BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

DAWSON

The King’s life is moving peacefully towards its close. Press notice released at Sandringham, January 20, 1936.

This blandly eloquent statement was written (on a menu) by George V’s physician Bertrand Dawson, who’d been raised to the peerage by the king himself, first as Baron and then as Viscount Dawson of Penn. Fifty years on, in 1986, the release of Dawson’s diary made plain that he had ensured a peaceful death by injecting the king (at “about” 11 PM) with a lethal dose of morphine and cocaine. So George V died “peacefully” or, as in Dawson’s diary. “comporting with that dignity and serenity which he so richly merited.” Dawson also felt that the timing was right, too late for London’s ‘gutter’ evening papers but just right for a notice in the morning London Times. By 1986 this was an open secret, but still it made headlines and raised a flurry of debate about euthanasia. Viscount Dawson was an interesting figure in his own right. He was born Bertrand Dawson on March 9, 1864, an architect’s son. He went to St. Paul’s School and then University College London, graduating MD in 1893. He rose quickly in the profession and established a fashionable practice in 1903. He maintained that private practice into his 70s, but meanwhile (1907) entered public service as physician to King Edward VII, then was promoted to physician-in-ordinary to George V. But what really made Dawson’s reputation was his war service, which convinced him that the public health was a public problem that required a purposeful public solution. His ‘Dawson Report’, published in 1920 as “An Interim Report on the Future Provision of Medical and Allied Services” is regarded today as a foundation document for Britain’s National Health Service, finally passed into law in 1947. But Dawson himself (he died in 1945) would have spun in his grave over that, for he’d come to oppose any notion of a universal, compulsory, publicly administered health service. This owed partly to his view of the medical profession as an elevated elite. In 1936 he opposed euthanasia legislation on grounds that such decisions should be left to the wisdom and ethical understanding of a qualified attendant physician. More importantly, Dawson shared the elite’s ambiguous views on modernization. While he wanted to liberalize marital law and also to rewrite the Book of Common Prayer, he came to fear any hint of collectivization and thought Soviet communism the most dangerous threat to the ‘British way of life.’ In 1936 he accompanied David Lloyd George on the former prime minister’s visit to Hitler at Berchtesgaden, and shared Lloyd George’s view of Hitler as a great German patriot. So Viscount Dawson was not universally popular. As a contemporary jingle had it, ©

[Stanley]

WALD

No surer way could be found to injure any person than to assume that, because of color, race, or nationality they are unfit . . . without claiming the gift of prophecy, one can foresee that our sins must recoil upon the heads of our descendants. Lillian Wald.

Jane Addams’ Hull House settlement in Chicago came before Lillian Wald’s Henry Street in Manhattan and was, to some extent, the inspiration behind Henry Street. Today, what remains of Hull House has become a museum. But the Henry Street Settlement still thrives, and still occupies its original building. Henry Street serves 50,000 people from its near neighborhood, most of them living in the Lillian Wald Houses project on the Lower East Side, where the average family income hovers (or is stuck at) $27,000. In Manhattan, that is poverty, so the Henry Street Settlement still has its work to do. For decades it has provided a wide range of services, mostly directed towards self-help: playgrounds, an arts center, drama and dancing classes, job training. The list goes on and on, but it all began with what Lillian Waldcalled “public health nursing.” She was born in Cincinnati on March 10, 1867, the granddaughter of refugees from the failed German revolutions of 1848. Already well-off, the family moved to Rochester, NY, to further her father’s retail trade (in optical instruments). Lillian got the best of educations Rochester could provide, finally qualifying as a medical nurse in 1891. She took a position in New York City’s Juvenile Asylum. She already knew about Hull House, but her “baptism of fire” came in 1893 when (summoned by a street urchin) she saved a woman from bleeding to death after childbirth. The appalling conditions set Lillian Wald off on her course of voluntary public service, and she did not stop running until her death in 1940. It began with offering a free nursing service, but by 1913 Henry Street was an institution, its 92 nurses working the neighborhood (one of them as New York’s first public school nurse), while others taught neighborhood kids, and adults, how to cope with life on the Lower East Side, training for jobs or experiencing some finer arts, as in painting or dancing or acting. In her work, Wald engaged the support of young socialites like Mary Brewster and Eleanor Roosevelt, but because she knew where the money was she was also staked by the banker-philanthropist Jacob Schiff, who bought and renovated her first Henry Street property. She focused mainly on new immigrants, whether fresh from Ellis Island or from rural South Carolina. For the black southerners, Lillian became a founder-member of the NAACP. Then came World War I, and a new career as a peace advocate, not to mention her work for women’s rights (whether in family planning or at the ballot box). She’s been recently rediscovered, and there’s a move afoot to erect a Lillian Wald statue somewhere in the Lower East Side. But just maybe New York’s new mayor, Zoran Mamdani, has a couple of better ideas, more in tune with the foundational nature of Lillian Wald’s life and work. ©