Doctors In Print

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28234, 23 March 1957, Page 3

Doctors In Print

A Doctor Returns. By Donald Mcl Johnson. Christopher Johnson. 256 pp. One Doctor in His Time. By Bethel Solomons. Christopher Johnson. 224 pp. Doctor in Soho. By Charles Connell. Elek Books. 211 pp.

Under the title “A Doctor Returns." Dr. Johnson presents the third instalment of his autobiography. In it his main concen is to call in question the circumstances surrounding his confinement to a mental hospital, in October, 1950, where he was a patient for six weeks. He main tains that the oddities in his behaviour which led to his being certified insane were attributable to his having been poisoned—doped, as he puts it —with Indian hemp. It is true that he can name no person whom he might suspect of having poisoned him. Furthermore, were he to have instituted proceedings against anybody concerned in his being put away, such proceedings. in the declared opinion of his solicitor recorded in this book, must necessarily have been laughed out of Court AU this not withstanding the author cannot get it out of- his head that he might have been poisoned. The idea has obviously become an obsession with him—an obsession that obtrudes so much in his book as to place a; strain upon the reader. For there can be no surer way of losing a reader’s interest than persisting, as the author does here, with a piece of conjecture beyond the point where it is seen to be no longer tenable. And that point is reached very early in the book.

’ However, Dr. Johnson’s conjec- ? ture has led him into interesting bypaths. He has a good deal, to - say in this book about Indian hemp and about its potent effects ‘ as a drug. After recovering from ’ his mental illness he made ? - special study of the hallucinogenic _ drugs with a view to writing a ’ thesis for the degree of M.D Bui his thesis, when presented to his . examiners, was considered by them to fall short of the standard • required for that degree. In the British Parliamentary elections nl Mav, 1955. he won the seat for Carlisle, standing as a Conservative. Before being accepted as a candidate by the Central Conservative Office, he was asked —as he writes —to produce a medical recommendation that he was fit to stand the strain of public life. This he was able to do. And since his becoming a member of Parliament he has been a persistent questioner on matters pertaining to the administration of mental hospitals and to the treatment of the insane. In the book under review he writes with I disarming candour. Indeed, to have written‘as he has done here with such frankness concerning so painful an episode in his lite, must have called for no little courage. It is from his own publishing firm that his book is made available to the public. Quite a number of autobiographies of doctors have been published by this firm, one of the most recent of them being that of Dr. Bethel Solomons, an eminent Irish obstetrician and gynaecologist. who retired from practice in 1951. Dr. Solomons held the distinction at one time of being Master of the Rotunda Hospital, Dublin, which is responsible for approximately 6000 births a year. Many interesting experiences, as one might expect, are woven into the story of nis life. And. no doubt, the personal background of some of his patients was often such as to make him feel that he could write a book about them. At least ne hints as much in one brief chapter of his autobiography devoted to happenings and anecdotes sui rounding the lives of 10 patients of a friend and fellow gynaecologist. whom he introduces as Paddy O’Sullivan. (One wonders whether the patients concerned were not really the author’s, and whether the introduction of Paddy O’Sullivan is not just a piece of artful subterfuge.) Dr. Solomons obviously likes the limelight, and one cannot help feeling that in his autobiography he occupies the centre of the stage just a little too much. In fact, there comes a point near the end of his book when he gives a straight rehearsal of his achievements thus: “I was only the third Jew to obtain a medical degree at Dublin University and was the first Jewish specialist in a city where there was then only one Jewish general practitioner. I was the first Irish Jew to hold a number of offices: the first to captain the Dublin University Rugby team, the first to play Rugby for Ireland, the first to be vice-president of the Irish Rugby Union. No Jew before me was president of the Dublin University Biological Society. vice-president of the Roval College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, president of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland, Assistant Master and Master of the Rotunda Hospital, indeed, to be an Honorary Fellow of the American College of Surgeons.” Surely such a recital

were better reserved for a publication like “Who’s Who.” To include it in one’s autobiography smacks a little of tedious egocentricity.

In his remarks about people whose acquaintance he has made, and about friends and orofessional colleagues of his. the author sometimes displays cr air of condescension—even when his remarks appear to be made with the friendliest of intentions. It is his manner more than anything else that is at fault. All told, this is not the sprt of book that should gain, its author many readers beyond the immediate •ircle of his friends and acquaintances.

A doctor’s environment and the characters it threw up are the material upon which Charles Connell bases his book. The surgery of the doctor concerned was in Soho, in the same building as a drink parlour, a gambling den and a night club. He is depicted as having quickly adapted himself to this environment, being as he was ever sensitive to the good that lay beneath the rough exterior of its inhabitants. One of them—a woman—was fast on the way to becoming a confirmed alcoholic when he first encountered her. By employing her ns his surgery attendant and tak ing her firmly in hand, he enabled her to overcome her addiction to drink and to regain confidence in herself. “I was treating’’—he states at one stage—“prostitutes. Lesbians and homosexuals of all kinds every day, but outside their professions and perversions, there was little to differentiate them from the average run of patients.” This book is narrated in the first person, ostensibly “as told to the author by Doctor S ” but in fact obviously reconstructed and embellished by the author in order to make a racy narrative. It is inconceivable that any doctor could have found himself in the mar mbarrassing situations de oicted here without so much /as over turning a hair. Nevertheless, a story may be apocryphal and at the same time lose nothing of its entrancing quality. And to read the story of Doctor S.. as oresented here by Charles Connell, is indeed to come under the spell of good raconteur.