In 1912, aged 24, Joyce Cary, who was later to become famous for his novels of Nigeria and bohemian artistic life (a strange but autobiographical combination), went out to Montenegro to be a stretcher-bearer for the British Red Cross in the First Balkan War. He was fearful that if he did not take the opportunity to witness war first-hand, he would never have it again, war having been abolished by civilisation. Two years later the First World War, in which he was wounded, taught him otherwise.

He wrote a book on his return from Montenegro, Memoir of the Bobote, that was only published eight years after his death in 1957. It is a young man’s book that treats war as if it were something of a lark, an adventure holiday. When it was over, ‘we assured [the victorious Montenegrin general] that we had enjoyed the war very much.’ At no point in the book does he say what the war and its attendant slaughter was about (200,000 Turkish soldiers were killed in it). This was simply not a question for him; later, he changed his attitude, which perhaps explains why he did not publish it in his lifetime.

There were British and Australian doctors attached to the Red Cross, and also to the Red Crescent on the other side of the lines. How many lives they saved, or how much succour they brought to the injured, may be doubted. Cary tells the following story:

He [a medical orderly] could barely stand for fatigue, cleared the room of soldiers, spread sheepskins for his patients, and made his examinations. Two were hit in the legs, one thigh, one calf, no harm done, one in the forearm, but no more than a chip out of the flesh – the fourth was shot through the belly.

Cary continues:

The best thing that can happen to a man hit in the belly is to be forgotten. Let him alone, don’t shake him, and his gut will close up quickly. This man had been carried from Dramos, up and down three miles of stony hillsides, and was lucky if he escaped peritonitis.

Despite Cary’s generally jaunty approach even to his own discomforts such as infestation with lice, the pit of war sometimes shines through. There is in his pages one of the best descriptions of a man dying shot that I have ever read:

There were three [men] crossing those five yards at the moment, and the first and second stepped safely past under the wall. The third was an old man, wounded in the leg. He was within a yard of the wall, when a single shot sounded overhead – he made a noise like a small dog whose tail has been trampled on, twisted half round, and fell like a sack. His cloak bellied out in the wind, fluttered and settled down on him. He was dragged under the wall, but died in a couple of minutes. At that angle, the bullet passed through the body from end to end…

Against such wounds, Cary had a liniment composed of eggs, olive oil, turpentine and vinegar.

He dedicated the book to Martin Leake, one of two Fellows of the Royal College of Surgeons to have been awarded Victoria Crosses twice. Only one other person has won two VCs: surgeons are the bravest of the brave.

Copyright 2013 Anthony Daniels

Dealers in antiques often scatter leather-bound volumes, usually of small value, around their shops to create an atmosphere of elegant learning. Recently in one such shop, I picked up a volume, the Justice of the Peace Reports, Vol. LXII, for 1908.

It fell open at page 467 and I was, as addicts so dishonestly say, hooked at once. It was a report of a case in the newly-instituted Court of Criminal Appeal:

J. was found on a road cutting off the head of a woman with a table knife. When spoken to, he continued to cut off the head. On help being obtained, J. was found to have taken the body into a field, where he was cutting off the arm of the woman. On being spoken to again, he continued to cut at the arm. On being threatened with a crowbar, he threw down the knife and was secured, but he insisted on taking with him the umbrella, hat and corsets of the woman, and spoke to those arresting him of the prices he would get for these articles.

Doctors testified that J. was mad, but he was nevertheless found guilty and sentenced to death. The appeal court sent him to hospital as a criminal lunatic.

There were many fascinating (and terrible) cases in this volume. A man appealed against his conviction for manslaughter:

The prisoner had assaulted his daughter, a baby, on November 13th, 1906, and again on December 29th, 1907; on both occasions the child received blows on the head. The prisoner was convicted and sentenced for each of these two assaults to four and six months’ imprisonment. On January 4th, 1908, she had convulsions, and on March 5th, 1908, she died. It appeared from the evidence that she died of meningitis set up by external injury to the head.

The man was found guilty of manslaughter, but his appeal was upheld because the judge misdirected the jury that it didn’t matter whether it was the injury of November 13th, 1906 or that of December 29th, 1907, that ‘set up’ the meningitis. But it did matter, because in English law you cannot be convicted of manslaughter if death occurs more than a year and a day after the original injury.

Then there was an account of the trial of a medical practitioner accused of procuring eight abortions on his mistress, a servant girl whom he first met when he treated her for ringworm. She agreed to the first seven abortions, but not the last, which he forced upon her. She wrote a letter to her friend that was intercepted by the doctor but later found by the police:

I fell in the family way in July and he brought on another miscarriage and I cried when he hurt me and I think he was  cross because I made a fuss has (sic) I have had seven miscarriages before this and have never cried or made any trouble about it.

But what really infuriated the poor young woman was that the doctor was simultaneously having an affair with his housekeeper, whom he refused to dismiss at her jealous demand. She therefore shopped him to a rival medical practitioner, who – whether from moral outrage or an eye to the economic main chance, or from some combination of the two – informed the police.

Although a uterine sound and the letter were found in the doctor’s consulting room, he was acquitted for lack of probative evidence.

Copyright 2013 Anthony Daniels

When my father was born, in 1909, the infant mortality rate in his borough of London was 124 per thousand. The infant mortality rate of present-day Somalia is about 105.

Two years after my father was born, when the infant mortality rate would not have declined by very much, an anthology titled Innocence and Death, edited by M. V. Dent, was published. It consisted of prose and poems written on the occasion of the death of young children. The editor in his preface wrote:

In the whole gamut of human suffering there is no sorrow so poignant as the death of a little child… There is a certain sad comfort in the fellowship of grief, and the following extracts in verse and prose may, I hope, be of some value to sorrowing mothers.

Throughout the book, there is an unresolved dialectic between personal grief at the loss of a child and consolatory religious acceptance that all is for the best, that death being the common lot of all, it is perhaps a blessing in disguise for a child to have departed this life before having tasted its bitterness:

Weep not because this childe hath dyed so young,
But weepe because yourselves have livd so long…

These are the first lines of Mistress Mary Prideaux by William Strode (1601 – 1645), and they are typical.

Five of the authors in the anthology were doctors, Henry Vaughan (1621 – 1695); Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809 – 1894); John Brown (1810 – 1882), who was buried next to his daughter who died in infancy; Robert Bridges (1844 – 1930) who, as physician to the outpatient department of Great Ormond Street Hospital, must have been well-acquainted with the early death of children; and William Henry Drummond (1854 – 1907), a professor of hygiene and medical jurisprudence in Canada, whose first child died within hours of its birth.

Dr Vaughan’s poem, The Burial of an Infant, is true to the consolatory theme of the book:

Sweetly didst thou expire: thy soul
Flew home unstain’d by his new skin;
For ere thou knew’st how to be foul,
Death wean’d the from the world, and sin.

Dr John Brown writes that the thoughts of a bereaved mother and her dead infant son are:

Not all sad, for well they know
Far above the sky
In the bosom of their God.

Dr Drummond (one of the best-known Canadian poets) writes in his Hymn upon the Innocents:

First sacrifice to Christ you went,
Of offer’d lambs a tender sort;
With palms and crown you innocent
Before the sacred altar sport.

Dr Holmes is slightly more pagan. A dead little girl lies in a graveyard, where her remains support new life:

At last the rootlets of the trees
Shall find the prison where she lies,
And bear the buried dust they seize
In leaves and blossoms to the skies,
So may the soul that warmed it rise!

Only Dr Bridges, with the greatest experience of infant death, is truly pessimistic:

Ah! little at best can all our hopes avail us
To lift this sorrow, or cheer us, when in the dark,
Unwilling, alone we embark,
And the things we have seen and have known and have heard
of, fail us.

In none of the poems is there a sense that anything might one day be different, that such premature death might become a rarity. But then, of course, poets are metaphysical, not epidemiological; they still use the death of children as a subject of meditation.

Copyright 2013 Anthony Daniels

Having reached the age of cancer, ever more of my acquaintances seem to be coming down with it. When they are very ill I am unsure whether they would find a visit intrusive or comforting, or even whether my delicacy in this matter is more for my sake than for theirs. Do they want me to come or not? The gesture of taking grapes to the dying can seem so eloquently futile.

William Saroyan (1908 – 1981), the American author of Armenian descent, died of disseminated cancer of the prostate. A year later his son, Aram, also a writer, published a memoir of his father’s last illness. It is extremely painful reading because Saroyan had been so impossible a father, fanatically determined to keep his children at arm’s length and inclined to insult them in the crudest possible way. For almost all of his illness, which was short, he was cruelly determined not to be reconciled with his children.

Saroyan, whose work is now little read on account of its tendency to sentimentality, was a man deeply venerated by Americans of Armenian extraction, and the success of his books, many of them set among the Armenian immigrants of California, was world-wide. He lauded the capacity of love and humour to overcome adversity, a very popular theme in the years of the Depression, but he was an abominable husband. He married when he was 35 and his bride was 17; he married his wife twice and divorced her twice in quick succession, abandoning the children almost entirely, and gambling and drinking his money away. His literary portrayal of his wife was scandalously unfair, and he always regarded himself as her victim. He left practically nothing to his children in his will.

His son attributes William Saroyan’s inability to love anyone in particular, despite his literary paeans to the power of such love, to the death of his father from appendicitis when he was only three, after which his mother sent him and his brother and sister to an orphanage for five years. Any attempt thereafter at intimacy enraged him, presumably because he so feared abandonment. But a vice that is explained does not become any the more likeable.

One of Saroyan’s plays, Don’t Go Away Mad, published in 1951, is set in a ward in a hospital in San Francisco in which all the patients are suffering from unspecified but fatal diseases. One of the characters is Buster, who says that he misses his son. Another of the characters asks him when he last saw him:

Two years ago, when he was almost five. His mother left me then… I wrote to my wife and asked her please to let me see my son, but she never answered my letters, so one night I went to the bar on Ortega Street to speak to her. She made fun of me in front of everybody.

This is an almost mirror-image of the truth.

In the introduction to the play, Saroyan asks ‘Is there no behaviour that is not theatrical?’ and replies ‘I believe there is no such behaviour; it is simply that of acting of some people is more tolerable than that of others.’ His own was often intolerable; he affected the greatest agony when his daughter, then a little girl, put medicine on his athlete’s foot.

It is not easy to like a man who did that. But when his son learnt, after years of estrangement, that his father was dying, ‘I saw, clearly, right way’ that such things ‘were no longer significant.’

Copyright 2013 Anthony Daniels

One does not, perhaps, expect many writers to have been executives in shoe retailing chains, or many executives in shoe retailing chains to have been writers, but Arthur Maling (born 1923) was one such. Whether he wrote his thrillers to escape the humdrum, or was an executive in order to fund his writing, I do not know (a surprising number of writers worked in banks or insurance offices); but his books are written in a finely-chiselled style.

On the cover to the British edition of Schroeder’s Game, published in 1977, are printed in bold lettering the following words:

In the U.S.A. there is no NHS; & the background to this novel is a collection agency for hospitals’ out-patients bills – very big business indeed!

The eponymous Schroeder is the founder and chief executive of the agency, Mutual Claims, of Phoenix, Arizona, who tries to conceal losses he has made on bad real-estate investments by a system of fraudulent accounting that allow him to post bogus profits. Those who try to expose what is going on soon end up dead, shot by paid Mexican assassins. The suspense is not in the discovery of the villain, but in the means of finding his comeuppance.

Schroeder’s company has several branches, and the fact that their computers communicate with one another at a distance is relayed as a matter for astonishment. Future generations will no doubt find the concept of public telephone booths, in which the character’s calls are forever being cut short for lack of coins to insert, as mysterious as we now find technical details of the harnessing of horses. And the world of 1977 was one in which long-distance calls were not just made, they were first ‘placed.’

One of the characters who try to expose Schroeder’s defalcations is Tom Petacque, a stockbroker who raised funds for him before he realised that he was a crook. Unfortunately, Tom is psychologically rather fragile, and needs the support of a psychiatrist, Dr Balter, as does the narrator of the book, Tom’s partner in the brokerage, Brockton Potter.

In those days, of course, anyone who was anyone in New York had his psychiatrist, and Dr Balter fits the bill admirably:

He paused to light a cigar. He smoked them all day long.

The ash fell with equal regularity on to his bow tie: thirty-five years ago that was taken as an indication of Freudian wisdom and penetration rather than of slovenly indifference to his own health and that of others.

The trust placed in the ability of psychiatrists to predict and heal was as superstitious as that accorded to miracle-working icons in previous times. Yet another of the partners in the brokerage firm relates how his alcoholic mother came to a sticky end:

His father had refused to let her go to a psychiatrist. With the result that in a drunken haze she’d accidentally fallen down a flight of steps and been killed.

The inference is clear: if she’d seen a psychiatrist she would have stopped drinking and not fallen down those steps.

These days, I suspect, we are less sanguine: we have more psychiatrists, and more drinking, than ever before.

Although 1977 is not an historical epoch ago, it was a different world: of, among other things, martinis at lunch and barbiturates at night. Nowadays, we destroy ourselves differently.

Copyright 2013 Anthony Daniels

When Dr Watson first describes the character of Sherlock Holmes, he presents the man who is soon to become his friend as a complete philistine where literature and philosophy are concerned. The detective is not an ignoramus, exactly, for he has at his disposal a wide range of arcana: but his islands of knowledge form an archipelago, not a continent.

The creator of the greatest detective who never lived, Arthur Conan Doyle, was about as far removed from being a bohemian intellectual as can be imagined. He was a keen sportsman and practical joker; he was an admirer of prize fighting and its practitioners; in his early days he was an adventurer. He is often presented as a bluff and hearty man of no great intellectual attainments. But a man does not become a great prose stylist (as Conan Doyle was) by chance; the doctor-author was a very well-read man.

In 1907, he published a book, Through the Magic Door: the magic door is that to his book-lined study, of which the frontispiece is a photograph. The text is a paean to reading, and a brief account of the books that had meant most to him.

He describes how, in his medical student days in Edinburgh, he had exactly thruppence (1.25 new pence) for his lunch, but that his way to his afternoon classes was past a bookshop which kept a tub of books for thruppence outside, and ‘a combat ever raged betwixt the hunger of a youthful body and that of an inquiring and omnivorous mind.’ At least once a week the life of the mind prevailed over the life of the body, and he bought old leather-covered volumes of classics such as Clarendon, Addison and Swift.

By today’s standards, Conan Doyle was prodigiously well-read, both in English and French. He makes remarks that, more than a hundred years later, retain their accuracy. Lamenting the decline of music in England since the time of Pepys, Conan Doyle says, ‘In England, alas, the sound of a poor man’s voice raised in song means only too surely that he is drunk.’ On reading this, I could not but think of my embarrassment when, abroad, I have been asked to sing an English song or, worse still, perform an English dance.

In another aside, Conan Doyle laments the passing of stoicism and the stiff upper lip:

The Gentleman should always be the Stoic, with his soul too great to be affected by the small troubles of life. “You look cold, sir,” said an English sympathizer to a French emigré. The fallen noble drew himself up in his threadbare coat. “Sir,” said he, “a gentleman is never cold.”

Conan Doyle would not approve, to put it no stronger, of our propensity to complain:

One’s consideration for others as well as one’s own self-respect should check the grumble… The man who must hop because his shin is hacked, or wring his hand because his knuckles are bruised should be made to feel that he is an object not of pity but of contempt.

Instead, we now have websites telling us how to complain and informing us that to complain is our right (though not, of course, that it is also big business, carried on at our expense). It is all enough to make a stoic… well, complain.

Copyright 2013 Anthony Daniels

Not long ago, a distinguished man of letters of my acquaintance, who lived in a far distant country, sent me an e-mail. It started with an enquiry after my general welfare, and continued:

All is well here – except that I am dying.

The lightness, almost gaiety, of his tone only added to the shock. He was a comparatively young man (that is, he was only a few years older than I), and at a time when the life expectancy is 80 years one does not expect, irrationally no doubt, one’s acquaintances to die many years before that age.

It was cancer, of course, and a little later he told me that he had read of a new experimental drug on the internet of which he was now trying to get hold. It was not effective, alas, but the search for new experimental drugs, in which a desperate hope is reposed, either by the sufferer or relatives of the sufferer, now seems almost a definite stage of dying of cancer, as denial, numbness, anger, etc, are stages of grief.

The distinguished writer of science fiction, Brian Aldiss (born 1925), wrote a memoir of his wife’s fatal cancer of the pancreas, When the Feast Is Finished, in which he described precisely this desperate hope. His wife died in 1997, the cancer having advanced very quickly after diagnosis, and the book was published in 1999; at one point in the memoir American friends told him by telephone of a new drug that they believed was being tested in Chicago, which raised his hopes. He imagined taking his wife, already much debilitated, to Chicago, there to be restored to him. Alas, it turned out that the drug was being tested even further away, in San Francisco, and only on young and hitherto fit sufferers. His hopes were dashed.

Is it better to have hoped and been deceived than never to have hoped at all? Probably the drug would not have worked, or at best extended life by a week or two at fantastic expense both of money and extra symptomatology. Of all the people I have known who have tried such desperate remedies – only too understandably – not a single one has benefited much. But I suppose the price of progress is a certain amount of heartbreak and disillusion.

Aldiss must have written the book as a salve to his grief. One or two of his observations will remain with me. Although he is very complimentary about the hospice in which his wife stayed until the day before her death, he suspected it (fleetingly) of gentrifying death, surely a suspicion that must have occurred to others. And he says something that I have often noticed in some of the old, that the details of daily existence are all that is left to them. This cannot be true in his case, however, since he has remained as productive as ever.

Although Aldiss and his wife were not believers, her funeral was held in an old parish church. Even the least religious of us feels that a funeral without a service is like a wedding without a bride, that is to say somewhat awkward and even embarrassing: a proof, I suppose, of the depth of the religious roots of our culture and consciousness.

Copyright 2013 Anthony Daniels

There are fashions in thought, as there are in dress, that appear bizarre to later generations. Such, surely, will be the fate of the prolonged fashion for psychoanalysis, a procedure still in vogue in countries such as France and Argentina. Never was such an edifice of theory built upon so slight a foundation of fact.

While in Paris recently I bought a brilliant book by an historian, Michel Borch-Jacobsen, Les patients de Freud (Freud’s Patients). In it he traces the fate of thirty-one of the great man’s patients. The result is so damning that I could not help but wonder whether the author’s attitude to Freud determined his evidence more than his evidence determined his attitude to Freud.

I think the latter. Freud emerges from these pages as an unprincipled scoundrel, a serial liar, a man whose egotism extinguished his regard for truth, and a most negligent practitioner, faults that no amount of talent or brilliance (both of which he had) can excuse. Nor does this list exhaust his vices.

Some of his mistakes, it is true, were caused by bad luck. For example, it was bad luck that the first description of a crisis of porphyria provoked by barbiturates was published by Hermann Breslauer, a friend of Freud’s first collaborator, Josef Breuer, only a few weeks after Freud’s patient, Mathilde Schleicher, died of such a crisis provoked by Freud’s prescription of barbiturates.

But Freud repeatedly claimed that his methods had cured patients when he knew perfectly well that they had not. This was a habit he developed early in his career.

Perhaps the most scandalous case is that of Ernst Fleischl von Marxow, a brilliant pathologist and physiologist who became a morphine addict after his thumb became infected during a post-mortem and was afterwards amputated. Freud had read in the Detroit Therapeutic Gazette that cocaine could be safely used to withdraw morphine from an addict, not realising that the Gazette was more promotional literature than medical journal (its editor, George S. Davis, was co-founder of the Parke-Davis pharmaceutical company that manufactured… cocaine).

Freud treated von Marxow with both oral and sub-cutaneous cocaine, and then proclaimed – in print – that it had been a great success, though he knew perfectly well that von Marxow had remained addicted to morphine and became addicted to cocaine. And he never retracted his false claim, far from it.

More shocking still, Freud borrowed money from von Marxow, who was very rich, and then wrote to his own wife, ‘Perhaps he will no longer be here when we shall have to think of repaying him.’ Almost as bad was his response to an article by Albrecht Erelenmayer, who subsequently tried to treat morphine addiction with cocaine and reported failure. Freud replied that Erelenmayer failed because he used sub-cutaneous rather than oral cocaine, though Freud had done the same with von Marxow, and had even said so in print.

Why did Freud, a brilliant man, resort to this unscrupulous behaviour (to put it mildly)? I suspect that it was because he was so desperate for fame, preferably as a result of a dramatic coup, that he disregarded truth and scruple altogether. The story of Freud and von Marxow brings irresistibly to mind that of a certain triple vaccine and its supposed causation of childhood autism.

Copyright 2013 Anthony Daniels.

My late mother told me of an old German proverb from her childhood: every little animal has its little pleasure. My little pleasure is old books: the sight of an Eighteenth Century title page sends me into raptures that most people would find difficult to understand or empathise with. Compassion for a person suffering from a sickness would probably seem more in order to them.

Booksellers keep tempting me with the catalogues; recently, for example, I received a catalogue devoted entirely to early printings of the works of Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744), the greatest English poet of the Eighteenth Century. I wanted to buy everything, but it would have cost me approximately £475,000 to do so.

I particularly coveted, at £9000, the first edition of The Narrative of Dr Robert Norris Concerning the strange and deplorable Frenzy of Mr John Denn.., published in 1713. In this pamphlet, Pope pretended to be Robert Norris, MD giving an account of the madness of John Dennis.

Dennis (1658 – 1737) was a literary critic who had written a book-length criticism of Addison’s smash-hit tragedy, Cato, for which Pope had written a prologue. Not worrying too much about the stigmatisation of the mentally-ill, Pope wrote his pamphlet satirising Dennis as being out of his wits.

In the pamphlet, Dr Norris is called to Dennis’s lodging by his landlady, ‘who was taken ill of a frenzy last April,’ manifesting itself by, among other things, his repeated calling out of ‘Cato, Cato, Cato,’ whom the landlady assumes to be a witch of some kind. She gives Dr Norris a sample of Dennis’ urine, from the examination of which he is able to conclude ‘the whole temperament of his body to be exceeding hot.’

Dr Norris, who at the time of the landlady’s arrival was ‘pondering the case of one of my patients,’ goes to Dennis’ lodgings, where Dennis, paranoid, thinks he has come from the King of France to lock him up in ‘a bastile.’ Dishevelled, Dennis is surrounded by books of which Norris has never heard (they are all the titles of books by Dennis).

Dennis calms down a little and tells the doctor that all that is the matter with him is that his legs are swollen. Norris asked him how he came by his swollen legs, to which Dennis replies, ‘By a criticism.’ ‘A criticism!’ says the doctor, ‘that’s a distemper I never read of.’ Dennis replies: ‘S’death, sir, a distemper! It is no distemper, but a noble art. I have sat fourteen hours a day at it; and are you a doctor, and don’t know there’s a communication between the legs and the brain?’

The doctor comes to his conclusion:

The symptoms of his madness seem to be desperate; for Avicen [Avicenna] says, that if learning be mixed with a brain, that is not of a contexture to receive it, the brain ferments, till it be totally exhausted. We must eradicate these undigested ideas out of the pericranium, and reduce the patient to a competent knowledge of himself.

A competent knowledge of oneself, the whole secret of human existence! I did not buy the pamphlet, even though the last one sold at auction was in 1962, and the last one ever sold was in 1982, but in very poor condition.

Copyright 2013 Anthony Daniels