The Four Freedoms speech
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!
Freedom of Speech
After last week’s long post I thought brevity might be the order of the day this time.
Usually the BBC ask one eminent thinker to deliver its annual Reith lectures, but this year it chose to have four different speakers, with the umbrella theme, The Four Freedoms, dealing with freedom of Speech and Worship, and from Want and Fear, inspired by the famous speech by Franklin D Roosevelt. The first speaker, on the freedom of speech, was the acclaimed writer Chimamanda Ngosi Adichie. A must-listen for me.
Wow! What a thoughtful, beautifully articulated and erudite lecture. She spoke eloquently of the price people have paid for speaking out – the lives and well as freedoms taken, the abuse and violence suffered. Nevertheless, she argued, freedom of speech is the bedrock of an open and democratic society. So it grieves her that there is currently an epidemic of self-censorship, with people afraid to voice what they really believe because they feel they should not. Those who find the courage to speak up face the possibilities of a terrible online backlash of ugly personal insults, invasions of their privacy, risk to their jobs and families, threats to their lives. Society is in the grip of ‘cancel-culture tyranny’. Publishers are loathe to take on anything sensitive which might draw the fire of the vigilantes. Unpublished manuscripts are now scrutinised by sensitivity readers whose job it is to cleanse them of anything that might just constitute potentially offensive material.
But imposing silence and calling it tolerance doesn’t make it so. Real tolerance requires understanding; understanding comes from listening; listening presupposes speech.
In Chimamanda’s view, social censure is the crisis of our day. But, she concluded: We can protect our future. We just need to have the moral courage to speak up for truth and right. Not simply apologising to the victims, but directly challenging the perpetrators of hateful messages and behaviours. Given that she herself has been the victim of abuse for what she says and writes, this aspiration carries considerable weight.
A powerful message that resonated with me. I’m trying hard to build up my own moral courage to face discrimination and intolerance in my field of operation.