A PIONEER WOMAN DOCTOR

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30895, 30 October 1965, Page 4

A PIONEER WOMAN DOCTOR

Stethoscope and Saddlebags. By Eleanor S. Baker McLaglan. Collins. 187 pp. The author of these illuminating memoirs has the gift of arousing in the reader a keen sense of interest in her fortunes and tribulations. Dr. McLaglan has had a far from easy life. Born over 80 years ago, she was brought up at French Fann (originally the property of her maternal grandfather) on Banks Peninsula, where her father, Thomas Southey Baker, an Oxford 8.A., ran a private school for boys. Here she

spent a halcyon youth, and her reminiscences of her early life give a good idea of the unspoilt beauty of Akaroa, and the simple pleasures of its inhabitants, at that time. In 1890, the school had to be closed down in face of the greater attractions of Christ’s College and Wanganui Collegiate School, and following on an unhappy investment in Tasmania the Baker family fell on seriously hard times. Eleanor had only two years formal schooling at Otago Girls’ High School, but she managed to matriculate in that time, and on her parents’ insistence began a medical training at Otago University, though medicine was then a highly unusual profession for women. In the event, a prejudice against women doctors was to bedevil the author’s life for nearly half a century, which, combined with a crippling lack of private means, might well have defeated a less resolute and strong-minded woman. Yet Eleanor’s life did not lack adventure. After qualifying she went to England, and then to Ireland where she spent a year in a Dublin slum hospital. On the way home to New Zealand, her ship was wrecked off Melbourne, and the unhappy lonely girl found herself completely friendless, her appeals for help ignored, and starvation threatening. A timely gift of money wired by a sister in New Zealand saved her from the depths of -terrified despair. After this shattering experience fortune briefly smiled upon her. Back in Dunedin she was given a temporary job by Dr. Truby King, who had always taken a friendly interest in her. "His liking and evidently good opinion of me kindled the first spark of self-respect as against the natural distrust that had been augmented by unpopularity in my teens.” The year was 1904, and Dr Truby King was already a revered figure in New Zealand as the inaugurator of the Plunket Society, and the first Karitane Hospital—so called for his care of neglected babies in his own beach cottage at Karitane. Her work for Dr. King completed, the author’s career got Off to its dubious start, and some justifiable bitterness creeps into her narrative at the perpetual evidence of a bias against her sex which manifested itself among her male colleagues. When she was put in charge of the tiny hospital at Te Kopuru, south of Dargaville, she was headlined as “Woman Doctor.” Her work in that remote district, mostly carried out on horseback, satisfied her medical conscience sufficiently for her to say when a male superintendent was appointed in her place “I think I had, so to speak, made an honest woman out of the despised

little Te Kopuru Hospital. It was now acquiring selfrespect. and so was 1.” In 1912 Dr. McLaglan became a school medical officer under the Health Department, and found herself in charge of South Island schools, comprising an area of 19,000 square miles with her headquarters in Christchurch. From here she went on long tours of inspection to 350 schools, with 36,000 primary school children on the rolls. This work, on a very meagre salary, involved a great deal of paper work as well as constant examination of ill-kempt, sometimes verminous youngsters. These children often suffered hitherto undisclosed weaknesses, of sight or hearing and their parents seemed to regard the Health Department's representative as their natural enemy. One favourite parental retort w-as “If that doctor woman wants my child’s eyes (or adenoids or whatever it was) fixed up she can jolly well pay for it.” This was during the First World War.

In 1918, with the outbreak of the ‘flu epidemic, Dr. McLaglan had her hands full attending Christchurch patients, and she devotes a grim and graphic chapter to the hideous inroads made by death into the population by that tragic plague. After the war she was called on to help Dr. (now Sir Charles) Kerens in his research into the incidence of goitre—at that time a bad health menace. She also inaugurated speech therapy for children otherwise intelligent except for defective articulation, and took a hand in the new Health Camps. For 27 years the author served the Health Department, until, at 60, she reached the retiring age, but her work was by no means finished, and for the next 13 years, by which time sex-prejudice was less pronounced, she held various posts in hospitals which enabled her to acquire a few savings and the peace of mind which goes with financial stability.

Hers is the story of a highly sensitive, intelligent and courageous woman, who battled gamely with adversities which often reduced her to the feminine weakness of tears, but which she overcame by her own force of character, and a little help from the great figures of her profession. Now, in her middle eighties she can write about these things objectively. Her book covers a good deal of recent New Zealand medical history, and the progressive stages by which the present standards of health have been attained. This spirited octogenarian has a pleasant sense of humour, and a facility with her pen which might, in other circumstances have brought her fame as a writer.