Introduction

The doctor who wrote this account of his early experiences died in 1911, and readers who know nothing about the daringly experimental history of Scottish medicine will perhaps mistake it for a grotesque fiction. Those who examine the proofs given at the end of this introduction will not doubt that in the final week of February 1881, at 18 Park Circus, Glasgow, a surgical genius used human remains to create a twenty-five-year-old woman. The local historain Michael Donnelly disagrees with me. It was he who salvaged the text which is the biggest part of the book, so I must say how he found it.

Life in Glasgow was very exciting during the nineteen seventies. The old industries which had made the place were being closed and moved south, while the elected governors (for reasons any political economist can explain) were buying multistorey housing blocks and a continually expanding motorway system. In the local history museum on Glasgow Green the curator Elspeth King, her helper Michael Donnelly, worked overtime to acquire and preserve evidence of local culture that was being hustled into the past. Since the First World War the City Council had given the local history museum (callled the People's Palcae) no funds to buy anything new, so Elspeth and Micheal's acquisitions were almost all salvaged from buildings scheduled for demolition. A store was rented in Templeton's carpet factory (which was soon closing down) and to this place Michael Donnelly brought troves of stained-glass windows, ceramic tiles, theatre posters, banners of disbanded trade unions and all sort of historical documents. Elspeth King sometimes gace Michael manual help with this work, as the rest of her staff were attendants sent by the head of the city art gallery in Kelvingrove and not paid to retrieve objects from dirty, unsafe buildings. Neither, of course, were Elspeth and Michael, so the new and very successful exhibitions they put on cost the City Council little or nothing.

While passing through the city centre one morning Michael Donnelly saw a heap of old-fashined box files on the edge of a pavement, obviously placed there for the Cleansing Department to collect and destroy.