy family. Our work has been appreciated and praised by more than 99 per cent, of our people. And great people have said nice things about us, both here and overseas.

So we believe you have much to gain and nothing to lose; we have so little to gain and so much to lose. A spot of respectability! What the hell is the good of that to us?

Additions to a family are not always unmixed blessings. It takes time and patience to educate and accustom the unaccustomed to co-operation, to living and working in a completely co-operative community.

The tragic irony of our new situation is that it is all our own fault. If we had only kept quiet and not boasted you would never have known about it. Instead we voluntarily and unselfishly hoisted ourselves with our own petard for the sake of others. And we were so happy—and now only smugness survives.

We should have remembered what Walt Whitman said:

“It is provided in the essence of things

That from any fruition of success

No matter what, shall come forth

Something to make a greater struggle necessary.”

And today for the first time in thirty years I speak to a gathering of Nurses in Kaikohe not as an advocate of a cause nor as a pagan in others’ eyes, in the dock pleading to save his heresy—my erstwhile roles —but as a mere interpreter, and sort of comforter, translating for your consideration the new conception of what a Health Service should be —and we have.

The first stone I turn for your revelation is our foundation and our key stone. It reveals a service completely cooperative with salaried nurses, doctors, and technicians, all working together. Note well, I don’t expose a nice tidy drowsy state service with no loose tags, centrally and bureau-

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cratically controlled so that when Wellington says “turn” we all turn “daring not even a whimper—lest it disturb father's sleep.” No! No! God forbids that kind of emasculated, never-changing service to all free men and women whom he loves.

We are far too restless bedmates, and far too proud for that in Hokianga. We refuse to co-habit under such terms however good the fees. Our service is quite different. It is controlled by a Board selected by our own community, who are sufficiently modest and thus enlightened, to realise that they, being laymen, must of necessity be largely indebted to doctors and nurses for guidance in the running of the show.

We are also under certain obligations to the Department of Health, but I can truthfully tell you we have not found these obligations too burdensome to bear. In fact we have had much assistance. We are dependent, and I want to say much indebted to Miss Lambie for the selection of our Nurses.

Some of you may think that a dual control of the nurses is inept, but in practice we have not, generally speaking, found that.

Maybe a staff, who keenly wants a service to work well, will make it work well in spite of an inherent fault. None of us want the control of nurses altered. So call yourselves public health nurses, civil servants, or what you will, as long as nurses do the work as well as ours have done in Hokianga, all will be well. I know lam satisfied, the Board is satisfied —they say so —the people are satisfied —they say so—and you can ask, here and now, our nurses in your midst. They will speak for themselves —they always do: I would not have it otherwise.

Let me give you an example of how it works, a real one, not a fictitious one. If a doctor, no matter who, in our service tries to foist work he should do on a nurse, the nurse

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has but to state her case to the Director of the Service, and if her complaint is just, its cause is removed.

I hasten to say that if the “foist” is vice versa, its cause is equally quickly removed. It is meet that sauce for the gander should also sauce the goose, be she ever so tender, and ornate. But if the decision of the Director is not acceptable, then the matter is handed over to the Board to settle.

What work do we do?

Our nurses, of course, do the usual Public Health routine work. And, by the way, the suggestion that in North Auckland we should have what have been designed “Preventive Nurses” and “Curative Nurses,” and that never the twain should meet (but to exchange blows) is obviously ridiculous to anyone who knows even a mote of what a communal medical service should be. Anyway who could love a pure preventive nurse!

Our Nurses also do the Plunket work —a special Plunket Nurse is a redundancy in our service.

In addition to the ordinary domiciliary work, and school work, our Nurses attend at clinics and clinic hutments. Each settlement has (or soon will have) its own clinic hutment. These clinic hutments have a waiting room and all necessary equipment and conveniences. They are well built and finished, and are quite attractive.

The doctor attends with the Nurse once a week. (The weekly attendance of the doctor has only recently been started.) These clinics save our staff a great deal of house-to-house visiting. They are very well attended, and a district that does not have one clamours till it gets one.

Our nurses live in the main centres in resident clinics. I have brought you a plan of our new resident clinics, which are shortly to be built at Broadwood, Mangamuka and Rawene. I hope you like the plan. We, I can assure you, are very proud of it.

A great deal of consideration and care has been taken

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with this plan. Our nurses have been consulted on every point. Nothing was finalised till they were consulted and satisfied. And not only Health Department officials, but our Public Works engineers, architects, our County Engineer, all have assisted. We have also had much assistance from the Hon. Wm. Grounds, who has acted as our ambassador in Wellington.

If this plan is not as nearly perfect as it should be it is the fault of a great number of people. I want personally to thank all those who have lent us their brains.

These clinics (we have already a very nice one at Kohukohu) are capable of dealing with cases that elsewhere would be sent to hospital.

And clinics—in addition to their usual functions — should, we think, be used as a sort of cultural centre for their district. They are as you can see from the plan, designed for that purpose, the wide verandah providing sitting room for a class, or meeting.

And we are fortunate in having secured ideal sites. We want them to be models of what a home in the country should be like, a norm for our people to measure up to, and imitate. They won’t, I promise you, be or look the least like the modern genteel suburban butter-box residence —so neat, and so hideous. They are Hokianga country houses, and in harmony with climate and locus. They should be made real country houses—with a large garden, fruit trees, vegetables, and flowers, all higgledy piggledy. And who is going to look after them? I hear you murmur. If you care to visit the Kohukohu clinic our nurses will show you round their property, and livestock, and answer your questions. What they have done themselves, and what they have been clever enough to get others to do for them, you all can do. Kohukohu is very proud of their clinic.

By the way, I intend at some propitious moment to suggest to the powers that be that our nurses should have an

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entertaining allowance. Political ambassadors, and politicians do, so why not our Public Health cultural ambassadors who are so far more important?

Then, when pundits visit we can do them in style, and melt their stony departmental hearts with our generosity. I, once —it was long ago —melted just such a stony heart (at the expense of his stomach) with a surfeit of luscious rock melons, and our community are still enjoying great benefit —the direct result of the solvent action of those melons. (Alas! that heart is now still; but I have no reason to think that had anything to do with my rock melons.)

Peaches are good. They grow well in North Auckland, but not in Wellington.

So much for the aesthetic and persuasive influences of our service, from which, as some of you may not think them so important as I do, I had better turn to our more materialistic functions.

I think our nurses are best described as general practitioner nurses (note: not general practitioner’s nurses —a style I will refer to later). They do all sorts of jobs for all sorts and conditions of people, and sometimes for animals: e.g., I remember

“One day of great scurry

I caught our Nurse Murray

In rig of gown and mask and gloves

Plunketing a new born pig,

With bottle, buttock ointment, teat,

Beside her all compleat.”

And another day travelling with one of our nurses I noticed the back of her car was more packed even than usual with stuff. She kept stopping at various houses delivering what I naturally thought were parcels of medicine. Alarmed at their size (some were huge), and fearful that this nurse was trying to out-do even the 7/6 doctors in prodigality at the expense of the Social Security Funds, I demanded full

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details of the parcels’ contents. With a grin she explained. My parcels of medicine” contained not medicine, but meat. Now the Maoris in that district—and many other districts are the same—get, I regret to say, a very inadequate meat supply. This nurse, believing as I do, that meat is usually better than any medicine, prescribed for her patients accordingly. I hasten to add that the meat was paid for out of Maori family allowance moneys, and not out of Social Security’s sore stretched and strained pharmaceutical benefit funds. I commend our nurse’s prescriptions to the attention of all Social Security doctors, as well as to all nurses.

Shakespeare called that “Kitchen medicine,” and commended it as the best of all medicines.

And scientific observers are emphatically asserting in the current scientific journals that for generations doctors and nurses have failed to keep many sick people alive because they failed to give them sufficient animal proteins—and that means beef and chops—and I believe that discovery, which is no discovery, means more for humanity than the discovery of penicillin. So let us call them in future butcher medicine.

But in addition to butcher medicine our nurses prescribe when needed, and under supervision of course, those simples” which nurses can be trusted with such as sub phanilamides, nembutal, penicillin, cod liver oil in gallons, vaseline in buckets, and Blauds pills by the thousand. But not, I particularly want you to know, cough mixtures, dian rhoea mixtures, rheumatism mixtures, blood tonics and such like placebos—those pernicious, persisting overhangs of an ignorant humbugging past still asserting itself and function' ing as the main armamentarium of many a district nurse, and for that matter many a doctor’s prescription.

Where family allowances are being wasted on rubbish, a nurse goes to the local storekeeper and asks for his help, which I am glad to say she usually gets.

Now compare the duties of a general practitioner’s nurse

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—the type I call “sponge and enema” nurse, because that is about all they are allowed to do, their very uselessness being their usefulness to the doctors.

I had the privilege recently of seeing a draft of a set of model rules drawn up by a Hospital Board for the guidance and control of their district nurses, working under the general practitioners of the district. There were pages and pages of them, and the essence of their castrating rules was, that a nurse must do nothing for a sick person—no matter how sick, no matter how urgent —that could possibly directly, or indirectly, deprive a doctor of a fee, or kudos, or an excuse, or a comfort. They went even further, for they protected phantom doctors, for the rules applied even when no doctor was available for love or money. And that may help you to see that a service such as ours is quite impossible with nurses working under private fee-earning doctors.

It is essential, I repeat, that the medical service be a salaried one and it is of supreme importance that those politicians and heads of departments who shape our destinies should understand that. Some of them don't, I fear.

How many people a doctor, working with nurses, as we do, can look after, is often asked us, and, for some reason I simply can’t understand, our estimate keeps being ignored by the powers that be.

I assert with a confidence based on a life-time experience that “One doctor with three Nurses working from clinics as we do, even in a district notoriously difficult to travel in as ours is, can give a twenty-four hour clinic and domiliciary service of high standard that is satisfactory to the general public—that includes public health work, and the various activities which we now call social medicine —for 5,000 people. I repeat, for 5,000 people. And no one is overworked. And note half our population are Maoris, who require, and get from us more than twice the attention our Europeans require and get.

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And in many parts of New Zealand today with a doctor for every 1,500 to 2,000 people, country people living but a few miles outside quite “considerable” county towns often can’t for love or money get a doctor or nurse to visit them in a case of urgency in their own homes; and when they com suit a doctor in the towns, have to wait for hours in a crowded consulting room, reading “Home Chat,” Yank Digests (not the latest) and yesterday’s daily paper, or by way of variety (if their luck is in) straining ears to catch the whispered, exciting, obstetrical, gynaecological, confidential interchanges of psychopathic females, victims of the very style of medicine they wait, poor things, so patiently for to “repeat.”

What these “overworked” doctors do with their time, and say to patients, passes my comprehension; and why the patients wait, and wait, is still further beyond my comprehension.

In our service a nurse unit costs £5OO a year, a doctor unit £1,500 to £2,000. Compare that to the cost of four (often five) Social Security doctors, who must, at a very low estimate, cost £3,000 a year each, to the country.

Now it has been said, and said rather often, by some nurses, with more spinsterly tartness than aptness, that our nurses are just half-pie doctors —7/6 nurses! Why! They diagnose! and that Good God, by a nurse is the sin against the Holy Ghost —the supreme sin; the sin of sins—as preached by doctors to nurses, and by pundit nurses to nurses, certainly since the time of Hippocrates, and probably for long before.

And today, so deeply has the sense of this eternal sin been inculcated into the very marrows of nurses, that all nice nurses now echo their master’s horror—Good God, they diagnose, they diagnose/

Now there is a belief held by the Australian Aborigines that if women or children eat an emu's egg they die —

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“deadly poison, deadly poison” they chant and refrain. The male adult strangely enough (or is it strange?) can eat emu egg with impunity, in fact thrives on it, and considers them the greatest delicacy. Unfortunately they are often rather scarce.

Now the facts for the belief are correct. Women certainly died after eating, or rather being caught eating, an emu’s egg. But the explanation? Well! Actually this is what happened. A buck Aborigine knocked his woman on the head for eating his favourite rarity, an emu egg. That happened probably thousands of years ago and today most of the women of the tribe, and the children, I imagine, genuinely hold the belief —the result of a dogma—that emu’s eggs are deadly poison for their sex and their children. The few who don’t, and dare to eat an emu’s egg —well they do die (it sounds like Russia).

Their belief is, of course, but a myth, but, like all myths, purposive for some group, or individual, to gain power and privilege.

Now I suggest that the horror of “the nurse sin against the Holy Ghost” expressed by some nurses at the very idea of a nurse daring to diagnose that a child is suffering from “a cold in the head,” and not from lobar pneumonia, has been brought about by the doctors with the same purposive cunning, and dogma, as the buck Aborigine used for the solution of the problem of the scarcity, and his great love, of emu’s eggs. Both are myths, both are purposive, both are greedy, both are leg-pulls.

I am disappointed with some nurses, I am very sorry to say. Yes! our nurses diagnose, and in this way-listen!

“Tommy Elsewhere” had a pain in his tummy —worser than he ever had before. Tommy’s mother was rather worried, so she sent for Granny. (No good sending for the Elsewhere district nurse, she is not allowed to attend sick people, she is only a preventive nurse.) No doctor was avail-

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able at the moment and it would have made no difference anyway because Granny, who, by the way is infallible with children’s ailments, got in first —they always do when there is no nurse. “Poof! Tommy has been eating rubbish,” said Granny. “Give him a big dose of Castor”—and she kissed Tommy, her favourite grandson, and went her way.

And next day Tommy was sent to hospital with a rup' tured appendix and general peritonitis, and all that was too much for Tommy.

Now contrast the fate of “Tommy Elsewhere” with the lot of “Tommy Kohukohu.” Tommy Kohukohu also had a pain in his tummy worser than he ever had before. Tommy Kohukohu’s mother did not wait five minutes. She did not send for Granny, who lived next door, she sent for the district nurse (Kohukohu nurses will go and see any' body for anything and for nothing) who was round in a shot, and (now some of you had better hold tight on to your chairs in case you faint) — diagnosed. Yes! diagnosed acute appendicitis. She used the knowledge she had acquired in her training. She did the right thing for Tommy, and pre* vented others doing the wrong thing. Tommy Kohukohu was in hospital within the hour. Tommy recovered—but he had acute appendicitis.

Now suppose the nurse’s diagnosis was wrong and Tommy had nothing much the matter with him, what then! Well! it would not matter to Tommy; it would not matter to the nurse.

For our nurses don’t run risks with people’s lives by catering to nurse’s vanity. They know jolly well what happens if they make that sort of mistake; and they know they won’t be sworn at if their mistake is through overcaution.

And they always get a doctor when in doubt —quicker I dare say than nurses can anywhere else in New Zealand, because it is our doctor’s job to help the nurses—he is paid

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to. I have never heard of anyone having much difficulty in finding me—and that is my misfortune.

Our nurses get more help, and have to take less responsibility than any other district nurse doing domiciliary work in New Zealand. Miss McNab, who recently spent a week going round with our nurses told me that, and she ought to know.

Yes! “Our nurses do diagnose.” I repeat —“they do diagnose” (they wouldn’t be much good if they didn’t), and so does every parent, every Granny, and every next door neighbour in New Zealand before they send for a doctor, or decide not to —and that is the point I want to make, very clearly.

And I think the diagnosis of a properly trained nurse is more likely to be correct than Granny’s. Don’t you agree?

I don’t think our nurses are overworked; but ask them! At Kohukohu the doctor takes all night calls. They do practically no midwifery; they can get a weekend off when they want it.

Our nurses have got to be first-class —duds won’t last long. Not too old, not too young —for “Ripeness is all,” true of peaches, so true of nurses. They must be trained in good modern schools, and be willing to re-train in our quite different school, and continue that training for the whole of their nursing career. For changing your ideas is synonymous with learning. And our general practitioner nurses have many new tricks to learn, and keep on learning, for the programme is constantly changing as knowledge grows.

Constant contact with the Hospital centre is essential. Our fortnightly meetings would be better weekly meetings. At them nurses report on their work, see their cases in Hospital, boast of their triumphs, weep over their failures. They are given a brief resume of current medical literature in tune with their work, and collect their fortnightly supplies.

Our nurses, we hope, in future will be engaged for three

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years. It takes them —however experienced and well trained —six months to learn their new job.

It would also be an advantage if a newcomer worked along with an experienced nurse for a few months. It takes time for a nurse contaminated by the propaganda of the Health Conscious School to get the Philosophy of Health Unconsciousness into her bones.

Some say that a “Doctor Only” medical service is superior to a Doctor cum Nurse Service, and if you have plenty of doctors you don’t need nurses.

Personally I am just about helpless without a nurse, and feel safer with two. Many things a Nurse can do, and does, no doctor would ever do; not because he can’t but because he won’t. Doctors are rather like Gods —aloof from the small things. And the small things are so important.

And this is the point: If a doctor has nurses to help him, he does not use his time doing work a nurse can do as well, and often better, than he can, even though he did it. So he can devote all his time to his true work—that only he can do. And that is the real explanation of why a doctor with three nurses to help, working as we do in co-operation, can do more work, and do it better, than four doctors without nurses. I reiterate: “Our doctors don't do nurses' work, and our nurses dont do doctors’ work.”

In Hokianga there would be a riot if nurses were removed and doctors replaced them. You nurses must know what I mean; but politicians and doctors, who have had no personal experience of domiciliary medical services, and think they know and talk as if they did, may easily remain unconvinced.

Like Johnston:

“Johnston could see no bicycle would do.

Your bear yourself, and the machine as well.”

And the financial argument of our cheapness leaves the politicians cold —it always does I notice when it suits them.

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They don’t pay —we do.

Be free women and scorn, with a great scorn, the status of a doctor’s hand-maiden, or a bureaucracy’s bondswoman.

Remember “the good soldier Schweik.” (Schweik was just an officer’s nurse, his batman.)

“I’d like to know what you think you're up to, Schweik; you porpoise you!”

“Beg to report, Sir, I don’t think at all.”

And another day:

“Beg to report, Sir, I'm Schweik who the Chaplain lost at cards.”

and that was Schweik’s way of life.

And I think there can be so much “Beg to report, Sir, I don’t think at all,” in a nurse's life that there is time for nothing more.

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Grace notes are the notes a (riper adds to a common tune, to ma\e that tune his own.

GRACE NOTES

The Red Cockatoo

I am asked in rather a suspicious, almost sneering, tone sometimes, “Why do you live in the backblocks?”

Here is the reason, and I am sorry it is rather long' winded, but money affairs are often like that. Now in Scot' land the ordinary medical fee was about two shillings. When I came to New Zealand I couldn’t help thinking ten and six' pence was an awful lot, and I found I was losing money by not asking for my fee. So I bought a parrot from Johnnie Walker—the bird shop in Auckland —and taught it to say “Ten and sixpence, please,” and it did, and it helped me quite a lot. And one day a man said: “Why don’t you go to Symonds Street . . . ?” and modesty forbids record of the rest.

And so, another day, when on holiday in Auckland, I walked up and down the shady side of Symonds Street at doctors’ hours, and saw for myself that business was very brisk, though I kept wondering if the patients always rang the right bell for their particular pains; and if the wrong one, were they directed to the right one? But that did not put me off. I was young and saw visions then —very egocentric ones.

So I came back to my backblocks and began qualifying for Symonds Street by teaching Johnnie the parrot to say “two guineas please”, without blushing, but he wouldn’t. I then tried the golden mean “one guinea please”—l thought I could just manage on that —but he wouldn’t. For years I persevered, but “ten and sixpence please,” was Johnnie’s limit.

Was Johnnie stupid or scrupulous or just wise? I don’t

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know; but I do know that not all who practise in Symonds Street should. And then the other day a curious thing happened. A famous New Zealand surgeon on holiday came to borrow a bit of sticking plaster—he had cut his finger. As he left with the plaster, Johnnie, from his usual perch by the front door, said “ten and sixpence please!” which was very bad mannered of Johnnie (that’s the worst of all kinds of parrots —they can’t discriminate), especially as I had made up my mind not to charge for the plaster, for Doctor don’t eat Doctor—in that barefaced way. I sensed at once that the surgeon didn’t like Johnnie. He asked me particularly if the cage was quite secure, but I didn’t grasp the significance of his question till by chance I read this old Chinese poem —“The Red Cockatoo”—dated 9th century A.D., and translated by Arthur Waley.

“Sent as a present from Annam

A red cockatoo.

Coloured like the peadvtree blossom,

Speaking with the speech of man.

And they did to it what is always done

To the learned and eloquent and honest.

They took a cage with stout bars

And shut it up inside.”

Of course!—it was stupid of me—the surgeon was afraid Johnnie might escape and go to Symonds Street, and perched amongst the “goldfinches” high up above the nuts on one of those lovely chestnut trees —so symbolical of Symonds Street, the Harley Street of New Zealand —would preach the horrible heresy of a ten and sixpenny fee —a ten and sixpenny fee in Symonds Street —the street of the specialists—God’s struth —what blasphemy!—what next!

“I’ll wring your bloody neck,” or something like that they'd mutter, but something like this they’d say: “A reduced fee would not be to our patients' advantage”—and the crease down their striped pants would increase.

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Then late one night, all conscious of their common but elusive foe, they'd huddle and cuddle together, a thing they had never done before, and decide to do poor Johnnie in, by the light of the moon.

For there’s no sense in a sense of humour about yourself in Symonds Street. And the first part of this story is all true, and the last part all lies but eventual.

And I have had much help and kindness from Symonds Street, but how can they know without a critic? And you only tease whom you love.

So Johnnie and I stayed on in the backblocks (and civilisation), and probably always will. Anyway we are getting a bit old for somersaults, if not for motley—and I have little itch for the very superfluous, e.g., collars and ties —the words sound sinister —suggesting “chains” —“rusty chains”—“leading chains.” And they just might hold another huddle and cuddle meeting in Symonds Street. Besides, listen to the poet:

“Great God! I'd rather be

A pagan suckled in a creed outworn,

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn.”

And listen to the proser Bunyan:

“The way to the celestial city lies right through this town”—and implicit in the text is a warning, for your soul’s sake, not to tarry too long in the town, but journey on to the open country —making North for Spirits Bay maybe—the best take-off, so the Maoris say, for a happy landing in the celestial city. And I don’t know why the good God made country people so much better than town people—we don’t deserve so much superiority, but I’m grateful.

Collingwood’s New Leviathan (26-77)

“What do you call it the second time round?” said an 18th century squire to a landscape gardener who walked

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him round the garden he had laid out, and drew attention to a certain feature with the words, “This is what we call ‘The element of surprise’.” The answer, I think—though Collingwood doesn’t say so—is Disappointment.

Well! I think that’s a good story, though a difficult story the first time round, for it exposes our style of thought. The second time round I knew that it didn’t. We don’t go the same way round the second time —we make a new circle and approach the Element of Surprise by a different path. Each time we iterate we change our itinerary, and the element of surprise arrives when our readers find themselves up the familiar garden path again, having approached it from a different angle.

For Historians and Philosophers are not really so interested in the final element of surprise, in their garden of posits and poses, as in the composite beauty of their approaches.

An Ominous Phenomenon for Me

I am but a timid sort of phenomenonalist—sometimes an Omenalist—when somehow that Empty Space (the likely haunt of omens) in man’s perception somehow to me seems very ominous indeed. Is “Dread” the word? I wonder!

Listen! Somewhere Professor Whitehead, speaking of the importance of relative location of occasions as prehensions to occasions, and using the analogy of the festive occasion of a dinner party, said “Its truth was recognised by all good hostesses, when deciding who was to sit next to who at their dining table.”

A recent occasion, however, in our hospital shows that some bodies, like colours, are eternal and location can’t change them, and refutes as an absolute truth Professor Whitehead’s notion. I suppose Professor Whitehead would

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retaliate by saying, “All facts have ragged edges—and that is but a rag.”

However, here is an occasion you can judge for yourselves. A certain man —not a woman, which makes the occasion even a rarer phenomenon, almost a noumenon — never stopped talking and, needing no Gallup, was accepted by all as the eternal bore of our vicinity. Having driven an unfortunate bedmate in his two-bed ward to near murder, he had to be removed. He was next bed-mated with a rather ill, bedridden deaf mute, who had, by a delightful coincidence (we thought), just been admitted to hospital.

Next morning the Sister in charge found to her horror the deaf mute alive, but “just alive.” Mutely he handed her a trembling note in trembling script which read—

“For God’s sake give me a slab in the morgue, that old B. has kept me awake all night writing notes to me.”

Won by a Head, on the Whip

(A Story for Bridie)

“Doctor! Doctor!” (I was going to Broadwood show — crossing my car and the pontoon was waiting.) It was Mrs Tony, an old Maori woman, a very old friend of ours. She went on.

“Tony jumped the paddock fence, just like the bull, just like the bull, Doctor” (and in a whisper), “Tony no good, Tony no good. I know, I know that. Oh! that Lily (age 16), she look like the lamb. She the devil, she the devil.” (Then using her fingers)—“ The high school Maori boy, the pakeha launch man, Moses, etc.” (she used up all her fingers), 'and now my Tony —my Tony.” (And in a whisper), “Tony no good, no good. I know. Doctor, I know.”

Her poise, her words, her expression—those flashing

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eyes —her gesticulations were superb. She was horribly upset —she had tears in her eyes, but never for one moment did she lose her great and natural dignity.

“Come on to the show with me,” I said. She hesitated —said she had no hat. I told her to buy one at the store from Newt —I would give her two minutes. She did it easily, and away we went.

At intervals on the trip I heard the story again. “Just like the bull, just like the bull,” was the refrain. (She had no children, by the way.) She enjoyed the show. She never told me what she was going to do, and I never asked, and she asked for no help—her manners were perfect. She was very brave for she loved her old fool bull. About a fort' night later I heard clear ringing, very ringing

“Doctor! Doctor!”—it was Mrs. Tony, and she was leading her Tony by the hand, and he came like a lamb, not a bull. And then she told me

“That devil Lily—That devil Lily! Oh She bad, she unfaithful to my poor old Tony.” (And she patted Tony’s hand) —“My poor Tony. I caught her, I caught her Doctor, in bed with the Maori boy in Omanaia, and I beat her, I beat her, I beat her with the stock whip—with the stock whip Doctor —she unfaithful to my poor Tony. My poor old Tony.”

Her words expressed only indignation and sorrow and love, but her voice screamed triumph and vengeance in silence, I fear. (I heard plainly the swish and crack of a stock whip, and the wails and screams of puir Lily—l saw weals now purple on pure petals—Arum Lily)! And Tony stood still, holding her hand, saying not a word. Just smiling in a silly way I thought, and looking distinctly neuter.

Then with a wave of farewell, and the winning smile and poop-roll of victory, up the straight—the sunny side — of the village triangle, with her hand on his withers, she led her bull, now but a working bullock, back to the yoke and his

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home paddock—from his gambols in young pastures —for to admire.

It was a magnificent gesture. I noticed, by the way, she said nothing about Tony being no good this time.

Now when we meet, we just wink, and I know as she knows—the home paddock is tight.

She won by a head on the whip.

By “Prehensions,” Whitehead means that everything enjoys the privilege of somehow absorbing what is outside itself into its own being, like unto a plant absorbing nourishment. It is a universal energy exchange, with no peculiar privilege, a rule being that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. It is a meeting, not a union.

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The Element of Surprise from Different Angles

“We shall not pursue these considerations further, but leave it each one in particular to practise for himself the art of coming back to this thought from the most diverse angles, using his imagination to hit upon the strangest cases of relativity and situation in order thereupon to cast up the account.” That was what Soren Kierkegaard said about a notion that concerns me so often in this note book. The explanation of course is that a man can change his bonnet but not his bees.

And that is also the explanation of our saying “of course” of course.

Different Races, Different Graces

One of our Maoris had beaten up his wife more than he usually did, and rather more than she liked. Our nurse salved the bruises, and to salve the spiritual hurt, made the wife seek redress through the newly constituted body of Maori elders to whom the Government has relegated the former police responsibility for dealing with such cases.

So the court duly assembled with all the requisite judicial ritual and solemnity. Many witnesses were heard, including our nurse. The hearing lasted over two hours. It was conducted, nurse thought, in an orderly and dignified manner. “They all enjoyed it,” nurse said.

The husband was fined one pound. Then they rang for a taxi and all the judicial elders and the wife-beater left for the nearest pub, ten miles away, to spend the pound fine. No one bore malice and all had an equal share of the beer, including the wife-beater, of course!

The pakeha crowd assembled to hear the case—the Maoris told them they were going to the pub to blow the fine —were shocked to their smug humourless marrows.

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Now hear Lawrence of Arabia tell of a grander scene, in more gracious manner the same story, in his Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Auda, the famous old fighting leader of the desert Arabs, had fought a large body of Turks, and in a glorious camel charge had exterminated the Turks to a Turk. Old Auda was satiated with killing. He had won a consider' able victory for Allenby and the British, and then to Lawrence’s horror Auda was suspected of treachery by the British.

“The crowd (British headquarters) wanted bookheroes," Lawrence writes, “and could not understand how more human old Auda was because after battle and murder his heart yearned towards the defeated enemy, now subject at his final choice to be spared or killed: and therefore never so lovely."

And the two stories, which are one story, go to show the mysterious unity of good and evil on all occasions.

Knowing the Maori

When you talk to Maoris it is the unspoken, unheard language which matters and has the truth in it. That is the real communication. There is nothing really peculiar about that. It is the usual, but usually unrecognised form of conversation you carry on with Departmental Heads or Members of Parliament —the language of interpretation and of deception—the power of intuition—God’s gift to Man, and maybe I should include some dogs, and, I am certain, our parrot Johnnie.

To receive “the unspoken truths” requires long experience to tune into —it requires a fine adjustment and a sensitivity that all don’t possess, and which some never can acquire. To know the Maori language may be an advantage, but I doubt it, for it is reasonable to believe that a

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Maori can humbug better in his own language than in Eng' lish. Let me give you an example of what I mean.

One beastly wet, dark night I insisted on some Maoris taking a sick woman into hospital. We had to cross a creek —with more boulders than water in it —carrying the patient on a not very good improvised stretcher. The Maoris were sulky and kept chattering away in Maori. I knew they didn’t care two hoots about the patient (she was not a loved one—only an erring one and to them a nuisance). Nor did they love the dark and the cold, the pouring rain, and the boulders in the creek. Nor did I, as I stalked in front—shut out, so the Maoris thought, by language from their minds. They had annoyed me and were still annoying me, so suddenly I turned on them with “That’s a lot of damned lies! just damned lies!”

“Golly! Doctor, didn’t know you knew Maori.”

“Oh! I understand the Maori,” I replied.

I don’t know what they understood by that but I had no trouble with them after that. The whole atmosphere seemed to change. Although it went on raining as hard as ever, we were all quite cheerful.

Listening in to the House and reading the daily press I am certain that the Pakeha Members don’t know much about Maoris. I am equally certain that the Maori Members don’t unburden their knowledge of their own people in the House! Why should they?—the Pakeha don't know—they will never know; they think they do—but they think wrong. I know Pakehas who understand the Maori far, far better than any Maori I know. They just happen to be more in' tuitive, more imaginative—yes! more highly evolved people than the Maoris. Gordon Coates knew the Maoris.

On the other hand, I know Pakehas who speak Maori well—but understand them not at all. Pakehas who write about Maoris usually don’t —maybe I have been unfortunate in my selection—l haven't read all such books, but any I

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have, I know the writers had never succeeded in tuning in to the Maori mind.

I don't know the Maori “how” but I usually know what the Maori will do, and I know what the Maori “can do.” The false sentimentality of most of our orators and writers makes me, who prefer the Maori in some ways to the Pakeha, almost dislike the Maori as much as I hate those who speak or write about them.

A Man’s Cosmology

We all have some kind of cosmology—there is nothing high-falutin’ about it —but all don’t know enough, because they don’t think enough, about their particular colour of metaphysic, to be able to appraise it. And it takes time — time-space I suppose —before you know it, and feel at home with it, and accept it as your intellectual measure and spiritual resting place.

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It's like buying a new pair of boots. If their design is good, and other things being equal, in time they may fit you; if not they never will be comfortable and fit to wear. And if your cosmology is suitable, ultimately you will see proof of its adequacy in all things—the eternal pattern unfolding—as you think about and change about anything, no matter how trivial. You accept its verdict and its idealism and there can be no compromise. It’s a kitchen philosophy.

For it’s no Sunday hack for feast days or holidays. It’s a staunch working-day hack, easy to catch, that will carry you anywhere, for it’s up to your weight, and a good stock horse for mustering strays to the branding, to make them yours. You who know horses know the aptness of my symbol, and, by the way, of such as you, I like to think must be the kingdom of Heaven —though I am not sure about horse dealers.

The Man Who Wished to Have No Shadow

It is true I may be possessed of my idea rather than master of it.

But even a shadow of a truth may be of great value, and should be cherished. It is a mistake to think that partial knowledge is useless and should be ignored.

And every man, whether he likes it or not, must have a shadow sometimes —he can’t escape from it, pass it by, or destroy it —if he lives in the sun, or even in the moon.

And I did in truth once, on a moonlight night, see a drunk man trying to destroy the shadow opposing him at the entrance of Drumsheugh Baths in Edinburgh.

Heralded by repeated challenges to come out and fight like a man, wild windmill blows were aided by magnificent footwork of advance and retire and provoked an equally good performance, of flattering similarity and simultaneity

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from his opponent. Having completely failed to make com tact, the shadow fighter sat down in his corner, exhausted but full of fight, scratched his head, and consulted me, a sober student and the only passer-by, of the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ of his evasive but persistent opponents.

As the moon—she was the cause of all the pother—was just about to set too, I left him to her.

Process and Reality

The rough life story of man as Organism in our epoch is clear enough to see and to accept as reasonably correct. From a but mildly predatory and comparatively mute ape there evolved the precocious “mutant” we call man.

That man, still mostly ape, was dynamite! He was Nature’s most dangerous mutant for he was Nature’s most mindful mutant —he could see a thing which wasn’t there.

So precocious was he, indeed, that in a paltry million years from a mere harmless chattering chipper, then shaper and but occasional thrower of stones and cracker of skulls —there were no glass windows then—he evolved into a shrieking hurler of atomic bombs. Surely the most predacious schelm of all the saurian mutants Nature had evolved.

For this strange mutant called man, can now, if he so desires, change the materials of Nature to Nature’s complete material undoing—he can split our atoms! Man can destroy man —himself! It would, in truth, appear to be, just now, his favourite amusement.

But in another mode, and more wondrous still, man was precocious. How? Nature, she must have known she ought, had organised a potential corrective to man’s predatory instincts.

Inclined to sleep in its niche in most, man’s wondrous single primary germ cell, Nature, has put that unique enzyme —let us call it Spirit, Morals, Soul, yes, God, if you like —

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whose chief function is to ferment the spirit of altruism in all men. It is the antithesis of the instinct of predatoriness present in all men, more or less. And the starter of that ferment (think of it as another enzyme potential in man’s first cell), needed by Nature for the functioning of man's moral enzyme we will call Persuasion. God, the essence of Persuasion, is the supreme Persuader, and all men, not one, his vicar.

Will the bud of Altruism we can just detect in men, and call such saints, ever flower and seed sufficiently to save man from predatory men? I believe it will! How? Because I know it must. Why? Because I believe it ought. And that familiar materialistic paradox, "raising the standard of living,” as indicative of a higher civilization, assumes a new meaning and a new value.

So the contemporary poet is reasonable and seasonable when he, repeating what’s been said before, warns man—"We must love one another or die.”

About Prophets

History reveals that successful prophets have almost invariably been well armed—and that is not difficult to believe.

Nor is it difficult to believe that unsuccessful prophets—the kind that get stoned —might have been more successful if they also had been well armed —the means, and the end being the same.

And that belief, I believe, makes Stalin sure that he is certain to be a successful prophet and not get stoned.

After Kierkegaard

And the Church, obsessed with the people’s errors “in matin,” preach an unpleasant satire on the three estates, Birth, Copulation, and Death, and vituperate on the vice of

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trying to spike their Canons. “Ane Pleasant Satyre of the Three Estates in commendation of vertew and vituperation of Wyce.” (Sir David Lindsay of the Mount.)

Democracy and Aristocracy

From Collingwood’s New Leviathan

(I have asked the publishers to print all this in gold—but they won’t do it, of course!)

26.1. There might be a man who decried the first Law of Politics (25.7. The first Law of Politics is that a body politic is divided into a ruling class and a ruled class —the ruled class is the nursery class) on the ground that he was thinking of a body politic in which every member should rule and none be ruled. I call him a doctrinaire democrat.

26.11. There is also an opposite error, the error of forgetting that the function of ruling, in any body politic, must be a function of that body itself, so that where a “self” is a body politic, all rule is self rule. One who forgets that, I call a doctrinaire aristocrat.

26.12. These are hostile to each other. But democracy and aristocracy properly understood are not hostile to each other. They are mutually complementary.

26.13. Each of them give a partial answer to the question “How shall we make the ruling class as strong as possible?”

26.14. Democracy answers “By enlarging it as far as possible. By recruiting into it, to discharge one or other function, every member of the ruled class who may constitute an addition to its strength.”

26.15. Aristocracy answers “By restricting it so far as is needful. By excluding from its membership everyone who does not or would not increase its strength.”

26.16. There is no quarrel between these answers. The

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inevitable recruitment of a ruling class from its correlative ruled class is a dialectical process, part of the process which is the life of the body politic.

Democracy and Aristocracy are positive and negative elements in that process.

26.17. The rise of the doctrinaire democracy or doctrinaire aristocracy happens when those elements are considered in false abstraction from the process to which they belong and then considered eristically as compelling for the politicians’ loyalty. One must be better worth following: which?

26.18. Abstraction is a necessary part of thought. In thinking of a process of change you must think of its positive and negative elements in abstraction from the process.

26.19. False abstraction is the same thing complicated by a falsehood! the falsehood, namely, that these two opposites are mutually independent and hostile entities.

26.20. Thus democracy and aristocracy which are really correlative rules for the process of drafting members of the ruled class into the ruling class (the rule go as far as you can and “don’t go further”) are misconceived as two independent rules “recruit them all” and “don’t recruit any.”

26.21. It is between fictitious entities like this that “eristic” discussion most loves to get up a dog-fight. The best kind of dog-fight; one in which the combatants being fictitious can never be killed, and being tied together by a dialectical bond can never run away.

26.22. A fight of this kind is the best example of these make believe discussions which are called academic discussions.

26.25. Each part —the rulers and the ruled —of the body politic may contain passengers. (That don’t work their passage, like our wharfies?)

26.28. The problem of getting the best available rulers (and what is included in this is the problem of sacking any

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who can be replaced by better men) is so important for the welfare of a body politic that no pains should be spared to find and enlist them. What is difficult is to keep the issue before your mind: to recollect that the only admissible ground of inclusion in the ruling class is the ability to do the required work; the only admissible ground of exclusion is inability to do it.

26.48. Populas in Latin, Demos in Greek and People in English, when correctly used, which sometimes it is not, is a word with a certain aristocratic flavour.

26.49. never means a mere mass of population, a totality of inhabitants —a crowd (let alone trade, professional, financial unions).

Based on that Philosophy our conceptions of the best controlling body for hospitals and health services are correct.

If our two political parties could only accept and act on Collingwood’s notions, what a lot of pother they would save.

Can I not by dialectical means, and failing that by eristical means (which means ramming it down their throats, which would, of course, be “no go”) talk our politicians into studying Collingwood’s New Leviathan ? Of course, some of them may have read it, but I’ve seen no signs. To those who have read it, I suggest they read it again. I had to, many times, before I grasped the whole truth that I think I’ve found in it. I got the copy that I read from their library and of course wrote notes.

When giving evidence before the Local Bodies Commis' sion at Whangarei, we advocated that doctors and nurses should have representatives as full members of the Con' trolling Board. Immediately we were asked by the Commis' sion if the porters, the engineers, the kitchen staff, etc., had not the same right to group representation on the Board. The correct reply is another question —would they add to

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the efficiency of the Board? The answer, of course, is No! and that is Collingwood's answer and it was ours.

Fraochans

The Hieland sensualist, unlike the usual gay Lotharios of other climes, is a fly man, a very fly man!

The word “fly” as Hielanders use it means cunning, secretive, a deceiver—“a ram with lambs’ wool,” as the say' ing goes. The word fly-away is the antithesis. On the other hand, fly-by-night must have an intimate symbolic connection with the Hieland “fly.”

The Sophists said Socrates was a sly man, meaning, I think, the same as we do by fly. Socrates led the Sophists up the garden path, teased them and played with them to his mind’s content. But don’t misunderstand me —Socrates was no seducer of women. He never took a chance—although a very successful seducer of Sophists, he was far too frightened of Zantippe.

The old Gaelic proverb that “the Parish Bull has aye to temper the steel benea’th his sporran, with a bonny flyness under his bonnet” expresses correctly what I have been struggling to say.

But maybe an actual experience that is a concrete example of the abstract conception might be more interesting than a stale old Gaelic proverb.

The Parish minister, my uncle, was investigating one of these cases in his Manse, which in the Hielands in those days took the place of a Magistrates Court. The suspect in this case was Donald McKenzie, a shoemaker by trade.

Now tailors and shoemakers in the Hielands—Pm not saying it’s so elsewhere —and tailors are the worst! you know the saying “as hot as tailor’s love”—are notorious for that sort of thing. I think it's got something to do with the con-

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stant anatomical posture that their trade demands, but I am not sure, even of that.

The evidence the Minister had —it was all up his sleeve and he kept it there, as he usually did, so Donald couldn’t see—was damning, and absolutely reliable.

But Donald, when asked if he was responsible for the lassie’s condition, to my uncle’s amazement unequivocally and persistently denied it. Now no Hielander —unless he was daft —would dare tell a straight-out lie to his Parish Minister (I am not saying that of the Free Church or the Wee Frees) and my uncle, knowing that, was sore puzzled -—but he was a fly man too, he was a Skye man, and “as fly as a Skye man” is a true saying—so the likely story got through to him after a bit.

“Now Donald,” he said, “do you mean to tell me that you had nothing whatever to do with Maggie’s bairn?”

“No! No! I never said that at all! at all! As sure as death,” he solemnly declared. “I only did the fraochans — only the fraochans and no more! —only the fraochans, your reverence, and no more, your reverence, as sure as Death.”

Fraochans, let me explain, are the ornamentation a highly skilled shoemaker puts on brogues—the finishing touches as it were—and Donald, just as his father before him, was the best at fraochans in Badenoch. He was in truth a specialist in fraochans, careless and ignorant of all things but one thing, fraochans!

Now my uncle, although learned in the humanities and a man of much sense, had no physiology whatever, which was a very good thing for Donald, as it turned out. I could have told him a lot, for I had just passed my second professional examination in physiology, but it wasn’t my business at all. Donald, I might as well tell you, had just made me a new pair of brogues, and they had the best fraochans on them I had ever seen.

My uncle told me the story I’ve told you when he came

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back to the parlour, and I was surprised, it was so unlike him to say much. He was furious, not because Donald had been with the lassie, but because Donald had tried, and so nearly succeeded in humbugging him. “And the rascal tried to deceive me,” he said—“that Godless heathen rascal”—and a lot more like that about Donald; it came out of him like the Spey in spate. I had never seen him so angry or heard him use so many Biblical swears. Then he rang the bell and told the servant girl to tell Hamish (the Minister’s man) to go and tell Black Sandy, the tailor, that he would see him in the study as soon as possible.

I watched through the parlour window and saw Black Sandy arriving, and I must say he didn’t look very cheerful.

When my uncle came back (he wasn’t long!) to the parlour he seemed calmer and merely said that Black Sandy was the father of the bairn.

Apparently Donald the shoemaker’s typical specialist's excuse of being responsible only for the fraochans of the bairn was accepted at its face value and not at its phy* siological value, and being such a small contribution towards the bairn—the Minister thought—he let him off.

As I said before, I could have said quite a lot, but I didn’t —it was none of my business, even if my uncle was absurd about a physiological fact.

Now, Black Sandy the tailor was the worst tailor in Badenoch. I know that too well, for he had just made a kilt for me. It was no good at all! The pleats were without a lie, he had the pattern so crooked you couldn’t tell the tartan, and it required two broaches to hold the skirt down, and I had only one —and that’s all without a lie! And I was proud in those days and the “Cock of the North” set the tune of our ways and the tilt of our kilts.

No! Black Sandy was no good to man or maid. He was only good at what he had no right to be doing, and even

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then it required Donald the shoemaker to finish it —so Donald said.

I had known them both all my life so in a way I wasn't surprised at Donald’s story, although I had passed in physiology. And maybe he was right after all! If you had seen the damnable kilt Black Sandy had made for me—no fraochans or finish about it! —and the grand brogues Donald had made, you would feel as I felt and believe all that I’ve told you.

The Monster Absurdity

The New York Zoo had a two-headed snake for quite a long time. It only died the other day. The authorities had to separate the heads to keep them from fighting, and to feed them separately to prevent the alimentary canal from being choked. In spite of these precautions the two heads one day fought each other so savagely that one swallowed the other and the monster expired. There were in this case two personalities from the point of view of volition, but one common physiological personality as regards appetite for food and sex (shocking complications can be imagined). (M. Chyka in a recent “Nature.”)

And this strange monster that has aroused not only the interest but the excitement of the whole scientific world, ought to, yes! must be, of even more philosophical interest. For is not its strangeness really strange because of its terrible familiarity. If our perception, as many say, is entirely analogical, then is not this the perfect—that is, universal — analogy—the symbol of man’s life in our time.

I know I could have used it as the sole analogy in these notes, to illustrate my conception of existence, and saved a lot of thought and paper.

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That snake that was a perfect monster, was a perfect absurdity, meaning the Complete Absurdity. By it, mam kind can be revealed as “It,” not “Either Or” which is a false duality, but as “Both”—that is, the whole, the complete twoheaded snake. That must be the right notion —right, meaning not only the Rule, but the Good. For was not the trouble with the monster that it was all appetite and devoid of feeling? And was not all the pother between the two heads due to the heads refusing to think together in terms of a necessity for survival. It was the problem of interdependence—a ditch on both sides of the road.

It was dual control, it was the problem of a Socialist Government elected by, dependent on and controlled by trade unions; the tragedy of failing to see the nature of Organism as interdependence; and the sin of specialism, the failure to accept the truth—that nothing can be alone.

Now I am not blaming the beast in the least. The complete lack of privacy of the heads and sharing of the privates was not exactly conducive to convenience, let alone philosophic meditation. In truth I was very pleased with that particular monster, and I'm sorry it’s dead.

It would have been a grand thing, and of great educational value to New Zealand, if we could have got it out for a trip.

Calories are just Cajoleries

Calories are just cajoleries, as calorie-rationed England has learnt to its sorrow, for to the individual, it just doesn’t work out the calorie way. Calories have become now more of a political term than a scientific term.

Of course! they are a useful means of comparison and maybe an essential for the Minister of Food —for his national housekeeping to measure with and talk with. But

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to prescribe the individual feed of a New Zealand baby on an assumed time-space norm for all babies, is folly and in practice means underfeeding. It is just pseudo-scientific nonsense, and that is exactly what cajolery means.

Unfortunately there are in our evergreen garden of follies two garden paths—the dietetic path and the medicinal path up which professional seducers tease their innocent fellow man with oily ease to commit absurd behaviour.

Is there no effective preventive?

A Vicious Dualism

“It is the task of reason,” Whitehead says, “to understand and purge the symbols on which humanity depends."

In New Zealand the serpent, that sacred symbol of Medicine as a profession, has evolved as the symbol of Medicine as Business, and all that that implies.

And although the potter, and not the pot, is responsible

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for the shape of the pot, Whitehead explains that “any lack of such conscious, analytical recognition (of the symbol) is the fault of a comparatively low'grade percipient.”

“Yet my zeal for life remains

Drinking coffee, telling tales.”

We are what we do.

Our Civil Service

What happens to New Zealand depends on our Civil Service. They decide the legalations and they decide whether the regulations be observed in doctrinaire mood, or breached in a humanitarian mood.

The heads of our Civil Service should be of the true Aristocracy—what the ancient Greeks called “Axiocracy” —the rule of the best. Not the sons of a belted Earl, not the pampered sons of purseful persons, not the puppets of a political party, not man promoted because of senility, seniority or servility, but men holding high office because of their character being that inherent Axiocracy—Masters be' cause they are qualified to be masters.

There must be a degree of, and in, bureaucracy. The heads of our Civil Service must be of the highest degree, the only degree that should or can be tolerated by a people.

Town Planning in Our Country Villages

“I am only a zigzagging lane with wild borders

And a few little birds in the bushes —

I am waiting for orders.”

Alun Lewis the soldier poet sang that, hurt by his native vandals in peace, just before he was hurt to death by alien vandals in war. And I know, as he knew, what orders mean for the Roses in Zig-zagging lane. I know! for they did

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it here where we live. Yes! it means the bloody slash hook to murder God’s garden of Roses, where beauty runs on the loose. Murder in the Cathedral I call it. And the grader degrading all beauty, straightening out the zig'Zags—the element of surprise—as if the traffic was that of Queen Street, where all must be prosaic, so safe, pedestrian, mechanical, dull, unsmiling, brooking no surprises.

It has happened, and is happening, not only here. The pest of the slash hook, the pest of improvers and planners is übiquitous in the country. Alas, I hear quite distinctly some saying, “What’s all the pother? it’s of so little importance.”

That is not correct. It is of importance for it’s an occasion that goes to make that society of occasions, which is our contemporary occasion, our mode of life, our sense of values. To treat it as trivial, is to commit the logical sin of the Spendthrift Fallacy, where each “spend” considered alone and in isolation is of no importance; but when added on to similar nodmportance spends, spells Bankruptcy.

It’s a symptom of the deadly disease syndrome we know as “Materialism” where power and greed, not beauty and good dominate, and “goods,” not ‘the good,” is God.

It smells of State chains—l hear their rattle!

“Those who do not know that—

They neither see nor hear,

They live in this world as if in the dark,

Stars do not breathe for them,

Sunbeams did not penetrate their soul,

Spring did not blossom in their bosom,

Woods did not speak in their presence,

And the starlit night was mute!

It isn’t their fault: can a deaf'mute

Conceive the life of an organ?”

—(Tyutchev.)

For such as those we need Social Security “seeing aids” and “feeling aids” to save Beauty.

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The Small Hospital

There is a rather common delusion in the minds of the staff of large hospitals, politicians, and lay men, that the birth of a new idea can only take place in a large institution.

“You!” they say, “you have not the clinical material nor the specialist staff with specialised equipment to make use of even your limited material.”

I don’t think that is true. The staff of a small hospital have for their use, through medical literature, all of the find' ings of the large institutions. They also can get those facilities which they need from the large hospitals.

Geographical punishment is not a serious handicap, always provided—and this is the crux of my argument —that the small hospital has a highly trained staff.

The small hospitals have one very great advantage in that they don’t have to waste their time, and what is more important their energy, on doing so much routine work — the frills of medicine —accumulating negative facts which are usually of little value.

Also the man with a notion can go on with his notion without having to fight professional opposition. He can concentrate on what he likes.

Most medical discoveries of significance have been made not from observation on a large number of cases, but from intense observation of single cases. This can be done rather easier, I think, in the small hospital than in the large hospital. Abstract thought in medicine doesn’t need i,ooo-bed hospitals, but one armchair. And the man who is capable of producing a new notion, will produce it, whether he works in a small or a large hospital.

Of course it is true that the best brains usually go to large hospitals—but not always. Staff the small hospitals with first class men and I am sure they will contribute as much to medicine as the large hospitals.

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Bureaucracy’s Pyramids

Film! File! Record! and Graph!—then STAT —next Stale—then Fartle! is the order of procedure and reference. And they build a Record Room far bigger than their Work room and never leave it. "Man has been no gainer by its drudges,” Lawrence of Arabia wrote, for drudges are slaves and slaves only build pyramids as their masters’ tombstones. And the Pyramids of Egypt, the biggest of our records, are the saddest and most horrible symbols in the world; and when we go to see them we ought to weep and confess and regret, and not wonder, far less admire! for they are but the pagan equivalents of our Christian Belsens.

Records of negative facts are of comparatively little value—often just drudges’ work, designed to keep men drudges, and servants civil, and civil servants, servants. In truth they do active harm, quite apart from the demoralisation of drudgery, for in their litter the positive facts which are of qualitative value and not merely of quantitative value, often get lost and refunded into ignorance.

Our medical literature is being cluttered up by this addition to collectiveness and classification in search of statistical measurements which permits of samples, while ignoring the recording of quality—meaning significance, uniqueness—which is the essential reality of value.

And often the classification is decided on before the assemblage of all the facts. So what is collected is decided solely in terms of an arbitrary classification, and not on the facts available, which is nonsense, if we want to determine causality rather than absurdity.

What a solace, and how often the clinical and philo' sophical help I need, I find from qualitative similarity in recorded cases in old books, with no guesses based on “stats” and “graphs” and “shadows,” for example in Ruther-

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ford Morrison’s Surgical Contributions, or the stories of the Bible.

Let me give an example of what I mean. I was on one of my rare visits to a city, and happened to be in the com suiting room of a proctologist, a friend of mine, when a patient was shown in. He at once greeted the proctologist as a long lost friend, asked how the wife and kids were and then proceeded to strip for examination. The proctologist had reciprocated quite well, I thought, but I knew also quite well that he hadn’t known him from Adam. Nor had he recognised him after consulting a magnificent case card with every conceivable relevant and irrelevant fact recorded in noughts and crosses —to save time and trouble so they say, but they don’t always.

By this time the patient was stripped and had assumed the classical lean-over posture that the practice of Proctology obviously demands.

Then the Proctologist took one look, just one look, then like a flash of light he straightened up, took one step round, seized his patient’s hand, shook it vigorously and in a voice oozing with affection and recognition, said, “Oh! Good God. It’s you, Mr. Jones, I didn’t recognise you.”

It was a magnificent recovery by direct recognition. And neither my friend the proctologist nor Mr. Jones seemed the least upset or to think the incident the least unusual, and certainly not worthy of recording. I unfortunately had to leave the room in a hurry and was upset for a long time.

Don’t misunderstand me —I don’t want to overwork the evidence merely to adorn the beauty of my symbolism. Some records are essential to progress and, dare I say, recognition. I repeat, however, that records of positive facts are the important records. The perineal scar was the perfect symbol, being the only one that could (so the only one needed) restore to my friend the proctologist complete recognition in this particular case.

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The New Porter

A new porter, McDonald by name, had come to Newton' more Station. He didn’t touch his hat to Cluney, because he didn’t know Cluney (so he said), and Cluney (the chief of the Clan MacPherson) didn't like that at all, and said so to Kennedy the Station Master, who, of course, knew Cluney well—maybe better than Cluney.

“I’ll see to that Cluney—l'll see to that Cluney,’’ he said, and he did.

The next time Cluney came to the station —he was going as far as Inverness, to the gathering—McDonald, the new porter, was there to meet him, and not only took off his hat, but kept on taking it off, again and again, for all the world like a “Waggity Waa,” to see. Cluney seemed very pleased, for quite a while, but then in his usual rather irritable voice said, “That will do, for just now, my man —that will do—that will do.’’ But McDonald the porter wouldn't listen to Cluney and, instead of stopping, went on and on with his saluting to the running accompaniment of “Plenty more here, Cluney! Plenty more here, Cluney,” till Cluney gave up and disappeared on the platform.

It seemed that my father and Kennedy, the station master, who was a very old friend, had watched the occasion from the station ticket office window. I didn’t wonder at them watching in the least. I had known them both all my life and also Cluney—but I did wonder how they had managed to persuade McDonald the new porter (whom I didn’t know then, but did soon after, and liked him well, and all the better for what he did to Cluney) to do it. I would have liked to have asked my father to tell me the whole story, but I knew what would happen if I did.

Is Man for God’s Amusement?

I wonder if that is the fundamental explanation that justifies our existence.

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Is man’s world but God’s picture show, screening scream' ing gangsters and gold'digging scenes of bloody vice?

Do our absurd antics amuse him?

If God is all'powerful there can be no likelier explana' tion except a much more horrible one. And is His sense of humour a cruel sense of the practical joke type, that only stupid people with minds lacking in imagination can laugh at —like upending carpet tacks on seats of chairs to pen forate a brother’s bottom? But if God is a limited God then we can in reason think He is doing his best to persuade us to organise for change, and progress means getting rid of our absurdities.

Just now, however, when man has become so very absurd and dangerous to fellow man, it seems as if God had gone asleep on His job of holding things together, or has He just given man up as a bad job, having come to the conclusion that man is not worth going on with, and like the sabre' toothed tiger he is God’s mistake, a godless predaceous blunderer?

“Worms are better bothering with,” He might say. “They can be depended on always to do the job I organised them for.”

Although I feel I have been sensible, I don’t flatter myself I have been convincing, nor do I want to be pessimistic, however much the evidence justifies it.

Still the real content of all that—l say it with assurance —is that “things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.” Without some philosophy, some religion, we are doomed. And what man calls “chance” is but a transcendent order whose causality is beyond man’s measure.

Good Health Must be Made Notifiable

The “State of Good Health,” the feeling that you have nothing wrong with you (a belief which is absolutely anti'

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thetic to the whole modem scientific and democratic con' ception of what pundits now call Positive Health) must be eradicated. The doctors say and politicians echo, “No one, absolutely no one is healthy if subjected to all the modem medical scientific tests” (in a sense I quite agree). “Good Health” is the great delusion and quite absurd. Such a belief if persisted in will min your health (and our livelihood, they think, but don’t say). Good health must be eradicated and made notifiable as a communicable and infectious disease under the Act, dangerous to the health of the people.”

The new conception of Positive Health they herald as the greatest medical discovery of our time and, may I add, the latest abracadabra, except from a business point of view. And foolish people greet Positive Health as their own Mes' siah and Saviour. The people have become a crowd and a crowd is capable of following any folly.

And any man or woman—they don’t need to be doctors —with a modicum of nous —a word that implies escape from the crowd—should see what the preaching of that false doctrine can do to —yes!—a wholesome proud people living at ease. It can turn them into an unwholesome and fretful people—diseased. It has already in New Zealand caused a tremendous amount of pseudo'disease as every doctor knows, and the high demands on Social Security funds tell the same sorry tale. Every employer of labour can confirm the truth of my statement. And if in our desire to expose the hurtful and avoidable, as distinguished from the inevitable ab' surdities of life, some may think I have lost my sense of fitness and fallen from professional grace—that makes me sad, but never sorry. It’s the price we, as witnesses of the truth, pay for travelling for a cause without a ticket. For the truth is that the British Medical Association has refused to issue tickets for that journey and the Government don’t seem inclined to issue a guide book and tickets in spite of them.

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Freedom and Its Vagaries

The compulsory choice between two freedoms is an irrational sort of freedom, in truth it is the essence of tyranny. In our kind of Democracy, with a two-party form of government, you are forced to chose one, and good God! you may want neither. Compulsory choice is the supreme cruelty. “You must, because I say so, make up your mind, ‘Yes or No,’ ” is the voice of the bully. That form of rule is the antithesis of a genuine dialectic form of government, that is, the true democracy. It is an eristic form of government and of dictators breed. Let us call it sympathetic, antipathetic Democracy. But unfortunately like other absurd things, we have got to accept it. It would be wrong not to.

But if we can see this inherent absurdity, some day we will escape the absurdity, and organise a genuine dialectical government and attain complete political and social freedom. Unfortunately today, as a people, we are not ready to escape the nursery, and absolute freedom must be restricted by a ruling minority. The doctrinaire democrat must still be an absurdity. For absolute freedom means you can do as you like—murder if you like!

Stalin is the only practising doctrinaire freeman still alive and he uses his privilege to the full and murders all those he doesn’t like. His bag to date, at a conservative estimate, I notice, is about ten million. His only lack of freedom is a degree of geographical control, and that little difficulty he is doing his best at present to overcome. He needs more elbow room, he says! In the Stalin form of democracy all but Stalin are slaves. The parliamentary candidates are all Stalin’s bought and sold men —all slaves! and the proletariat, of course, are all slaves. I include those Friends of the Soviet Union, the Mongols in our midst, who are also fools, being fooled into slavery. They point to one virtue (there is supposed to be no usury in Russia), and excuse or ignore the absence of all other virtues.

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Now you can’t become civil, and worthy of heaven, by obeying only one Christian injunction —that you shall not commit the sin of usury —and ignoring all the other injunctions such as murder, torture, false witness, pinching your neighbour's land, wife and ass.

The first case I diagnosed suffering from that particular and rather prevalent syndrome (of travelling to heaven on a partial ticket) was a comparatively mild case, trivial if you like, though my father didn’t think so. The occasion was that of a horse deal —I was just newly through at the time.

This horse dealer had just taken my father down over a deal. It was a straight swap for a likely looking two-year-old filly of ours. I remember the look of the horse dealer’s beast well. He was a dun, twelve-year-old, roadster gelding. I didn't like him —I dislike all duns, always have; it’s a dreary colour and to me almost sinister, but maybe it’s only the suggestive word “dun” that makes me feel like that. But my father didn’t feel that way, although he did later on, when the beast turned out to be broken in the wind, and a slug to boot. The brute was done! that was the truth —and so was my father.

I wanted to put a tube in the horse’s throat, but my father wouldn’t let me. “He’s not as bad as that,” he said, “If you take him canny on the hills he’s all right.” He wasn’t! My father didn’t like to think he had been so badly done, because he usually wasn’t. He knew about horses, but not, it seems, about duns. He never, by the way, touched another dun —I know that!

Now this is what I want to tell you. It’s what the horse dealer said as he was leaving, and I have never forgotten it: “You’ve got a staunch beast in that dun horse, Mr. Smith, as sure as I’m going to Heaven.”

“But! But!” said my father, “who ever heard of a horse dealer going to Heaven?”

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“Ah!”—with a vanishing wave of his hand—“but I'm a farmer as well, Mr. Smith —a farmer as well, Mr. Smith.” He said it twice, straining, I felt, to reassure not so much my father, as himself, of going to Heaven.

A Humane School of Surgery

A budding surgeon said to me one day, “These small hospitals in the North are excellent for gaining experience. You can do as much surgery as you like —no one to inter' fere with you."

I interfered with him, and nipped him back a bit. lam doubtful if he will fruit now; but I might have failed. Then talking another day, a well known surgeon said, “Yes! well, that is all very fine, but they have got to learn somehow.” And I tried hard to nip that point from that surgeon, but I had more luck with the young one.

Now I have a suggestion to make—l believe it is a good one. I know it is a humane one, for it would save human lives.

Here it is! Postgraduate classes for young surgeons should be held at freezing'works. Pigs should be the victims, not butchers. And why pigs? Pigs are more like humans than any other animal (it sounds better put that way and not the other way round —truth sometimes must make way for harmony). A pig’s abdominal wall, with its com parative absence of hair, is convenient. Its intestines are almost identical in make'up, and feeling, with the human bowel, because their tastes and habits are identical —I mean as regards food. So if a young surgeon can remove successfully a length of pig gut, without killing the pig, or seriously in' conveniencing the pig, then it is reasonable to believe that he could, with comparative safety, remove a similar length of gut from a human. And he could carefully put the magneto

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back where it should go and the carburettor where it should go, and not vice versa, before sewing the abdominal wall up, as tight as it was before, leaving just the perfect scar for the lady to show and boast over.

Of course the pig would be properly anaesthetised, by a properly trained pig anaesthetist, who on the same principle would have been trained on guinea pigs—guinea pigs are just “its,” not pigs. Every care should be taken to be pigmane.

A highly qualified and experienced humane human sun geon would be in charge, to direct and instruct. He would be able, without doubt, to judge when his pupils had attained the requisite skill, on pigs, to certify them as safe for human beings. It would cost little, for fully qualified union butchers would attend to the after treatment, and the pig could then go overseas —just a completely anonymous prime porker bearing the redoubtable All Black Brand. No one would be any the wiser, except the young surgeon.

Pigs are used in America for training surgeons —but not enough. I have read advertisements, in the American journals, with the cost of the course in dollars, and implicit the certain gain of many more dollars, to the pupils, not the patients.

Now I like all pigs except one, and it’s dead. Pigs always have interested me; I know a lot about pigs. My first opera' tion was on a pig. There were two cases of congenital hernia in the litter. I operated on one. I had gloves on my hands, and boiled my instruments. The grieve operated on the other. He had dung on his hands, and spat on his instru' ments. My pig died, his pig lived. I explained its death away, in the way I had been taught at medical schools, to my father, but my father was a practical man. I was never allowed to operate again on pigs; the grieve did them all—suckers were suckers in those days!

I have discussed the matter with a freezing works manager—a friend of mine—with a suggestion for a trial at

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his works. He was dubious, not about the notion being ethically and materialistically excellent, nor did he object from the pigs’ point of view, but “what would his butchers say?”

“They will say,” he said, “that a pig was killed on the table by an unqualified butcher, and would go on strike or go slower still.” I pointed out to him that every care would be taken, and anyway the young doctors were already only too highly qualified as butchers and highly eligible for a butchers’ union, I thought.

I said a lot.

He said even more.

But I am going to try again.

Auckland’s Wonders, i

“The P orteous Queen of Heaven ’

“That’s the owner of Happy Ending, the fastest horse in Australasia,” the lounge porter urgently whispered, and I saw what Louis McNeice must have seen, and some more, when he wrote of “old faces frosted with powder and choked in furs.” And if the race was owners up —as they always should be, I think —Happy Ending would not be the fastest but the slowest horse in Australasia.

She was overweight (20 stone, I can swear to that), over-raddled and over-frosted like hoar frost (I wouldn’t be surprised) and over-furred (it was a very hot day), and top feathered like a dissipated cockatoo. And she was slightly fuddled.

And “of such is the kingdom of Heaven,” so that poor porter thought. His whole attitude was one of wondrous devotion to her service! To him there was no one else in that lounge. No! not even himself.

In truth she was his “lure of feeling” and seemed to me akin to what St. Theresa must have felt —

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“O Mary—lf I were Queen of Heaven and thou Theresa, I would change places with thee, just to see the Queen of Heaven.”

Auckland’s Wonders. 2

A Grand Hotel Dinner

I was very tired, I was very empty, for the Northern train journey to town is rattly, slow, long, and hungry.

The soup —I had asked for thick —was thin; I thought the girl had made a mistake, but she said she hadn’t. It was useless—soup always is in pubs! I next ordered a favourite food —lamb and mint sauce. Sitting next me was an oldish, worn-looking, disillusioned, ”a bob a lb. butterfat,” obvious cow-cocky. He also ordered lamb and mint sauce.

I tried it. Now! my teeth are good, but against that lamb they were bad. I glanced at my companion grinding savagely. “Full mouth ewe dressed lamb,” I said. “Broken mouth ram!” he mumbled —his top plate had apparently turned upside-down on the ram.

I next ordered apple pie (that is usually a famous ribsticker). The cocky did the same. Our portions were small—apple pie in abstract—a concrete composed of driedup dried apple, languishing on a square of reinforced pastry.

I asked for some milk. The girl said, “We don’t serve milk with apple pie.” She sounded cross, so I said I was sorry and I told her that if I had known it was as bad as that I would have brought a cow with me to town. My sadness apparently affected her. She said she would see what she could do, and hurried away.

We rested on our spoons for a long time and my companion, correcting my obvious impatience, remarked, “Maybe the lassie has a longish way to go to the coo yard.”

When the milk did come it was the thinnest milk in the smallest jug (like a pepper pot with a handle) I had ever

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seen. The cocky, sadly inspecting his share, remarked, “Yir coo idea would have been the best plan.”

I have recorded all the cocky said and all I said, and all we got for 4/6 —for I didn't pinch the spoons. I was frightened, that was all. I don’t know what the cocky did with his spoons.

Early next morning I left for home in a car, driving very fast, and got home in time for dinner.

The Wonders of New Zealand

I was in Auckland not long ago and met a man at the bottom of Symonds Street whose prostate I had removed years ago. And he told me this —it had just happened he said —and he was still chuckling—

“Symonds Street,” he said, “is no good for a case like mine—you know what I mean!” (He had a bladder that brooked no delay.) “So I rang the first doctor’s bell I could reach. I got in at once—l’ll say that for them, the service was quick and so was I. I found the right place easy and it was just as well. Then the doctor saw me and I told him I had a touch of the diabetes and he said ’You’ll have to give me a specimen.’ I said I had. ‘That’s no good. You’ll have to call again.’

“So having signed the 7/6 docket for him he showed me out. I thanked him kindly and promised I’d call again, if I got it again, in Symonds Street. As I was leaving I had a look at his sign. Urologist! God! I was right after all.”

Of course, I explained to the old fool that he was quite wrong, that a urologist was not for that, that he had no right to do what he did, and that Social Security benefits did not cover that. What would happen if we all went to urologists for that? But he always had been an argumentative old devil, and maintained that the sign was up, the doctor had

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got the 7/6 for it, that Social Security was a grand thing and everybody should be satisfied. He didn’t see that there was anything out of place or over the odds about it at all, as I said. He had paid his levy and if all the doctors gave people as much relief as he had received at that urologist’s in Symonds Street they wouldn’t be doing so badly. But it’s no good talking to a man like that!

And on thinking over that ridiculous episode and what the old fool had said, I felt more inclined to cry than laugh, for I suddenly realised that he really had got more good out of the Government’s 7/6 his way than the vast majority do their way. For most can’t get any benefit. They only get what they don’t need —medical advice and numerous bottles of medicine or a blood count or an X-ray.

For I believe, and I speak advisedly about my own job, that at least 75 per cent, of the people who consult doctors have nothing wrong with them that a doctor can right—and the doctors, who can’t tell them that truth for business reasons, prescribe medicines costing us over a million pounds a year, and tell them to call again for more, for business reasons.

Though I was told the other day by a doctor who ought to know more about it than anyone else, that at last, he thought, the doctors are beginning to set sick of the farce and humbug.

And it is not really the doctors’ fault- —it’s the people’s fault fundamentally. For New Zealand, which should above all places be a locus of mentally heathy people, is today assiduously cultivating hocus-pocus middens and focuses of infection for neurotics and the crafty sick to roll around in in luxury at normal men’s expense.

For it is indeed a sorry sight to see, crowded into doctors' rooms, not only the old and unhealthy who have a respectable reason and right to be there, but the young and healthy of both sexes with no such reason. Being pathologically

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health conscious they have become unethically shame unconscious. And the beer drinking menace is but a shadow to the menace of drinking such medicine and all that that means. The former is a harmless and natural taste and decent; the latter an unnatural taste and indecent, for it steals all dignity from proud youth. Medicine is the popular intoxicant in New Zealand today. Have we forgotten that “Malt does more than Milton can to justify God’s way to man” (A. E. Housman). If we had beer gardens in New Zealand we might save many from the fate of the consulting room.

And it is not only the direct moral and money cost, but the indirect materialistic loss, the “brass tack” of work manhours due to our state of health consciousness and duty unconsciousness that is so especially alarming today, for the loss to the community in man-hours from that cause is far greater than labour strikes and “go-slowness” are responsible for.

And all that is not only a New Zealand Wonder but a World Wonder, for the fame of the results of our health propaganda and our medical services is without a doubt the biggest, and for us the saddest, medical joke of the world today.

That there’s always a hidden danger in excess of increment has been amply confirmed in this self-conscious, healthconscious medicine-bottle-from-the-cradle-to-the-grave country of ours. It takes thousands of years, they say, before thought can capture action. That is despair of life. I can’t believe it —thank God! But Ido believe that “if there is no anticipation, change has to wait upon chance, and peters out amid neglect,” as Whitehead has said.

Maybe that’s what the old chap I have been telling you about had in mind. Perhaps he was right after all in his extravagant way.

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A Spayer of Cows

I once saw a professional spayer spay 50 cows. I have never seen a gynaecologist even approach to a comparative degree of dexterity, decision and speed, for each case took seconds —not minutes. The cows didn’t seem to mind much. They were hardly upset then, or later, so morbidity and mortality was nil.

And then at the farmhouse afterwards, over a cup of tea, the farmer and his wife asked the spayer to “doctor” a beautiful, sleek-looking, naughty-looking, young tom cat. Yes! He was a beauty!

I have never seen worse surgery —slow, clumsy, hesitating and brutal. That Tom did mind! That Tom was upset! He died two days later and I was not surprised.

It only goes to show that specialists are dangerous unless someone with understanding is there to protect “poor Toms.” For some specialists assume an unwarranted arrogance to conceal an abysmal ignorance of all “lasts” but their very own.

Politics is the only profession I know for which no preparation is thought necessary.

Our New Maori Houses

Imagine a house designed for six people and not enough room for four—and inhabited by twelve. Yes! I can show you many such. Visit one in the early morning when twelve Maoris are still abed. Shut and closed and sealed, they smell their own confinement like nests, for men are still like birds in some ways and not only feather their nests, but foul them. Yes! even the turtle dove, symbol of hope and sweetness, does it cynically, where she listeth. So do Maori children, and so do Pakeha children, unless sat on. For children behave cynically to others, that is, as if they were

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alone. But there is no possible deception of aloneness in these houses.

Male and female are so huddled, that to cuddle is inevitable. Sexual life has an unceremonial initiation, sometimes incestuous, sometimes sinister —where nothing is, nothing is forbidden. In such a house nothing can be private. The word, having no reality, has no meaning. There is no room for anything in them, but what requires no room. And not having smelt the slum smell of the Cowgate and the Vennels and the Wynds of our Scottish city slums for thirty-odd years, I smell them afresh today in Hokianga, where there is plenty of everything, above all “room” and plenty of wealth to exploit our room. Was it nostalgia or noisomeness that made me weep? No! It was rage, just pure rage that a government protesting horror at city slums should themselves establish rural slums in a country where there is an alternative.

Now the old Maori houses, many of them but shacks, never had that foulsome smell. They had plenty of holes in them—chimneys, fireplaces, gaps under the door and often in the walls, that allowed cross ventilation. From the health point of view they were magnificent, compared to the new houses. And the Nikau shanty, “with ragged roof and chinky wall,” is the healthiest house in the world, when it does not go on fire, which mine once did.

The Pakeha type of house can be built for the same cost as one of these foul nests —probably less —and in them there is room and rooms, and privacy, and none of these shameful things need happen.

They are so designed that closed windows and doors can’t stop sufficient cross ventilation. This prevents the stink of the slums.

Don’t misunderstand me! Some of the new Maori houses with very small families are beautifully kept, but the usual

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one is as I have described —just a slum, and stinks of the slums.

A fraud of a house! painted in bright colours, but stinks inside. And it is not the Maoris’ fault, it is the Govern' ment's. The size of the family does not decide the size of the house. On the contrary, the larger the family the poorer the Maori, therefore the smaller the house. I have said that before. I will say it again and again until it is untrue.

The Crowd

I am never certain if “the man in the street” is not really the crowd, that soulless crowd. I know theoretically he is supposed to be a self-determined and fair-minded individual —a sensible gent, standing on his own legs. I, alas, can only see the man in the street standing on his head and that means he always follows the crowd, having mislaid his own understanding. And the crowd follows as the loudest windbag listeth and is prone to any absurdity and cruelty. No! I don’t trust the man in the street.

Perception

Whitehead makes the following arresting remark which like a meteor lights up the rest of the discusion. “The triumph of consciousness comes with the negative intuitive judgment.” In this case there is a conscious feeling of what might be and is not —e.g., “This is not a good book.”

Becoming

I read the other day that Lord Samuel had written a book of grace notes. In it I hear there are about 2,000

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notes, but I haven’t heard them all. I did, however, hear a few, and these, to my horror, I also had in my note book. I knew then I had been associating with my betters, which is a foolish thing to do, they say. So I have cut all these par' ticular notes out, reducing my grade to a level of naivety becoming to a Kitchen Philosopher.

Culture

Whitehead says, “Culture is activity of thought and re' ceptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of in' formation have nothing to do with it. A merely well informed man is the most useless bore on God’s earth.”

Flaubert thought the same. He started Bouvard and Pecuchet, the most useless bores in France, as avid searchers after culture; and they did learn quite a lot. Then he finished them off by returning them to their old job, their true voca' tion, of copying clerks, those clerks, who needing no thought, had no thoughts.

Culture comes, but won’t if sought for culture’s sake.

The Generation of Specialists

The generation of specialists is usually spontaneous generation—like von Helmont’s receipt for the creation of mice “was conceived that if to a pot of dirty linen a few grains of wheat or a piece of cheese are added, the desired rodents will come forth.” “There is a good opening for a chest specialist in the town of Simpleton,” is the same com ception.

The doctors when they prehended and later accepted as their satisfaction the Government’s offer of 7/6 a touch, plus what more they could get, opened their mouths so wide they surely must have whispered into their own ears, “It’s too

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good to last.” I wonder what they whispered to their wives? Did not their wives whisper in reply, “Darling, are you not afraid for what you have done?”

Plagiarism

“Everything has been said before —by someone who did not discover it.” (Whitehead.)

I anticipate that critics of these notes will only say of mine, “Everything has been said before, by this writer.” But no matter! It's worth repeating for it’s always forgotten.

And if they say “He doth protest too much,” I can’t help it. I’m in a hurry, for lam still young.

A Hospital Board

“Bom a disputant, a sophist made,

His Board he silenced, with a crust they paid.”

Many years ago I succeeded in silencing, with much noise, all opposition on my Board to my request that they should purchase a septic tank with all the appurtenances (of the cheapest type) for the official Medical Superintendent’s house, to be paid for by my not taking my annual holiday, and thus saving the Board the cost of a locum and the cost of a septic tank and all appurtenances.

Where the Long Way Round is the Wrong Way Round

“Instead of living off the wild herbage of the Steppe, through the transforming medium of wild animals (like many other nomad hordes who have done the same), they (the victors) proposed to live off the cultivated crops of plough

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land through the transforming medium not of animal diges' tion but of human labour.” (Toynbee.)

In other words, eating the pigs’ food instead of letting the pig eat his own food, and then eating the pig. This, I think, is the fundamental absurdity of all our modem food cranks, amongst whom I include those often very foolish cooks who call themselves “dieticians.” It is also responsible for the Rape of the Soil, where farming is mining.

Collingwood’s New Leviathan

1.46. “A man ceases to be a beginner in any given science, and becomes a master in that science when he has learned that this expected reversal is never going to happen, and that he is going to be a beginner all his life.” In medfi cine that begins when he attends a clinical discussion once a week.

Was Cluney at Church?

There is just one problem in the World —it is the Art of Living. Dying is easy! Too easy, I thought, when I first saw it.

Listen! When I was a boy, walking home with my father from Church one Sunday, we called in to see an old woman who was said to be dying.

We went into the room. She opened her eyes, looked at my father, and in a clear, quite lucid and rather impatient sort of voice—l thought—said, “Was Cluney at Church?” That was all. She never spoke again—she was dead, they said.

My father and the old man didn’t seem to mind much, but I was terrified —it seemed so easy.

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Excuses Within Their Comprehension

“There is no order in his notes” —meaning that order which pundits practice and call Methodology. Of course there’s not. How can there be? These notions are noted as they’re bom, knowing not their dates. I stop my legs, I stop my horse, I stop my car, I jump out of bed —having forgotten my pencil, I drop my book, I drop my tools to make my notes while still they’re hot. For I register only the living, not the near dead.

For the inchoate symbols that bring them come without my knowing or my invitation. They don’t appear in orderly array, for if I sit down to write them up they sulk methodologically. Nor does a symbol, an analogy, promote just one thought or the same thought in all persons or on all occasions. A note book, sometimes engendered by parts from wholes, sometimes by wholes from parts, consciously methodical would not be a note book of notions, but a text book of norms, a noisome sort of book.

So I harp on the trite as my triumph, with whiles aperitifs to aid absorption and not on the method of an order. Any way!—in that way it’s all intellect in triplicate at least. What I want to say you’re sure to find somewhere. For if you jump the points the first time round, you’ll hit the bull the second time.

The Footnotes of the Moderns

Scientists, I notice —on rhetoric bent, seeking appraisal and approval of their notions —ignore the footnotes of the modems, ape the methods of the scholars, and laboriously glean enlightenment from the archaic, like an ass who never strays from the shafts.

For example, John Bunyan’s mythical Christian still

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walks boldly in our cloisters as the greatest of our English pilgrims. Lawrence’s miraculous pilgrimage of Revolt in the Desert, epitomising the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, stalks unseen in the orations of medical pundits.

TIME

About Philosophers

In case I have misled you—

In the course of a brief 5,000 years or so of our historical period, philosophers, who were also poets, have solved a lot of problems, deducing from very limited facts most of science’s fundamental notions, clearing up much loose think' ing and pegging many mental pitfalls.

Man is much in their debt, more deeply so than to any other class of society. But some of their modem work

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appears to a Kitchen Philosopher as rather like a piece of the finest Carriskmacross lace, a tangled mass of “threads" and “knots” and “bits," so fine, so subtle, that their teleological pattern can’t be detected nor its beauty appraised by an ordinary man’s vision—in a word, sense murdered by excessive fabrication.

It is quite useless for everyday kitchenware. And have not such philosophers just tumbled into the bottomless pit of specialism, and lost their philosophy and their God? And are not specialism and philosophy contradictory terms, and these men just juggling absurdities? For is not philosophy thinking all things together, and is not specialism thinking altogether of one thing? The Philosophy of Organism, I believe, is the only philosophy or cosmology worth bothering about, for it is the only reality. I would like to shout that loud enough to be heard in Heaven, for then I might get in.

Dieticians

The dietician talks about balance of diet. He is presumptuous and is assuming an exotic control of what the tissues can do without his assistance, and probably in spite of him. The animal organism can make tranformation be' tween protein, carbohydrate and fat. Recent evidence even points to the ability of the organism to make carbohydrate and even glycogen from carbon dioxide and water. And animals can be kept alive and in excellent health with all dietary nitrogen furnished in the form of pure amino acids. Many of the amino acids themselves can be synthesised in the body.

These observations account for the fact that people live on a very great variety of diets, which according: to the pseudo-scientific are unbalanced and therefore inconsistent with good health. And they talk in spite of the self-evident

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facts —e.g., the Chinese diet, Indian diet, etc., which show they are talking nonsense.

All one can say about diet is this—that certain types of foods—e.g., the complete carcase of a sheep—having every' thing in it, can make the organism’s job of “aminoing” acids an easy one.

Kierkegaard Amused

In 1848 by 1948

“The idea, in whatever concrete form it may be under' stood, of attaching a demonstration of probability to the improbable (to prove that it is probable) is so stupid when seriously conceived that it would seem impossible for it to be entertained, but as jest and banter it is in my view extraordinary amusing; to practise in this narrow turning is a very entertaining pastime.”

No wonder the theologians of his day tried to crucify him for baiting them. It is an extraordinary wonder that the theologians of our day still go on with the same amazing stupidity and expect the people to follow them.

WhY'LONG AND HoW'LONG

I like a long run for a long jump but not so long as to tire me or you. It’s a difficult measure!

And I hate people who plan for the very long run—but then I hate all plans and planners. Notions are quite different. They are organic—in them change is always imminent—and they go on for ever. You may be right, but you’re bound to be wrong. You know what I mean! You are never quite right.

And if my note book is a good note book, none will

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complain it is too long, but all will bemoan it is too short. Whoever said the commandments were too long? unless the slave who cut them in stone.

Warning

By the way, illiterate writers should never quote the masters quite correctly. To deprive the literate the pleasure of correcting the illiterate is so unkind.

Classification Before Assemblage

Today, graphs would pose as synonymous with truth. But theirs is not the truth; many graphs are quite misleading, for they often use selected facts, rarely the whole of the relevant facts, and the most important facts may be quite ignored. Whitehead says that “classification before assemb' lage” is the commonest error of mankind.

So beware of graphs! they are the fashionable Satan potential.

A Nice Chappie Macbeth But!

On a day not very long ago lecturing to a meeting of teachers and talking about boils I asked them who was Job? and none of them knew. Then I asked them if none of them remembered Job that used to be the plumber in Kaikohe, and none of them did. He had nothing to do with their job so he didn’t interest them, they solemnly implied .

On another day when I was a boy driving with my father to see our hoggets that were being wintered near Forres, my father, pointing to the Blasted Heath, said, “That was where Macbeth met the witches."

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“Was that,” our driver said, “Macbeth that used to be the butcher in Nairn? A nice chappie, Macbeth. I knew him well.”

“Yes! the very same man,” my father replied, focussing on me that threatening look I greatly feared that told me to mind my manners.

A Note Book

A note book is a literary form that has no literary form; it is quite informal.

It needs no artificial mode of synchronisation. There is no such thing as a “non sequitur” in a note book —anything can happen.

Its mode of synchronisation is just that of the kitchen midden —that exotic locus so beloved of all archaeologists, the contents of which and their juxtaposition depend soully, on the quotidian appetite humour of the cook, and the weather.

And it’s not the truth, because the truth is the problem —the obsession —it’s a partisan repetitive foray with Truth for Truth’s sake. My friends describe mine as “just havers!” In truth, it’s just my truth. It’s full of malice, if it’s full of sense and feeling.

Memory

The remembering of an event and the remembrance that it happened are very different. Think of the world of difi ference in significance between “I remember that she laughed” and “I remember her laugh.” And a man might get hung because that world of difference was overlooked. And “the remembering of an event,” recognising the above distinction, is private. We never remember the same as others do, as every magistrate and judge knows.

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Commission reports may fail to report reality for the same reason.

The Healing Quality of Art and Port

Neitzsche talked about “the healing quality of art, meaning the therapeutic use of art in the higher state of consciousness. That can only mean, I think, the use of the religious or metaphysical notions, conveyed by some art. These notions are needed to bring about the wholesomeness of mind, that essential to the change from the state of dis-ease to the state of ease —the attainment of Health. I believe that sometimes may be the correct treatment. But don’t misunderstand me, I don’t mean the sort of thing my father used to say about a very old, very useless, but still very active country doctor —“He’s reached the praying stage now.”

The doctor, when he didn't do anything that did any good—which was his habit —prayed long and loudly on his knees at his patient’s bedside and charged a doctor’s fee, not content with a parson’s cup of tea and a sponge cake. I confess that I have sometimes felt inclined to pray, when faced by a similar predicament. Alas! I don’t know who to pray to, but if I did I swear I’d do it in a stealthy silence, on my own backside or with straight legs—and charge the full doctor’s fee by right, of course! like him.

My father's habitual spiritual medicine —and his only medicine—was port wine. He used it regardless of symptoms and species for horses, cattle and humans, and once I remember for the old sow that was in sore travail with six out, but more to come.

He, like Neitzsche, believed in it more as a metaphysical medicine than a physical medicine. He always said “it kept the spirits up.’’

I know he invariably prescribed, and usually presented,

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a bottle of port to all the old praying doctor’s patients in our parish. He called it “the pleasant antidote to present prayer.” I can’t recollect his taking port wine himself when he was ill, he must have had some good reason (he invariably had!) and probably it also was spiritual. He believed in whisky toddy. And the mystic A.E. supports what I’ve been trying to tell you-

“At last, at last, the meaning caught—-

The spirit wears its diadem;

It shakes its wondrous plumes of thought

And trails the stars along with them.”

The Weather as the Supreme Causality

Man’s inclination (which I think I share to an abnormal and primitive degree, being myself of the breed of shepherds and sheep stealers), to attribute causality to the weather, when faced with mystery, and helpless from not knowing, is a primitive trait. It dates back to the days of long ago, when man was comparatively young —about 45,000 years old, I understand; to the days of the great river civilisations —to ancient Egypt 4,000 8.C., when man first made God a Supreme God, a Sky God —so they say.

Personally I think the Sky God notion must have existed in the still further back, to the days before agriculture, when man was still but a fruit gatherer, a hunter, a fisherman.

The important point I want to make is that a Sky God, for man in that epoch, was inevitable. Man learnt from ex' perience that there was no use arguing with, swearing at, or quarrelling with the weather. Feeling impotent and that life for him was dependent on the weather, he naturally came to the conclusion that there was nothing for him to do but to make the weather his Supreme and All Powerful God —hoping thus to propitiate him, or her, or it, by spiritual

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flattery. If the worst came to the worst and the weather was too bad altogether, they could always try the effect of a materialistic offering (e.g., a goat or a Government In' spector), a form of bribery that always worked well with humans in ancient Egypt, and still does with modern Egyptians, I understand.

And today, 1949 A.D., in spite of all the rise and set of moonshines since, God is felt still —I think every Cockey at any rate must agree —to be a Sky God. Of course, bribery of the Sky God has rather gone out —“more’s the pity” the parsons say —but bribery of sorts is still quite fashionable, I understand, in the seats of the mighty of urban civilisations. And propitiating our human gods—“those worshipful men” the Arabs call them —who can alleviate the weather with gold, I do so hate.

Recognition

The minds that have shaped my mind, that have pulled the trigger of perception for me, and made possible recollec' tion of what I believe is inherent in me, as in every normal human organism who is prepared to go further, are firstly Professor Whitehead, and Mr. Hooper, editor of Philosophy and Director of Studies of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, who has done so much to explain away the difficulties. of interpreting the Philosophy of Organism.

Perry’s Primordial Ocean, R. G. Collingwood’s 7\[etc Leviathan, Soren Kierkegaard, Santayana, many of the poets, Lawrence of Arabia, and Toynbee quite recently have added confirmation. There are a host of others but these are, I feel, my foundations. These men are scholars. They have taught me something of the notions of the Ancients, on which their own notions are based. The truth is, of course, that what I am, and what I see, is due to my environ'

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ment and all that that means —mostly my job of work which is my own. “What is, grows from what was,” must be true, and if I add to that proverb—which must be a very old one instinctive to all peoples—“and will be” it is still true.

Excess of Fabrication in Medicine

I believe that the greatest part of medical diagnostic and curative procedure, when sent to the laundry of space-time, will never come back from the washing.

The Humbug Extractor will see the end of most of the specialist frills, like the fate —as every woman knows—that befalls all frilly panties sent to the public wash for purification and ironing out of wrinkles.

Consider the swallowed safety pin that was never re' covered. Not thinking and not looking, they pulled the plug on the obvious, depending instead on the absence of X-ray shadows and a bismuth meal for their perception. And so many instructive occasions—“drops of experience”—go down the drain without inspection or without consideration, as every plumber knows.

Lawrence's Cosmology

From his Seven Pillars of Wisdom

“Into the sources of my energy of will I dared not probe. The conception of antithetical mind and matter which was basic in the Arab self-surrender helped me not at all. I achieved surrender by the very opposite road through my notion that mental and physical were inseparately one: that our bodies, the universe, our thoughts and facilities were concerned in and of the molecular sludge of matter, the universal element through which form drifted as clots and patterns of

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varying density. It seemed to me unthinkable that assemblage of atoms should cogitate except in atomic terms. My perverse sense of value constrained me to assume that abstract and concrete as badges did not denote oppositions more serious than Liberal and Conservative.”

And so Lawrence found a cosmology by the way of the Desert, which was a very hard way indeed.

Somewhere, and somehow, in that short but hectic period of his life, he had found the fundamental truth of Organism, and on that based the Cosmology which I have just recorded.

Ordinary men, having slower minds and living slower lives, require longer.

Man’s continuance in continium in his cosmic epoch hangs on a suitable Kitchen Organic Philosophy and sufficient Kitchen Medicine.

Whitehead says, “A power of incorporating vague and

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disorderly elements of experience is essential for the advance into novelty.”

And “Morality consists in the control of process so as to maximise importance.”

And “In the absence of Perspective there is Triviality.”

So what happens to matter is Process, not Matter.

North Auckland University

(A Prospectus)

City parents are advised that the Spring Session opens on the ist August.

This University prepares intelligent boys desirous of attaining the highest possible of all degrees—M'A'N.

A comprehensive study and practice in the arts and crafts of man and beast —the Humanities and Animalities — is offered to suitable students.

The degree of M.A.N. (Master of Animal Nature — which, of course, includes man) will be conferred at the end of the milking season, to successful students. Students who are desirous of acquiring special knowledge, to qualify pre' paratory to becoming specialists, will be permitted to remain in residence to continue their course through the Basic Slag season of throwing a blinding dust over the land. This session for specialists begins at the end of the milking season —the date depends on the cows, the bulls, the weather, and the Government making supplies of Basic Slag available — and that’s none too dusty!

The University, following the traditional example of the Oxford and Cambridge tutorial systems, consists of about 300 self'contained and self'sufficient colleges. Each college is under the supreme control of a qualified graduate of our University, who acts as tutor and Principal and is known as the 0.8. He arranges and personally superin'

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tends the work of each student (in fact he has actually been known to remove his professorial oilskin —the “long robe” of office —and work in the rain with the students in the flush of the season).

Lectures on the Humanities are usually given at night—it depends on the weather. Lectures and practice of the Animalities go on during the day, and sometimes, at the beginning of the season, at night, when the cows are coming in—especially if there are a lot of heifers.

The University, with its various Colleges, is splendidly situated in beautiful and extensive grounds. The country is rich in traditional and contemporary culture. The climate is excellent and rainfall ample, especially at the Weka Weka Colleges, which has an annual rainfall of between 200 and 300 inches.

The objective of the benevolent and farseeing founder of our University was to make available to the town dweller the higher culture of the country (and provide cheap labour for the hard'up cockies).

There is instruction and plentiful practice in the domestic and culinary arts. Plunketing and liquidation of calves is also given between, and after milking, by the wives of the principals of the various colleges, who are themselves Uni' versity graduates of the Humanities and Animalities.

Sex instruction is acquired in the cowyard by observing the habits and custom of the animals.

The short robe type uniform worn by students, wearing of which is compulsory, consists of a shirt, dungarees and gumboots, no hat, no socks (the last is optional). At the Weka Weka College an oilskin is sometimes permissable and advisable. The uniform can be bought locally.

The discipline of the University is firm but kindly, and can be appraised from our coat of arms (which is always worn off except sometimes at Weka Weka), and our motto, which reads—

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“Think when you’re telt. Do as you’re telt.” (A North Auckland rendering of a Gaelic proverb.)

Here it is incumbent on me as Dean to warn parents that if their sons are much good, they will never go back to town for good.

The fees depend on the abilities of the individual student and are payable to the Dean in the first place. Board and lodging are provided free of charge.

A Personal Note on the Previous Note

If you will permit me for a moment after my apparent levity to be consciously pompous and even more didactic than usual, I would like city parents to know that nothing can so well prepare their children for the hard scramble that looms ahead as a season of farm fife and farm work.

Their health would benefit and their minds would improve. I don’t mean a holiday in the country —that’s no good!—I mean work in the country, hard work, not play. And it’s not the conception of country training colleges that work should be make believe rather than real, but rather the apprentice conception that makes boys craftsmen, not playboys or amateurs. And they would learn as they earn —not spend as they play.

By the way, the advantage of writing a plain note book is that it is not a proper but an improper book, bound in no literary convention, so incapable of offence or defence. Listen!

“The little fox murmured

‘O what of the world’s bane?’

The sun was laughing sweetly,

The moon plucked at my rein,

But the little fox murmured

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‘O do not pluck at the rein,

He is riding to the town land,

That is the world’s bane’.”

—'W. B. Yeats.

And a Cocky reading that said “that’s right!”

Man is the Measure of All Things

(Meaning each man is the measure of himself)

I have a notion that what a man thinks about a subject depends on the amount he thinks. So that if we all thought the same amount, we would all think the same, and all agree. That is why a Pukka Philosopher sometimes comes to the same conclusions as a Kitchen Philosopher (by another way round) and can be equally wise.

Civilization

Our whole civilization meaning our spiritual decency and our spiritual beliefs, not our technical skill), is full of lies, which seems absurd.

Everyone lies, and everyone knows they lie. Truth is a double bluff. For example, every business letter and most private letters begin with one and end with one, and God alone knows how many more explicit in the lines between and implicit between the lines.

It would be disastrous to refuse to He. It’s not done “in the Row that man calls Rotten."

We can’t tell the truth, none can face the truth. The only reasonable explanation of our behaviour is that truth has a different quality at different levels of thought. Credulity has different levels! —we know.

And if we can’t accept as reasonable a philosophy that

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we know to be absurd and perhaps illogical, how can we be expected to accept a religion that we know and feel is absurd, having no harmony for us?

It’s true that many have accepted such a religion in the past, and some may still say they do, but the evidence that their acceptance is high up on the ladder of faith is rather low on their neighbour s ladder of credulity, sometimes below the Zero rung. Still, I believe that a Philosophy making religion possible can be found by those who seek it with that per' tinacity that is intent and content to go further in search of satisfaction; a philosophy that requires no faith save reason and intuitive imagination, no revelation save your own revelations, not even learning from others but the learning got from your own contemplation, no analysis but your own in' trospection of your own existence, and no appraisahcon' scious and super'conscious—but your own appraisal in terms of organism.

I believe that spiritual satisfaction can be so acquired if we seek it—intent to keep on “going farther.” I believe that attainment of such a satisfaction belongs to the inherent order of the nature of man. Without it we can’t be whole' some, or in order, or worthy of satisfaction and survival, any more than the sun would, if she refused to get up in the morning, and passed the buck to the light of the moon to warm herself and others.

Eternal Bodies and Drops of Experience

Plato, the Bible, and Shakespeare have between them monopolised the conversation of all the time and space of this our era. They have done all the talking.

Between them they have said everything, leaving not a single thought for the moderns to say with pride “this is mine.” All the moderns can do is to write long footnotes

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in small letters in very narrow margins. It is—l put it too mildly—shocking bad manners on the part of the ancients. They have ruined modern literature —we have nothing to say or do but complain or drip. Also you can’t murder the dead: can’t even bury them. Are they going to live for ever?

Yes! —for they are eternal bodies, just as colours are — these permanent colours I mean that never fade away. It is true you can wipe them out in one place, but they just turn up again elsewhere when needed, just the same colour and fresh as ever, willing if need be to add colour to another occasion and so confer on it a quality of eternality.

Of course, I speak from a humble sore. It is not really quite so one-sided as first appears, for if we did not provide the ordinary occasions, drops of experience, by our talking and our writing as a medium for the masters —our “eternal bodies” —to go on living and parading in, they would not only die but be buried for good this time.

So that is probably our vocation and that is our privilege as preachers. We keep the dead alive, although perhaps we sometimes torture them as drips so often do.

Is that how the humble inherit the earth,

Yes! as trite drip'drops, as farthings.

Classical Logic is Absurd

“It is characteristic of science in its earlier stages, and logic has become fossilised in such a stage, to be both ambituously profound in its aims and trivial in its handling of detail.” (Whitehead).

And if of that you want confirmation I suggest that you consult Jevens, written fifty years ago and still the standard logic of our centres of erudition. As a guide in life it would land you in prison or the asylum, and kill most of my patients.

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The Best of Two Worlds

“Theologians have, enough, tried to obtain the best of two worlds —the world of doctrinal orthodoxy, and the world of rational speculation, without realising that the chasm between them cannot be bridged, that dogmas erected on primitive behaviour compulsions, cannot be rationalised and fitted into some coherent philo' sophical system.” (Journal of Philosophy.)

Deciding to withdraw all religious beliefs from the sphere of reason, Pascal’s advice was to believe them because they are absurd. The new Theologians have just done this, sweet reason having failed to reestablish religion in the minds of the people. They have gone to the other extreme and ap' pealed to the irrational side of man, and advocated acceptance of the absurd, just as Kierkegaard did 100 years ago, faced with the same predicament.

But it can’t be done that way. That is a childish way, the Jack and the Beanstalk way to Heaven.

And didn’t Kierkegaard also jeer with much joy at the absurdity of the parsons ever prinking to be in at the death, by trying to prove the improbable by giving probable reasons for the improbable. Kierkegaard in effect said, “Yes! Accept the absurd, for there is no alternative in reason; but why paint the lily by being more absurd than is necessary. That is being absurd just for absurdity’s sake." A prescription of sense and nonsense—with the dose of each ingredient to suit the particular case is the only suitable spiritual medicine for man as he is.

The Schizophrenic

Empathy means the bases of emotional relations with each other. Socrates was what we call a good mixer. To him all men were “thous.” A fully developed schizophrenic

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is the bad mixer—or rather he can’t mix at all. He is the quite impossible man and to him all men are “Its” and he alone is “I.”

Of course, that is the certifiable schizophrenic, who is intolerable, so we shut him up. But there are a multitude of mild schizophrenics at large, and we in a kindly tone call them “bad mixers.” To them most people are “its.” (“A picture of the outer world painted in colours that the painter already learned to use, for his self portrait,” Collingwood says.) Some artists and poets belong to this class. Of course, people say, and they are right, that poets are all half daft and some quite daft when at work, which is not very often, fortunately. And poets say the same of themselves with pride. The saying “Genius is akin to madness” is the public recognition of this truth. The partial schizophrenic is, I believe, the victim of his parents’ folly, partly through genes and partly by nurture. It is sad that “feral” children, children who have been adopted by wild animals since an early age, are totally lacking in power to show empathy.

I don’t know if that is true, but I do know that children bred from and nurtured by inhuman people—“wolf” people if you like—do produce children that grow up lacking in power to show empathy. It is a common disease of the common rich, who know not wealth, but arrogance.

A High Producer

“111 health,” he says, “is a conviction and I was bom with that conviction.”

But his ill health is no mere sequence of ailments and remedies. It is the basis of his daily habits and intellectual pursuits. It is a ritual and a philosophy. He is not altogether unconscious that it is his substitute religion.

“It is only we invalids who can know anything about

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ourselves. His aim is that perfection which in such a context is called Health. In this comedy of salvation, therefore, Hypochondria becomes his moral conscience, self analysis his dogma, and his drug cabinet the shrine at which he worships.” (Nature review of The Confessions of Teno.)

That's the perfect dual purpose New Zealand breed for the 7/6 doctor.

Will Social Security destroy Instinctive Security? Shall the mothers pass the buck?

The Key to Billy

“The key to the riddle is never found at the level of the riddle in question, thus the problems of thought cannot be overcome by thought, the anguish of the soul cannot be

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stilled by psychology, economics will not exorcise the chaos and misery from our economic and social condition.” (Erich Gutkind.)

A suitable philosophy and transfiguration of the riddle is the key. You may find it if you sit still long enough and keep your brain busy—sufficiently restless —yes! buzzing is the word. “Teach me to sit still,” meaning “Teach me to think,” the poet says.

We think analogically—see sermons in stones and good in everything or bad in everything, depending on which of the personalities who five in your busy brain is for the moment holding the floor. The Kitchen Philosopher says the same thing more profoundly when he talks about getting out on the wrong or the right side of his bed.

And parents often express wonder of why Billy, the one' year-old, is an angel today and is a devil incarnate tomorrow, an unreasonable and therefore an incalculable organism. The answer is that Billy is an organism with multiple personalities, and of the same stuff as his parents. It is not due in most cases to what Bily had for dinner, or that he is teething, or sickening for measles, or too much fat or too much protein, or that he is “just spoilt.” Neither is it due to any of the other multitude of physical phenomena that parents glean from our chattering health propaganda, proceeding then with the prescribed treatment which in nine cases out of ten makes Billy more objectionable than ever and sometimes even harms him.

Don’t misunderstand me —Billy can and sometimes does suffer because his innards are upset, but not nearly so often as parents think, or doctors preach and profit by. My advice, based on a long and painful watching of Billies is, “Leave Bill alone, leave Bill alone—for God’s sake leave Billy alone.” If I could only persuade parents to do just that and nothing else, I swear I would have done more to help the children of New Zealand than all the State’s pharmaceutical benefits

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and aids to healing can possibly do. The urgent need today is an aid to thinking. “Blame the weather” for most ail' ments, as we do for rheumatism, is the best thing to do, because we can’t argue with the weather or do anything about it but accept it.

A Stowaway Might Save the Craft

This gracious passage was found amongst the litter of the Tuberculosis Index published by the National Associa' tion for the Prevention of Tuberculosis, Tavistock House, London —where it had apparently stowed away.

Widstrom G., “On Tuberculosis and the Treatment of Tuberculosis as a Biological Problem” —

“Instead of the pap some doctors are tempted to offer laymen, treated as uneducated high grade mental defectives, Widstrom writes intelligently about Tuberculosis and its treatment viewed as a biological problem. He enforces his argument that heredity does play an important part by a reference to the work of Kallman and Reisner of U.S.A. who in 1943 published their observations on the incidence of tuberculosis among twins in different categories. ’ (Signed) S. Lillingston.

An Ordinary Kind of Bird

He is an ordinary eccentric —alone and never alone —a paradox that is an absurdity, living on his perch in the country on the touch line, watching the game of cajolery going on in the centres —those Wens and would-be Wens! His view is just the bird’s-eye view of an ordinary indeterminate kind of bird having no authority, aspiring not to the vision of the all-seeing, all-knowing, soaring eye of the spontaneously evolved eagle pundit.

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A disagreeable kind of bird who can't agree with the crowd, a sort of crossbred parrot kind of bird, still quite contented with his locus, and he likes cracking nuts.

Sacked

“Once, long ago, I was a school teacher —

I was sacked—

So then, I became, just a paper backed preacher.”

The stupor arose through my attempts to explain to youth how, when and where life began in this world.

The Headmaster, who was a fulminating fundamentalist, knew and told me the exact date of all creation. I have forgotten his year and his month and his day of the week, I only remember his time of the day—it was three o’clock in the afternoon.

He said my dates were not only all wrong but would lead to immorality in the High School; exactly how, when and where he didn’t explain. So of course I was no fit person to teach the young creation, and as I have already told you, I was sacked!

The Significance of Cajolery as a Symptom of Our Malaise

In medicine how much cajolery is right, with “right” meaning “according to rule” or precedent, and how much is right, with “right” meaning Good, ethically good and beneficial to the community, the individual, the family, and the nation? “We know, we have had experience, we have got the right to speak,” as Flaubert made Bouvard and Pecuchet chorus the comparative amounts —

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“The good to the circumference of Cajolery

Is as a small point in geometry,

Where greatness is so little, that a less

Cannot be made.”

Its only good is, that being a point, it’s just a pointer.

And now for all I care, business can play the tricks of cajolery with people’s pockets, the once poor having plenty in theirs, to their hearts’ content. That’s a game, that’s business, maybe not always a fair game with all being “fair game,” but when business rules that rights—legal rights—are played with people’s health, it’s just foul play—really foul!

A real note book of cajolery would hide all tomes; for in it could go 95% of the British Pharmacopeia, surgical operations, especially gynecological, ear, nose, and throat, thoracic surgery, hospital excesses, diagnostic techniques, tuberculosis prevention and cure, physical therapy, X-rays, etc., etc. I can’t convey the vastness of that circumference of absurdity, mumpsimus, and cajolery. It needs a whole catalogue, like the Farmers Trading Co. catalogue (that family Bible of our backblocks), but far, far bigger, of course. Let it be illustrated just like it, with the prices figured in Units of Health, as Ease or Disease, morbidity or normality; in fact an itemised double entry health audit, the prices always subject, of course, to market variations, and to the law of supply and demand, as Mr. Nash was wont to explain, not only in height, but at length and breadth.

Is this all peculiar to our epoch? No! I believe all epochs have suffered more or less from their peculiar malaise, for if you listen you can hear the Jeremiahs of all the epochs prophesy the same grave grace notes of horror and of dread. Consider the 17th century, historically known as the age of melancholia when Death was the dread, the time of the Great Plague when London smelt of death as Belsen did and

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Russia does, and Burton wrote his Anatomy of Melancholy. and the poet sang in irony but in truth.

“Young gentlemen would be sad as night

Only for wantonness.”

Can we in that precedent find comfort? No! No! there is this terrifying difference; the Dread —our dread, the Anguish—our anguish, is that man is now so horribly efficient. He can do anything except “behave.” He can split the atom into bloody occasions that can blast us all to Hell. If that is true, and it is true, then the Book of History our Epoch is writing is correctly called The Anatomy of Madness, not the Anatomy of Melancholy, far less The Anatomy of Reason.

Is our epoch then to be a century of madness? As Middleton Murry has suggested—and I notice his notion has had more recognition in the public press than any notion he ever launched before- —lunacy will be the “rule,” the “right,” and the Law, the norm we all must measure up to, and live by. How, Good God! how? Can it be that

“The soul of man is on the march

To its last bivouac—death.”

Cajolery in medicine compared to that may be but a small thing, a symptom, but it’s a warning symptom, and therefore a grave symptom of a whole developing syndrome, and I—and I speak advisedly—diagnose that as incipient madness. Inevitable madness may well be reason’s verdict.

To the Curious

What does Smith look like?

Well! if you care to go to Scotland, and if you go to the best place—which, of course, is North of the Forth —you will see, somewhere up on the Highland line, a long fair Hieland Shepherd. He will be cursing and swearing at his

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dogs, because he can’t get the sheep to go the way he wants, which, of course, is the right way. That’s me! or rather it would have been me, if I hadn’t been a good shepherd gone wrong.

The Bridge Called Humour

Kierkegaard’s intellectual life was a sprt of rake’s progress—he said so himself! —and the last bridge he crossed before taking his final leap into faith was the bridge between ethics and religion. And Kierkegaard called that the bridge of humour. And humour is just the recognition of the absurd by which man maintains his humanity.

The Individual in Our Midst

“ coward, clown, traitor, dreamer, beast—such was a poet and shall be and is, who’ll solve the depths of horror to defend a sunbeam’s architecture with his fife.” (From E. E. Cummings’ One Time One.)

“Ah, yes! so did the contemporaries doubtless judge of the Roman knight who made the immortal leap to save his country! . . . The essentially ethical (individual) author is always polemical and hence he suffers under or suffers from the opposition which corresponds to whatever in his age must be regarded as the specific evil ... he has but one fulcrum for his lever, namely a miraculous syllogism. When anyone asks him on what he bases his claim that he is right and it is the truth he utters, his answer is: I prove it by the fact that I am persecuted; this is the truth, and I can prove it by the fact that I am derided. The category, “the in' dividual,” was regarded as an oddity and the invention of an odd person. In fact it is, for was not Socrates, in a sense the inventor of it, called, in his day, “the Oddest.” The credit

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for having brought the category of “the individual” to notice in its time I would not exchange for a kingdom. If the Crowd is the Evil, if Chaos is what threatens us, there is salvation only in one thing, in becoming a single individual, in the thought of “that individual” as an essential category.

And that was written in 1848 by Soren Kierkegaard, the master of irony, the man with the thin legs, whose trouser legs were invariably variable in length—the terrible Dane the crowd and the Church called him. The battle of the individual has reached its climax, maybe its last ditch, today, and “spies in a higher service” are urgently needed to man and perhaps drown in the Partisan’s last ditch.

Don’t misunderstand me —unless the individual never for one moment forgets that there is no such thing as being alone he deserves to drown in the first ditch. The absurdity of an individual thinking he is “the only pebble on the beach,” instead of only a pebble on the beach, is the conception that has led to the last ditch predicament, and so proverbially makes all last ditches lost ditches.

The community is as real as the individual; the problem is how to make them function as individuals in community and not as crowds, political parties, trade and professional unions or Friends of a Bloody Pagan Muscovite Civilisaiton and enemies of their own, for all there are crowds. The crowd is the “numerical.”

And all that is our drop of experience in the stem, bitter fight for spiritual existence, and not just waggish wisdom talk, which although natural, is but technical, and quite incidental to my purpose. And I am not writing for myself, I am writing for you, or rather for us, the guinea pigs who have no tail!

Preaching

Can the Protestant cease from preaching? Can the eagle soar without a tail?

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This is the climax of my preaching years. Not all has come I wished for, for that would never do! Perfection has a hidden selfishness. Lawrence of Arabia said something like that when the desert campaign was near ending, and I feel like that now.

Should the remaining years be praying years, as many of our intellectuals seem to think? May be! —if I knew who to pray to, but I don’t. My God doesn’t like prayers, he’s not that sort of omnipotent God. He is an organic God. Indeed he is deaf to prayer, for he knows that prayers lose grace even as they’re prayed. And if he spoke and if I prayed, I can surely hear him chide me in derision, “Get off your knees, you’ll spoil your pants. Why ape the mantis? Think and think again! then practise. Then you will know yourself and me.”

For the temporal and changing is as necessary to the per' manent and eternal as the latter is to it.

So God is in you, and you are in God. That is, or is at least implied, in the Bible, although Puritans deny it.

I don’t know what Parsons think when they think.

Satire

Satire comes at the end of an art era, and it’s the lowest form of art, the pundits say.

It may, however, be the best form for a time. For satire, if successful, and sometimes it has been, can free man from the shackles of contemporary absurd conventions. That is its reason, and the justification of its lowness. For the world if it is to be saved will be saved most likely, and certainly most kindly, by laughing at our absurdities with others, rather than by cursing God for his. Only an internal causality belonging to a higher mental level of man’s personality can save us.

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Our Old People Who are Becoming so Common

The principle that each addition of a child should com' mand more house room should also apply to an old addition. Lack of room, as much as lack of love, is the usual reason for children dumping their parents in an institution when they are done with them.

If they had semi-attached accommodation for them, with the degree of attachment depending on their peculiar circumstances, the lives of old people would often be much happier.

And I say again what I have stressed before, that the benefit would be mutual, for the old can, and often would, herd the grandchildren. It amuses both. That, I believe, is the biological symbiotic function of the old in a humanist society. Elephants do it, and the Maoris used to, and many still do.

A Convenience

“Who is that, this dark night,

Under my window plaineth?”

(Sydney’s Clenlogie.)

Reading that brings back to mind another night, dark like that, and snowing hard.

“Will you come at once to a convenience at Glenfarg, Doctor?”

“I’m damned if it’s convenient!” said the old doctor in his night shirt from his bedroom window.

But he went at once. I know that, because I had to go, too —it was such a devil of a night. He belonged to a school that believed they had to go, though they didn’t want to.

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Writers

“We assume to a ridiculous extent that what is stimulating us will stimulate others in the same way, forgetting that what will happen depends on what has happened before and what is already happening within, about which we can usually know little.” (J. A. Richards.)

That, I suppose, is why all we write is in essence autobiography. There creeps in the injunction to swallow your own words, for “they will be cast out only into the draught” and defile it only. But these same words if allowed to come out of your mouth, coming from your heart, may defile man. And it’s not the bawdy or obscene that defiles man, it’s the misleading statement —the ignorant lie, as well as the purposive lie. Socrates said that ignorance was the greatest sin. (A censor is required, it’s true, but who and what and when? —no man wots.)

Is evil as well as virtue needed for our processing to a better civilisation? I know some choice is essential to all organisms—it is to electrons. Maybe Good or Evil supply the freedom of choice we need as organisms to attain satisfaction. Perhaps that is the correct answer to the question.

Yes! “the necessity of Evil”—it seems absurd but it appears as if we must accept it, not knowing a better, as a fundamental of our philoosphy.

And we have got to forget a lot, to retain what is by courtesy and wont called sanity but isn’t really!

Is not acceptance of the absurd the democratic way of life? Totalitarians having their own alternative would accept that definition. We have no alternative, so we also perforce have to accept it.

Contraries and Contradictions

From Collingwood’s New Leviathan

■‘29.51. Dialectic is not between contraries but be-

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tween contradictories. The process leading to agreement begins not from disagreement but from nonagreement.

29.52. Nonagreement may be hardened into disagree' ment: in that case the stage is set for an eristic in which each party tries to vanquish the other, or remaining mere nonagreement, it may set the stage for a dialectic, in which each party tries to discover that the difference of view between them conceals a fundamental agreement.”

And by listening to debates in our House of Representatives was not how Professor Collingwood formulated these notions.

Perception

All these notes are just our perceptions of our environment. Our “immediate perception” is arrived at by the state of our own bodies, especially our intimate innards; our “remote perception” by the state of our home (including our purses), our parish and our land; our “remoter-still perception” by the state of the World (which is mad); and, lastly, a still remoter perception is arrived at by consideration of the probable state of our future environment, and that includes our prospects of immortality.

In the aggregate these perceptions constitute “the Concrescent Process” of our Becoming, our causality. All our perceptions, including our emotions, are bundled up together into that Whole, which is our Inheritance and our Cosmic Epoch. As Whitehead says, “it is heavy with the contact of things gone by which lay their grip upon our immediate selves.”

“How oft do they their silver bowers leave

To come to succour us, that succour want,

How oft do they with golden pinions cleave

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The flitting skyes, like flying pursuivant

Against foule feendes to aid us militant?'

(Spencer’s Faery Queen.)

My answer is, “As often as we bother to sit down in solitude and think.” That, I think, constitutes, inter alia, the observance of our religious perceptions.

But our epoch does not really bother much about religion. For example, the 8.8.C. (our ever guiding star on values) devotes about two minutes or so each day for God’s sake, and they are deeply religious Christian body. And the same 8.8.C. devote a few hours each day for the sake of football, cricket and such like; of these we are all devotees and all “good sports.” (I wonder what God thinks of his two minutes.)

Absurd? —I don’t know! I don’t know! The correct answer may be that God today is trying to persuade, for life today is giving us no easy answers. But Ido know that time must, for the sake of man’s spirit, be found somehow for a thinking Philosophy, one that thinks of real values and not of trivialities. Time has not been found yet, and that is dangerous and so absurd, and to me at least neither the danger nor the absurdity, is acceptable. lam frightened.

Dog Eat Dog

Our medical service has no desire to survive as a fossil in its fastness, nor as a red herring (that fish that only fishermen knowing fish, look askance at and think strange) for the B.M.A. and Government to use.

Nor are we —thinking ourselves perfect—deluded pen fectionists who think the better bad. On the contrary, we wish to be better than we are. In the narrow official mind of the B.M.A. our medical service is an infectious disease,

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liable to assume epidemic form, which ought to be stamped out —just as the 7/6 doctors think Health is infectious and must be stamped out —and for the same reasons.

The Modern Philosopher and the Theologian

The theologian starts with a God, which he swears he has already found, and proceeds to develop his Christian cosmology.

The organic philosopher, on the other hand, starts with science, and using it as his tool believes he may end by finding not only an implicit but an explicit God. Then having attained satisfaction like A.E. he can sing:

“At last, at last, the meaning caught—

The spirit wears its diadem;

It shakes its wondrous plumes of thought

And trails the star along with them.”

The Fate of Buddhism

Buddha is said to have said—

“Do not accept what you hear by report; do not accept tradition; do not accept a statement because it is found in our books, nor because it is in accord with your belief, nor because it is the saying of your teacher.” (James Bridie in his preface issues a similar warning about this book.)

Buddha wanted them to think for themselves—each man his own lamp.

In India that was too much trouble, the Indians thought; accepting authority is so much easier. And so Buddhism died out in mentally lazy India, the place of its birth, but spread East because of its appealing wisdom.

Buddha himself aimed at being scientific and precise—

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LATER NOTES

he was no mystic! His followers changed his notions in the course of 2,000 years, to suit themselves. That was inevit' able, and Buddhism grew mystical. Alas! they substituted absurdity where there had been but reason.

Have we sO'called Christian followers done the same with Christianity since Jesus walked and talked by the Sea of Galilee?

Buddhism

Buddhism kept the Gods in their place. It didn’t deny their existence. Oh no! on the contrary, it accepted them, but depicted the Gods coming down from their pedestals to bow to Buddha, who was just a mortal man. Thus Buddha shore the pride and the glory from all the Gods, and that was an admirable notion.

And so Buddha freed man from the fears of the Gods in all the land. That must have been one of the most important steps man took towards civilisation.

Who is going to free the Muscovite from fear of the Georgian God —Stalin —and not only the Muscovite but Us! US!

Yes! Gods of any breed, human or inhuman, must some' how be kept in their proper place. Only a limited God is per' missible.

Loitering with Intent

I accuse the Government and the Opposition, and I speak in a hurry, of “loitering with intent” with the 7/6 doctors —the intent being content by mutual consent to do nothing about it —“it” being a state of medical service that costs more than any other medical service in the world, not only

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in money, but what is far more important, in Health. Health means well-being, and capacity to work and produce, to play and to laugh. The whole world laughs at New Zealand, the B.M.A. the loudest —they crow!

The Plums in Plum Pudding

Alas! all the plums out of a plum pudding are not the same as the plum pudding itself.

So one’s apt to sniff a bit at snippets. Maybe all you can say as a snipper, to the too very superior sniffer, is that plums are better than no plum pudding, and that digestion is the mode of the moment —I was thinking about my grace notes.

About Prophets

The teaching of Jesus on The Way amounted to little more than a fresh focussing of some of the most illuminating thoughts of preceding prophets and rabbis.

It is hard to find sayings that are definitely original. Their volume altogether is very little. But what a light shines through that little! and what a radiance it has! (Liddell Hart.)

The just “stoning” of a prophet is because there always has been a preceding prophet who said much the same thing. The story had been told before, and for a prophet to suggest that it hasn’t—well he deserves stoning.

All writing is fundamentally reiteration and repetition, and all writing is fundamentally autobiographical, yes even a mathematical formula or a catalogue. That may seem to be a paradox and absurd, but isn’t if we but remember the notions of organism. Nothing can be alone; everything

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is affected by every thing else; novelty is due to the fusion of selected prehensions not to the confusion of chance, or a new creation of new electrons or protons —or new prophets.

Reasoning Anthropomorphically.

“We reason anthropomorphically when we seek reasons for the behaviour of things other than ourselves; in the reasons we have already found for our own behaviour,” the pundits say.

Is my analogy of the two-headed serpent then but a sophistry? Not at all! The Logical Positivists if asked, would at once point out that when empirically tested, the serpent’s reasons were all wrong, not morally wrong, of course, but materialistically wrong, for it didn’t pay.

A proper example of reasoning anthropomorphically would be if when using a hammer you, by your own carelessness, miss the nail and hit your own, then blame the hammer, and chuck it away or dance on it in a rage, attributing stupidity and intention to hurt you on the part of the hammer. That kind of reason a kitchen philosopher would call “just damned silliness.” It’s fairly common, as every nurse knows in operating theatres, and the saying goes “A poor surgeon blames his tools.”

But the real reason for this rather long winded and until now rather pointless note is this —that the anthropomorphic error in reasoning is the cause of much of the cruelty to animals, and what is still more serious is the cause of cruelty intentional and unintentional to young children, who are still just as little pigs.

I have mentioned this before —as usual —talking about Bills, and this is just another way around to the same view. You know the familiar “cunning little wretch” —“let him cry”—“if you lift him he will do it every night”—and so

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on —even “he just does it to annoy.” You attribute to the child the same reasons —just moral depravity—for its behaviour as to an adult. And for adults, let alone so called baby experts, to behave as if a child were morally depraved is not only damned silly but damned cruel, and I want every Plunket nurse in New Zealand to know that.

In this note book just one thing is sacred and so inviolate —the belief in the Philosophy of Organism—that brooks no laughter!

All else compared are but havers —straws that blow as they listeth —which might help or just annoy.

Acceptance

We began the book when the omens seemed glamorous, Now we’re ending the book when the omens seem langourous.

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Writes A.R.D.F.—

He wanted to write a cosmography,

He said he must write a cosmography

But he did in the end

What he didn’t intend

And turned out an autobiography.”

We are in Considerable Danger

I want one last chance, my last note, to take one last detour-one last circle—to get the notion behind this book clearer. A last chance to have the laugh against the Gods on our side.

“Where there is nothing, there is God,” a mystic said. Is that the vacant space in man’s perception Whitehead talks about, the space which would not be really vacant if man's mind was complete, and was not lacking of the extra sense needed for wholeness and harmony as the highest grade of all organisms?

For man lacks, although not absolutely, the sense to see or understand what must be in the vacant space. His in' stincts and his feelings tell him that something exists—a mere glimmer (and telepathy and premonitions suggest it) —but he can neither express it in words nor, what is far more iim portant, make use of it sufficiently in his behaviour, to assure his survival as a high grade organism. Although we have acquired more knowledge than ever before, we have also acquired more misery than ever before. Santayana described the function of that extra sense in man as “Life looking out of the window its work done.” Somehow soon man must -use his reason to define the limitations of his reason.

We are, unfortunately, as Collingwood says, not yet escaped from apehood to manhood. Will we ever escape

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from the limiting intellectual bondage of our ancestry?

For man is still like a caged monkey—

“They are secured by straps about their slender

Waists, and the straps to chains, most sad and tender

They clasp each other and look around with eyes

Like ours at what their strange captivities

Invisibly engender.”

—Roy Fuller.

Will man’s monkey mind cage man for ever? I don’t know! I don’t know! but Ido know that my conception of what may happen to man is true. We have ample precedent for the belief that God or Nature, call that what you may, may get tired of man as he did of Tyrannosaurus and many other breeds of hopeless, helpless blunderers. And the possibility of that fate needs no mystical support or scientific imagination for credence. It is just history written with the indelible pencil of the past. It is a self evident truth and needs no proof; and the event may not be far distant.

And now what of the Church and the Theologians? They assume the right and say they know how to get man out of his present parlous spiritual predicament, let us call it for the moment spiritual and not materialistic.

Well! they may know a way for some, but I swear they don't know the way for enough, and I am amongst the “enough.” Have not the Church forgotten that —-

“The years like great black oxen tread the world

And God the helmsman goads them on behind

And I am broken by their passing feet.”

Can they not see, hear and feel that there’s a new yoke groaning now, and to carry the payable load they must change their time-space; and that we, who are the vast majority of people, and are organisms, must have an organic philosophy to suit our nature, one that can lead to a religion that does not deny the facts of life, as we know them — a belief in order in the universe, a belief that is as nearly as

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possible a self-evident fact, a belief that, giving man hope, still does not insult his intelligence.

Above all we refute the conception of an all-powerful Sky God, a man-made, man-like God that man, if he credits omnipotence, can but hold that God responsible for German Belsens and Russians Belsens and such like things, and to add to the hideous absurdity linked to a creed that says of that God —“Our God is Love.”

That is absurd—it is far too absurd to tempt man to take the leap to that Faith. It is more absurd than apedom, and is not a fit faith for mankind. I know the orthodox Christian theologians, fearful of it, attempt an explanation to escape their logical predicament, but their case is not acceptable, because it is neither reasonable nor feasible, for ordinary people.

The Organic God on the other hand man could accept. He is a limited God and his function is one of limitation and not of omnipotence. And the Church, if they wish to retain the respect of the people, must cease from assuming that they have a monopoly—right over faith. They must cease from assuming that the only faith is the faith they sponsor, and that Ethics are a priest’s perquisite, a perquisite that they use or refute as it suits them, and which they alone can dispense in the correct mixture to maintain the spiritual health of humanity. It is not only a theological mistake, but a social blunder.

The truth is that Ethics to a certain extent are part of the biological and physiological genetic make-up of the high grade organism known as man, so are natural to man and only to him amongst the animals. If we were good enough physiologists we could, maybe sometimes, make the necessary desirable ethical adjustments.

It’s our limited perception that leads us astray! Our minds are not understanding enough to keep us either ethically consistent or persistent. And there is nothing “high

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falutin’ ” about ethics! —what I mean by Ethics. Reason' able ethics need no more God in man than going to market does, and man needs no professional interpreter in priestly garb to guide him ethically. The most highly ethical people I know don’t know the meaning of the word “ethics,” and wear their collars the usual way.

But to think that a mere theoretical belief is strong enough to guide our lives ethically is nonsense. We must live that ethical way, to believe that ethical way.

You can’t play the fiddle and become a reasonable fiddler having just bought a fiddle in a shop. You must learn it by playing the fiddle. A teacher can show you a way to go about it —probably quite a good way —but that is not enough, you must play and practise playing all the time, not some of our time. In truth, you must just fiddle away your time. And, similarly, you must acquire a philosophy, and in youth, and from that glean a religion and live in it. Philosophy must begin in school before the school age, if possible in your pram.

And you must learn by example, and can only be taught by example. The first ethical lesson that a young child must learn (that is true, also of pigs) before he can learn the second, is that certain things don’t pay in life. In other words ethics are materialistic at this stage and not spiritual (that dichotomy of mind and spirit I believe is false but necessary for description).

Beauty—the spiritual ethic that is the second lesson — comes later and that also you can only acquire by being beautiful yourself. Then you may see visions, dream dreams, feel Heaven, get satisfaction through adventure, and so become a higher grade organism with more God in you, and attain at least a degree in immortality if not a general practice.

Something like that must come about to give man a metaphysic, to save man from destruction by man. And each

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man must till his own garden, he is an individual, a per' sonality not a “state” in a Christian state. No one else can do it for you, you must stand on your own legs, and practise standing on your own legs seeking adventure, shunning the crowd and the conception of the state, “the untruth.” You will find God most likely in your closet and not in a cathedral, for God, I am certain, has no vicar in particular. Each human being is God’s vicar, and to that extent man is a measure of all things and a person, not an “it.”

And I dare to speak of these things because I know the language of the ordinary people. They are my own people; they don’t know the language of the scholars who are philosophers and theologians, the sophists.

And I am an ordinary person, as most men are ordinary persons. I am not a scholar, not a theologian, not a philosopher with a portfolio, just a practising kitchen philosopher—quite a blind man really, trying to lead the blind by offering them, as a lure to feeling, the loan of any old crutch which I’ve picked up as I’ve stumbled along, try' ing to go further. My crutches may or may not exactly suit you, still they might do till you find a better pair for yourself. They will, I think, be much the same as mine.

And whether you accept the assistance of my crutches or not, I advise you to treat the matter as “one of urgency” as the politicians say when there’s no hurry—which is just what you would expect a politician to do.

For the splitting of atoms is certain to be simplified by improved technique, and will develop in a hurry into quite a habit—possibly a Muscovite habit. And I am certain that prayers to a Christian God—or any God, or a Yogi tech' nique—won’t stop the scientists (or Big Business), though the parsons seem to think so. And could any sane person imagine Stalin or Molotov paying heed to our prayers?

The pure and simple scientist will go on without pause whither his problem leads him, for his problem is his God

GRACE NOTES

and magnet, and he knows no other. He thinks not of man —that mess of motes and mots —only of the single atom. He is the pure specialist “par excellence,” and so is man’s worst guide, and man’s greatest potential menace. He might, of course, if ethically controlled, be man’s potential saviour, and save man from man, or the devil called Stalin, or Bush ness. Alas! he thinks not yet of either possibility, “It’s not the business of a pure specialist,” he says, “to consider man as a whole any way!”

And now I am finished, and like all writers the question in my mind that causes considerable itch, is which of two things will happen. Will the crowd cheer or will the crowd jeer if by some strange chance they do all read our note book?

For I know that Nietzche said when he remembered the paradox of the crowd —

“Good God! they are clapping: what nonsense have I been talking?”

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