Poor Things

NOTES CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL by Alasdair Gray

1. This was not the superstition of an ignorant woman. Bank failures were frequent during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and poorer folk suffered most by them, as the prosperous were better informed as to which financial houses were unsound, or becoming so. In twentieth-century Britain such injustices only happen with pension funds.

2. In his history The Royal Doctors (published by Macmillan, 1963) Gervaise Thring gives most space to Godwin’s progenitor, Sir Colin Baxter, but says: “Between 1864 and 1869 his less well-known yet equally gifted son was attendant consultant during the delivery of three princes and a princess royal, and probably saved the life of the Duke of Clarence. For reasons perhaps connected with his precarious health Godwin Baxter withdrew into private life and died in obscurity a few years later.” In Register House, Edinburgh, there is no record of his birth, and on the death certificate of 1884 there are blanks in the spaces reserved for age and mother’s name.

3. Semmelweis was a Hungarian obstetrician. Appalled by the high death rate in the Viennese maternity hospital where he worked, he used antiseptics and cut the death rate from 12 to 1¼ per cent. His superiors refused to accept his conclusions and forced him out. He deliberately contracted septicaemia in a finger and in 1865 died in a mental hospital of the disease he had spent his life combating.

4. The following extract on this subject is from “Women and Medicine”, an entry by Johanna Geyer-Kordesch in the Encyclopaedia of Medical History, edited by W.F. Bynum: “Florence Nightingale once wrote that she didn’t wish women to become doctors at all, because they would become like their male colleagues. Nightingale’s objectives were breathtakingly broad. She wanted no less than a medical reform so thorough in prevention and care that doctors might become redundant.”

5. Michael Donnelly, indefatigable in his efforts to prove this history a work of fiction, points out that the garden here described does not mention a coach-house on the far side of it. He has visited Baxter’s old home (18 Park Circus) and asserts that the space between back entrance and coach-house is too small and sunken to have ever been more than a drying-yard. This, of course, only proves that the coach-house was built at a later date.

6. “Skeely” means “skilful”, as in the old Scots ballad Sir Patrick Spens:

The King sits in Dumfermline toun,

Drinking the bluid-red wine.

“O whaur will I find a skeely skipper

To sail this new ship o’ mine?”

7. The first ichthyosaurus was discovered by Mary Anning (the Fossil Woman of Lyme Regis) in 1810. The illustration here referred to is in Pouchet’s The Universe, a popular nineteenth-century introduction to natural history.