St.Davids Hospital, 25 years ago.
I have, in fact, been at St David’s Hospital for a mere twenty four years and for most of my time in the hospital my status has been pretty informal, some would say positively inconsequential, but twenty five years seems a much rounder, neater figure and more appropriate for a person of mature years and impressive gravitas.
I came not all that long after that long after the retirement of the penultimate physician superintendent, Dr Sidney Davies. He remained a legendary figure, frequently referred to by patients and oft quoted by staff. It would appear that he administered the place almost single handed, insisting on making all the major decisions himself. This even involved his personally selecting the various kinds of jam to be consumed within the hospital. Whether such weighty decisions were largely decided on grounds of taste, or price, is not recorded.
He was given to making sudden and unexpected inspections of the hospital at all manner of inconvenient hours of day or night. Theses excursions and the consequences of the shortcomings they revealed, seem to have been viewed with considerable awe by the nursing staff.
Rumour has it that he could be a bit curt and dismissive in his pronouncements. He would, for instance, sometimes describe someone as being “not one of your better types of patient”. There seemed to be little more that anyone could say in such circumstances.
No one before or since appears to have wielded such authority or commanded such respect within the hospital. As was always the case with the physician superintendent, when that post was in its heyday, if you didn’t love him, then at lease you knew exactly who to hate….That is a situation which seems to have quite a lot to commend it. Who amongst the current army of ever proliferating administrators knows anything about the relative merits and cost of jam? Nor does there seem to be anyone who could be clearly identified, and who’s head would roll, even if large quantities of a particularly septic variety was purchased…
I only met him on one or two occasions in his old age, not long, indeed, before he himself was admitted to St. David’s Hospital. I am told that the poor old chap did not relish being in the role of patient in his old hospital and was not at all amused by the irony of that situation.
After arriving in St David’s I was asked to take charge of Brefi Ward, then a repository for all the iller and more difficult male patients within the hospital. It was also the place to which any male rash enough to get himself admitted at night was sent (a practice which took several years to stamp out). The number of beds had recently been reduced from 100 to a mere 80. I took it upon myself to further reduce the bed complement to 50. This decision was not universally well received, indeed it met a surprising amount of resistance from some of my colleagues who seemed to believe that undue pressure would be put on their wards in consequence. Given the large number of very ill people confined on one ward, the door of which was usually kept locked, it is not surprising that the level of disturbed behaviour was pretty high on Brefi at that time, as was, indeed, the level of staff morbidity.
I recorded for posterity (and many will be disappointed to learn) that I only got thumped once! In that, as in many other things, I seem to have led a charmed life. Because I saw the punch coming and managed to dodge, even that only just connected! I fear that the nursing staffs were often much less fortunate and, although staff moral seemed surprisingly high, it was not an easy place in which to work. The situation improved marginally when the bed complement was finally reduced to 50 but there was still a long way to go.
Even under theses disadvantageous circumstances one was occasionally presented with unsolicited and, alas, usually unwanted gifts.
One patient now so long dead that it is safe to mention his name, which was Evan James (he was called Evan James, Farmyard, to distinguish him from another of that ilk), upon being allowed home for the weekend invariably returned with half a dozen eggs intended for my personal consumption. Unfortunately, these eggs were always delivered in a brown paper bag and most of them had broken well before his and their arrival in the hospital. In consequence, his return to the ward was accompanied by the steady drip of egg yolk across the whole length of the ward. The domestic staff did not always greet this sterling challenge to their efforts with the enthusiastic approval it deserved.
Not all admissions appeared to be amply justified. In the case of one Gary Cooper, the sole reason for his arrival at St .David’s Hospital appeared to be that a policeman, who demanded to be told his name late one Saturday Night, refused to accept the (correct) answer he was given. This resulted in unfortunate consequences for both individuals concerned.
Alas, junior medical staff seem to be less colourful and less eccentric nowadays than they were 25 years ago. Just before I started someone I used to be in school with worked at St .David’s as a J.H.M.O (the title of this particular medical grade has changed so often over the last 20 years as to leave me a bit bemused and often unsure about what the current terminology is). Like many of us, he carried large bundles of clinical notes in the boot of his car en route to various clinics. Unlike most of us he also kept pigs and was therefore also in the habit of carrying several large canisters of pig swill in the boot. He was not noted for his energy and zeal as far as clinical work was concerned (the pig s, after all, took up a lot of his time), but this alone did not get him into too many difficulties. Unfortunately, one day a can of pig swill tipped over in the boot and the contents became inextricably mixed with the notes! His career in psychiatry did not survive for long following this debacle. He moved into public health instead – a sphere of medicine in which pig swill probably figured more prominently and appropriately than it did in psychiatry.
Another junior doctor of this era was noted for his habit of picking up his copy of the Daily Telegraph as soon as he got to work in the morning. He would then disappear into the nearest toilet and lock himself in until he had read the paper from the first page to the last. He was not a fast reader and this therefore often took most of the morning. One yearns for the return of such a leisured age.
I well remember another doctor whose lack of clinical acumen was such as to make us seriously doubt if he was actually medically qualified. The prime reason for this apprehension was that, when conducting an intimate examination on a female patient he was noted to display considerable uncertainty, if not downright confusion, regarding the precise body orifice to be examined.
Perhaps it was the same doctor, who upon deciding that it was time he learnt to drive, took Mr. Ben Jones (a patient of many years standing, well known and respected throughout the hospital but who had not driven the car that time along with him as the experienced driver. The outcome of the very first such excursion was that the car ended up upside down in a ditch and Ben Jones had to be admitted to Glangwilli with head injuries. Following his recovery in hospital, he was heard to observe that, whatever anyone might care to say about his mental state, he was in no doubt whatsoever that particular doctor urgently needed to have his head examined!
As I said at the beginning, the present complement of junior medical staff seems to be far more staid and respectable in comparison. Also the libel laws now appear to be interpreted with a hitherto unknown degree of uncompromising savagery.
To refer to his visit to St David’s. That Christmas he had a particularly hectic schedule, permitting no more than a brief and time visit to the hospital. That was not quite how things worked out. By teatime we could scarcely stand up but he was just bout able to issue a decree “Would someone please ring Argel (old people’s home) and tell them that the mayor of Carmarthen has been detained in St David’s Hospital”.
On one more recent and perhaps less memorable Christmas, the visiting dignitaries included the then matron of W.W.G.H and they were shown around by the chief Nursing Officer. Two points need to be established: First is that the matron and nursing officer had never got on, the second is that she was an enthusiastic supporter of the Baptist cause. She opened proceedings by announcing that she was a busy woman with only a very limited amount of time available and she hoped the visit would be a brief one. It has to be said that, as a tactician she showed poor judgment. The nursing officer insisted on showing them every nook and cranny in the hospital and this took a surprisingly long time. They ended up on the ward that housed the Rev. As I well remember, the memorable thing about the Reverend gentleman was that, if suitably primed, he would produce a torrent of the vilest and most blasphemous language imaginable. He had been particularly well informed that day and he quite excelled himself a stunned silence shall I’m a state of shock, she turned to the chief nursing officer and ached, “who was that dreadful old man?” He replied “that was the Reverend ”. The Reverend!” “Oh yes, he used to be a Minister Baptist, I believe”.