31. There is reason to think he had afforded it for fourteen years. In Chapter 22 Blaydon Hattersley is quoted as boasting that he was “employing half the skilled work-force of Manchester and Birmingham” ten years after he “smashed King Hudson”. George Hudson — known as the Railway King — was a very successful shares and property speculator until the railway mania of 1847-8 plunged him into ruin. This means Bella’s father became a millionaire when she was three.
32. The patent of the MacGregor Shand twin reciprocating gubernator sockets gave Blaydon Hattersley’s Steam Traction Company a lead over its competitors which lasted until 1889 when the Belfrage popper valve made gubernators obsolete. MacGregor Shand died of consumption in the charity ward of Manchester Royal Lunatic Asylum in 1856.
33. Dr. Victoria is mistaken. This anonymous folksong was neither written nor collected by Robert Burns.
34. If Dr. Victoria had loved her husband more she would easily have seen why he wrote this claptrap. Archibald McCandless obviously wanted her to edit his book for publication. This, the only part of it which she had the experience and medical training to correct, was his way of asking for her collaboration. But she could not see it.
35. Bella Baxter’s later life was passed under the name Victoria, for in 1886 she used that name to enrol in the Jex-Blake women’s medical school of Edinburgh, and was made a Doctor of Medicine under that name by Glasgow University in 1890. In 1890 she also opened the Godwin Baxter Natal Clinic in Dobbie’s Loan near the Cowcaddens. It was a purely charitable foundation, and she ran it with a small staff of local women trained by herself. These were continually leaving and being replaced, for she employed nobody more than a year after she had trained them. To a devoted employee who did not want to leave she said, “You are a great help to me but there is nothing more I can teach you. I enjoy teaching my helpers. Go away and help your neighbours, or work for a doctor who can teach you something new.”
Several of her helpers enrolled as nurses in the city hospitals, but not many did well because (as one ward sister said) “They ask too many questions.”
Between 1892 and 1898 Dr. Victoria bore three sons at two-yearly intervals, each time continuing her clinical work until the last two or three days of her pregnancies and starting again very soon after. She said, “That’s how the poor women I treat have to do it — they cannot afford to be horizontalists. And I am luckier than most of them. I have a very good wife in my husband.”
The Fabian Society published her pamphlet on public health in 1899. It was called Against Horizontalism, and said that many doctors wanted patients laid flat because it made the doctors, not the patients, feel stronger. She agreed that rest in bed was essential to the healing of many diseases, but said childbirth, though painful, was not a disease, and came more easily in a squatting posture. She advocated birthing-stools of a sort used in the eighteenth century. She also said horizontalism was a mental as much as a bodily state. It assumed that the inner workings of the body were sacred mysteries only doctors could understand, so good patients should have unquestioning faith in them. She said:
When priests and politicians ask for unquestioning faith we know they are thinking first of themselves. Why should we with scientific training ALSO want the people we serve to remove their thinking apparatus and bow down before us? But patients will only stand up properly for doctors — doctors will only stand up properly for patients — when all know the common-sense daily foundations of the healing art.
She wanted all children to be taught basic nursing in their primary schools (“where they can learn it as a game”) and basic medical training in secondary schools. In this way all would learn not only how and when doctors could help them, but how to live more healthily, how to care for each other better, and why they should not tolerate housing and working conditions which damaged the health of themselves, their children and community. Here are some typical reactions from the journals of the period:
It would seem that Dr. Victoria McCandless proposes to turn every British school — yes, even the infant schools! — into training grounds for revolutionary socialists.
The Times
We hear that Dr. Victoria McCandless is a married woman with three sons. This is astonishing news — we can hardly believe it! From her writing alone we would have deduced that she was one of those sticklike, unwomanly women who would benefit from a course of “horizontalism”! Under the circumstances we can only offer her husband our hearty sympathies.
The Daily Telegraph
We do not doubt the adequacy of Victoria McCandless M.D.’s training, nor do we doubt the kindness of her heart. Her clinic is in a very poor part of Glasgow, and probably does more good than harm to the unfortunates who attend it. But that clinic is her hobby — she does not live by what it pays. We who earn our livings by the stethoscope and scalpel should smile tolerantly on her Utopian schemes, and return to our mundane task of healing the sick.
The Lancet
Dr. McCandless wants the world to stop being a battlefield and become a sanatorium where everybody takes a turn of being doctor and patient, as in a children’s game. It is surely obvious that in such a world the only thing to flourish would be — disease!
The Scots Observer
From 1900 onwards Dr. Vic (as the papers started calling her) was an active suffragette, and her work for the movement can be read in histories of it. The war of 1914 shocked her in a way from which she never recovered. She wanted working people and the soldiers to end it by going on strike, but her two youngest sons joined the army almost at once and were killed on the Somme soon after. She split with the Fabians because of what she called “their lukewarm tolerance of criminal carnage”, and appeared on platforms with Keir Hardie, Jimmy Maxton, John Maclean and other Clydeside Socialists (and advocates of Scottish home rule) who opposed the war. She quarrelled with Baxter, her eldest son, who supported the war effort from his desk in the Department of Imperial Statistics. In a letter to Patrick Geddes she wrote:
Baxter performs miracles of falsification, proving that the huge number being killed and maimed in France is less horrifying than the publicity suggests, since it contains many thousands who would have been killed and maimed by accidents in peace time. This comforts the shareholders and profiteers who draw unearned incomes from our war industry. It means that millions of dead young soldiers will soon be as forgotten as those who die in factory and road accidents.
It is ironical that Baxter McCandless died without issue in 1919 at the age of twenty-seven, knocked down by a Paris taxi-cab while attending Lloyd George to the Versailles peace conference.
Like many at that time she thought long and hard about why the world’s richest nations — nations who had prided themselves on being the most civilized because the most industrialized — had just fought the biggest and cruellest war in history. What puzzled her was why millions of men who, taken singly were neither bloodthirsty or stupid (she was thinking of her sons) had obeyed governments which ordered them to kill and be killed to such a suicidal extent. She accepted Tolstoy’s view that human animals are prone to epidemics of insanity, like many thousands of Frenchmen going into Russia with Napoleon and dying there, when their country would have been no better off if they had conquered it. However, being a doctor she knew epidemics can be prevented if the causes are discovered. She knew that people who live and work in overcrowded quarters are as liable to epidemics of belligerence as any overcrowded creatures, but at least a quarter of those who fought and died in the Great War were prosperous with spacious homes, and to this class belonged nearly all who had ordered and officered the carnage. She decided that although the Great War had been started by the same national and commercial rivalries which had caused the British wars with France, Spain, Holland, France, the United States and France, she believed the men fighting and supporting it had succumbed to “an epidemic of suicidal obedience” because bad mothering and fathering had left most of them with a heartfelt belief that their lives were valueless: