by George Biro
Dr White learnt his first lessons in hygiene and public health as a small boy in Bowral:
Before dawn, each Friday, a shadowy figure would come to our outhouse and play his key part in our pan-and-fly hygiene system. He was also our mayor, carrying off all his ceremonial duties spruce and shining in his robes of office.
At a Christmas party, one of my mother’s staidest friends asked me for a poem. I recited one our mayor had left us:
‘Although the police keep order
There’s no more useful man
Than the bloke who comes at sunrise
And juggles with the pan.’
To my amazement, they stopped me.
In 1921, his widowed mother and young Paul moved to Sydney. At Sydney Grammar School, he became a runner, cricketer and active Christian. He started his medical course in 1929, at the height of the Depression.
Paul gained a University Blue in 1931 and 1932.
In my third year, I ran in the Intervarsity athletics. A Melbourne runner, Wellesley Hannah, beat me over the mile. Then I found that he was also a committed Christian. This friendship was to change both our lives.
As medical students, we followed the desperate search for weapons against the great killers like pneumonia and meningitis.
I felt especially bitter about meningitis which had killed my father.
By the time I graduated in 1935, I’d decided to work as a medical missionary in East Africa. First I spent one year at Royal North Shore Hospital, where our training included infectious diseases and obstetrics. For anaesthetics, we used the old ether with a rag and bottle.
As interns we earned eleven [shillings] and threepence a week and had every third weekend off.
In my spare time, I practised tracheotomy [emergency opening of the windpipe to bypass blockage] on an old piece of garden hose. Soon after, I had to do the real thing on a small boy who had severe diphtheria and couldn’t breathe.
He met many challenges during his preparations:
Most of our equipment was borrowed: if we couldn’t get it, we had to make it; if we couldn’t make it, we had to go without. Mosquito nets were crucial, since mosquitoes transmit malaria, yellow fever, dengue and elephantiasis.
Among the things he learned: keeping a corrugated-iron roof cool, making a surgical retractor from two bent spoons, driving through mud or sand, and plugging a hole in a radiator or petrol tank.
In 1937 Dr White, with his wife Mary and son David, sailed to Dar-es-Salaam, the capital of Tanganyika (now Tanzania). Then to Dodoma and Mvumi.
Sechela the head nurse welcomed us with her story of a cobra emerging from its hole to watch her delivering twins.
Over 100 people came for my first outpatient session; some walked 50 kilometres. Relatives led the elderly who were blinded by cataracts. We had so few medicine bottles that people brought their own.
Those with malaria shivered in the scorching sun. Our only antimalarial was quinine, which we bought from the Tanganyika Post Office for two shillings per 100 tablets.
Our operating room of granite, cement and corrugated iron cost 120 pounds. A burly African pedalling a jacked-up bike which charged a battery, gave most of our light. We built our anaesthetic machine from a pickle bottle, a car footpump, a football bladder, the Y-piece from a stethoscope, an eye-dropper glass and rubber tubing. It worked really well.
I removed many cataracts; trachoma I treated with surgery and zinc sulphate drops that cost threepence.
Twelve times a day, out two water carriers made their round trip of over three kilometers. Each carried 36 litres in petrol cans. Twice a week, the mailbag came, along the paths where lions and rhinoceros prowled.
The dry season lasted eight months and ended in October with torrential rain. Within minutes, a parched riverbed became a torrent. Within two days, grass would grow. We built water tanks to see us through the next dry, only to see them cracked by an earthquake. In one hour, we helplessly watched three months’ water disappear.
Once sulphonamide drugs were discovered, we could fight the next epidemic of meningitis.
Our second child Rosemary was born in 1939. After my wife’s illness forced us to return home, Wellesley Hannah came to Tanganyika to take over from me. He stayed 20 years.
Dr White’s Jungle Doctor books numbered 54 and have appeared in over 100 languages. In 1977, he published an autobiography titled Alias Jungle Doctor. Later he was awarded the Order of Australia Medal (OAM) for services to religious welfare. Dr White died in 1992, at the age of 82.
(GB)
Bertram Wainer, abortion law reformer
I did not set out to be a reformer; I … became involved with a law which was inflicting human suffering (Bertram Wainer)
Melbourne, 1968. She was 21, and had already had a baby at 15. Now she was pregnant again. Terrified of telling her father, she took an overdose and landed in a psychiatric hospital. Then she threatened Dr Bertram Wainer that she would kill herself if he didn’t terminate her pregnancy.
Not only did he do the abortion, but he told the Press, the Homicide Squad, the Chief Secretary and the Attorney-General. Dr Wainer was relying on a 1969 judgment of Mr Justice Menhennitt: ‘A lawful abortion is one believed by the doctor to be necessary to preserve the woman from serious danger to her life or her mental health.’
Dr Wainer’s challenge did not provoke any legal response, but it marked his entry into the campaign that Australian women were fighting for the right to legal abortions done openly by capable doctors.
In the 1960s there were about 70,000 women having abortions in Australia each year; many abortions were performed by unqualified abortionists.
Dr Wainer fought against strict abortion laws and their narrow interpretation. He fought also against the police corruption that he felt was a consequence of those laws. By proving the extent of police corruption feeding on undercover and backyard abortionists, he forced society to face both issues.
His efforts helped to clean up the Victorian police force and to bring about a more liberal interpretation of abortion laws. (Nowadays, in most states of Australia, a woman can get an abortion on demand, in the early stages of her pregnancy, if her physical or mental health is in danger.)
Wainer’s outspoken views brought him abuse, vilification, threats and even attempts on his life. The Australian Medical Association found him guilty of unprofessional conduct. Rumours said he was mad and had a criminal background. Criminals shot at him and tried to run him over. For years he lived in fear of his life.
What made a man fight at such personal cost for the right of Australian women to have safe and legal abortions?
His background gives us some clue. His father died soon after Bertram Wainer was born in Edinburgh in 1928. His stepfather was an illiterate alcoholic. Bertram’s mother’s sweet shop failed during the Depression, forcing the family to live in the slums of Glasgow.
The Second World War added more traumas. During the Blitz, young Bert and his mother were caught in an air raid away from home:
… bombs (were) exploding around us, ack-ack screaming … fires devouring houses, incendiary bombs blazing … then the relief of reaching an air-raid shelter. We were told: ‘You can’t come in here, this is a private air-raid shelter … We have carpets and heaters and food. We can’t let just anyone in.’ The door slammed …
Bert Wainer never forgot this experience.
He left school at 13 to help his mother, and was still underage when he entered the army, where he served for the rest of the war. In 1949, the family migrated on free passages to Australia.
Supporting himself with a remarkable range of jobs, he somehow managed not only to matriculate but also to study medicine at Melbourne University. By the mid-1960s, he was a lieutenant-colonel in charge of a large military hospital.
After leaving the army in protest against the Vietnam war, Dr Wainer became a GP in St Kilda. In 1969, he went to the Press with evidence of backyard abortionists paying senior police large bribes for prot
ection.
In June of the same year, radio station 2GB invited him to Sydney to debate abortion law reform. Before he left Melbourne, Dr Wainer told reporters that he planned to put before the New South Wales Chief Commissioner of Police (Norman Allan) evidence on abortion and police corruption in that state.
The threatening phone calls increased: ‘If Wainer goes to Sydney, he will never come back alive.’ The evening before the trip, a man offered to sell him protection in the shape of a shortened shotgun.
Dr Wainer and two trusted friends booked a flight on TAA, but actually took a tiny charter plane from Moorabbin airport. It might have been safer, but the unpressurised Piper Aztec took about three hours each way.
From Mascot airport, they took a convoy of cabs to the back entrance of 2GB. Sydney police didn’t know that Dr Wainer had arrived until they heard him on air.
Then they rang and invited him to police HQ, but he made them come to 2GB. Mr Allan did not come himself, but sent Superintendent Donald Fergusson and Detective-Constable Roger Rogerson.
According to Dr Wainer’s account, he went to hand Fergusson a sealed envelope with his information. The latter asked who his two friends were. When he heard they were journalists, Fergusson said it would be unethical to accept the information in their presence.
Dr Wainer replied: ‘The only possible reason … is that you will be forced to act upon it. [If] I want to report a crime or a murder in Sydney, [do] I have to crawl into a wardrobe with a policeman and whisper it in his ear?’
The tension rose, Fergusson refused to budge, and the futile meeting ended.
Leaving 2GB, the visitors didn’t risk ringing for cabs, but picked two at random. At the airport, Dr Wainer waited in the pilots’ room. Then, steeling himself for the impact of a bullet, he forced himself to walk, not run, to the plane.
Despite the dangers, he did return to Sydney. In March 1970, Dr Wainer appeared on the current affairs television program Four Corners. In May, on another television program, prominent journalist Michael Willesee asked Chief Commissioner Allan if he believed there were abortionists operating in Sydney. When he said ‘no’ Willesee offered him Dr Wainer’s list. When Mr Allan would not accept that, Willesee showed him films of an abortionist’s surgery, reportedly within one block of police headquarters, then interviews with patients who had had abortions there.
Instead of receiving Dr Wainer’s information in front of two journalists, Mr Allan had to do so in front of two million viewers.
New South Wales police then raided many abortionists, forcing Sydney women to turn to backyarders. As a result, more and more women came to public hospitals with severe infections from their abortions.
Police raided the Heatherbrae Clinic in the Sydney suburb of Bondi and charged the two owners and three doctors on ten counts of unlawfully using an instrument to procure a miscarriage. If found guilty, they could face 10 years in gaol. But the implication was that in some cases, procuring a miscarriage could be lawful.
In 1972, Mr Justice Aaron Levine in the Darlinghurst Court House, ruled that, for a guilty verdict, the Crown had to prove that a doctor did not reasonably believe the operation to be necessary for the woman’s physical and mental health: ‘The termination of pregnancy by competent use of instruments in the hands of medical practitioners is not an offence in this state.’ This ruling reinforced the Menhennitt ruling of 1969 and drastically redefined key sections of the Crimes Act.
In 1986, in response to the liberalisation of abortion laws and their interpretation, Wainer said with surprise: ‘Do you know what I am now? I’m almost respectable!’
He died of heart disease in January 1987. Friends organised what amounted to a state funeral; an opera singer sang A Scottish Soldier. His close friend Evan Whitton called him ‘the most extraordinary man I ever met’. In the eulogy, it was said:
Dr Wainer’s legacy to the people of Victoria from his great eight-year campaign was … a relatively uncorrupt [police] force, and the consequent failure of organised crime to get more than a toehold in this state. One’s only regret must be that Dr Wainer did not happen to live in Sydney.
(GB)
3
Quacks, Pseudologists and Other Phonies
Quacks and charlatans
Generally speaking, the free interchange of ideas, the publication of new discoveries, the ready application of medical knowledge in sophisticated surroundings, and a commitment to aid the patient by sharing expertise, is the way in which modern medical practitioners go about their business.
Although you may occasionally feel that medical personnel are not always so virtuous, and can sometimes even be grasping, it is salutary to remember that in the past ethical standards have often been considerably lower. In fact, today’s most rapacious practitioner has much to learn from some of his or her predecessors. So let us go back a couple of hundred years to look at some real phonies.
A charlatan is one who pretends to skills he or she does not possess, and the term is usually applied to the vendors of quack remedies who cover their ignorance in a spate of hifalutin and meaningless words. These people played on the gullibility and touching faith of the population, and for them 18th-century Europe was their high noon. Their advertising used jargon, classical or oriental names, intimation of royal patronage, claims of infallibility and ‘secret formulations’. To compound the hard sell, there were usually unsubtle hints about the worthlessness of the opposition who, as one contemporary writer had it, commonly used his skill ‘to influence the minds of the vulgar, or help especially those lately sporting in the garden of Venus and now tasting the bitter grapes’.
A good pictorial representation of such a person can be seen in William Hogarth’s crowded drawing ‘Southwark Fair’. He stands there, in laced hat and embroidered waistcoat, expanding on his cryptic skill. A written description comes from Samuel Curwen, who in 1781 travelled through London’s Moorfields district (now the site of one of the most famous eye hospitals in the world) and came across such a character. He described the scene:
A stage doctor on an elevated scaffold covered with a ragged blanket discoursing to the more dirty-faced ragged mob; demonstrating to their satisfaction no doubt, the superior excellence of his nostrums to those of the dispensary, and the more safe and secure state of patients under his management than hospitals and common receptacles of sick and wounded poor.
So the characteristics which seemed to set the quack apart from the journeyman apothecary of that era were secrecy, advertising, including dubious testimonials, the popular image of a care-lined pedagogue in declamatory pose gazing meaningfully at a retort of urine, and, above all, the skilful use of crowd psychology.
The purveyors of these impenetrable skills ranged from the simple market-day pedlar with his handbills and treatments for ruptures, VD and the like, to such as Dr Clark, ‘sworn physician and oculist’, as he wrote, ‘to Charles II, James II and Queen Anne’. He advertised in top magazines offering his secret of ‘the lamp of light’, promising success where others had failed through the use of his infallible cure for the King’s Evil (tuberculosis), cancers, and the stone (in the bladder) without recourse to cutting. No disease too trivial, no duke too poxy.
A less up-market practitioner was a Dr Cerf, ‘lately arrived from France’ who claimed to be:
Well known for curing all kinds of disorders, both internal and external; likewise the SECRET DISEASE … Trusses to be disposed of for all kinds of ruptures. Any person that cannot attend personally, by sending their morning urine, may be faithfully informed of their complaint, and receive such medicines as are proper for their disorder, on the most reasonable terms … [There is] A back door with latch, by which persons may let themselves into the surgery. The doctor may be spoken with in all languages.
He sounds quite talented.
Dr Benjamin Thornbill of ‘the orthodox city of Wells’ (and few more orthodox than Wells, that’s for sure) cured the lame, blind, deaf, and diseased, with dismissive ease. No poss
ible pathological condition was regarded to be beyond his expertise.
Lengthy lists of treatable syndromes probably came about as a result of the welshing nature of the quacks’ trade, in that they lacked those personal ties of reputation which the proper practitioner enjoyed within a neighbourhood. Mind you, proper practitioners were not above a bit of advertising to help retain an irresolute clientele. Besides stability, the local practitioners had two advantages over the itinerant quack: access to hospitals and the treatment of the poor and indigent for free.
The fly-by-night needed to concentrate on cures which were quick, could be confirmed at once by sight and background conversation, and conditions which did not recur before he or she had passed on to new pastures. The bizarre constituents of the nostrums added to their mystical quality, in itself part of the therapy. For instance, a concoction of snails mashed with bay leaves and mallows was advanced as a cure for the ague (malaria, then endemic in England) and a mixture of woodlice ground up with sugar and nutmeg was recommended for cancer. The juice of wild cucumber aided dropsy, and dung tea, stewed owls and crushed worms were given for a variety of complaints.
A Joanna Stevens was so jealous of her secret ‘universal cure’ it took an Act of Parliament and £5,000 from the Treasury to winkle it out of her. It turned out to be a mishmash of powdered snails, Alicante and other soap, calcined eggshells, wild-carrot seeds and honey.
Among other cures were Dr Belloste’s pills for rheumatism advertised at a guinea a box and Parke’s pills for the stone at 2s 6d a pill. Such a price would guarantee success: having been foolish enough to pay that, you would hardly admit to the cure’s failure. Also sold, with equally spurious reputations, were Velno’s vegetable syrup for venereal disease, Daffy’s Elixir, Godfrey’s Cordial, Scott’s pills and Indian root.
Godfrey’s Cordial was given to quieten fractious children, and very popular at London’s Foundling Hospital. The snag was it contained laudanum (an opiate) and spirits, and its use resulted in numerous fatalities; a classic case of the treatment being infinitely worse than the complaint.