gossips
Living history!
Well, I’ve been going back into history big time this week – a history which slots me squarely into the past!
I trained as a midwife in the1960s and was part of the mother-and-baby scene for decades thereafter, as a clinician and later as a researcher. So, I’ve been fascinated by a 2022 edited book: Bringing Life to Aberdeen: A History of Maternity and Neonatal Services, which does what it says on the tin. 
Scotland is a small country and the medical network closely knit, so I could not only relate personally to the changes in the service over the years, but recall vividly many of the characters who helped to create the service available today.
Margaret (Maggie) Myles, who wrote THE definitive textbook for midwives in 1954, was still alive and patrolling the hospitals when I learned the art and craft of midwifery from her successor as Senior Lecturer in the Simpson Memorial Maternity Pavilion in Edinburgh.
I worked with Dr David Baird, son of the internationally acclaimed reformer and pioneer, Sir Dugald Baird, and both saw and listened to the great man himself occasionally.
Several of the big names whose work is appreciated in the book were my contemporaries whose paths crossed with mine from time to time. Salutary to realise it’s only in retrospect that we can truly value the remarkable insight and sheer scale of what these significant people achieved in their lifetimes.
Some indeed did so at great personal cost. A number eschewed financial or commercial gain, and instead ploughed their own money into setting up improved services. An Aberdeen physician, Alexander Gordon, was 50 years ahead of Semmelweiss in recognising the risks of contamination due to poor hygiene in the contagious spread of streptococcal infection as a cause of puerperal fever, but instead of fame, Gordon got such abuse and hostility that he was forced to go abroad.
Much of the book is a factual account of developments through the years, assembled to mark the opening of a hew hospital facility in Aberdeen, but the firsthand stories towards the end add a lighter and moving touch. I could identify with many of those people who delivered infants in insalubrious homes at dead of night, or coped with serious staffing shortfalls in the days of Florence Nightingale wards, or struggled to keep tiny infants alive at a time when neonatal care was in its infancy. It brought back a few heart-stopping moments, I can tell you!
But I didn’t know that Sir Dugald Baird used the term the ‘Fifth Freedom’ for lifting the burden of unwanted pregnancy, picking up the idea from US President F D Roosevelt’s famous speech in 1941 about the Four Freedoms every citizen was entitled to. In Baird’s case he referred to the availability of contraception, sterilisation and abortion. Strange to realise these are all relatively recent innovations – in their legal and medically approved forms anyway.
Nor did I know that in the days when lay women delivered babies at home, the neighbours and friends who were invited by the mother to attend her delivery were known as ‘gossips’! Interesting then that an early advert for a qualified midwife read:
‘… who understands business well, who will be prudent in her walk conversation, and not given to gossip‘.
A real walk down memory lane!