Sickness and health

Most of those interviewed grew up in the era before the National Health Service. They were also raised at a time when a visit to the doctor’s surgery often meant a visit to his home. Seventy years ago some diseases that are no longer commonplace were considered a serious threat to wellbeing and even life. Tuberculosis, or TB, was regarded with particular concern.

One of Sheila Herdman’s earliest memories of Whitehead was going into the back garden of her King’s Road home and seeing a bonfire in the next door garden. She later found out that one of her neighbours had died of TB and his bedclothes were being burned. Diphtheria also claimed many lives. The Gribbin brothers lost a five-year-old sister to it, while it also claimed the life of one of Annie Hill’s brothers at the age of seven.

On the other hand, there are illnesses that are now not viewed so gravely which were treated much more seriously in the past. For example, one of the interviewees had scarlet fever as a child and spent several weeks in hospital in Antrim.

Another missed most of an autumn term with tonsillitis and then his mother kept him off school for the rest of the academic year to allow him to make a full recovery. Occasionally a visit to a hospital was required.

Matt Quinn was in Antrim hospital having cartilage removed from his knee on the day of the Nutts Corner air crash, 5 January 1953. As a result of this disaster, three of the four crew members and 24 of the 31 passengers were killed.

A Whitehead doctor

One of those interviewed in Whitehead had been a medical practitioner. Dr John Wilson moved to Whitehead in the late 1950s and has lived in the same house in Cable Road for over fifty years. The son of a caulker, he was born in Parkmount Street in Belfast and moved to Bangor at six months old.

When he was a year old he moved to a small farm at Portadown that had been left to his mother, living there until he went to Queen’s University to study medicine. After graduating from Queen’s, he spent his house officer year at the Moyle Hospital in Larne, followed by another year in the children’s hospital in Belfast. An opportunity arose for him to spend a year in Liverpool before going on to the famous children’s hospital in Great Ormond Street in London.

However, one day, as he was finishing up in Belfast, he was visited by Dr Joseph Dundee and Dr William Calwell. They wanted to combine their practices in Whitehead and wanted John to join them in the new practice. He had been recommended to them by Hugh Wilson, a surgeon in the Moyle Hospital. They proposed taking him on as an assistant on a salary of £750. He told them he would need a car, but they instructed him to buy his own car and he would receive an allowance towards his petrol.

John Wilson recalls his first meeting with Drs Calwell and Dundee:


They said, “Why are you going to England?” I said, “I am going to England because I have a lot of knowledge, but I have no practical ability by my hands.” … They both laughed and they both said to me, “Give us six months in general practice and we will teach you more practical ability than you’ll ever learn in England in the next seven or eight years!”

John began work in Whitehead on 10 February 1958 and has never regretted his move there. In 1959 he became a partner with Drs Dundee and Calwell, originally under a one-seventh partnership arrangement, eventually becoming an equal partner. He acknowledges that in the late 1950s it was very difficult to go into general practice. In 1958, for example, only two people in Northern Ireland got into general practice.

The three doctors covered an area encompassing Whitehead, Ballycarry, Islandmagee, Magheramourne, Glynn and Eden. They also had about 30 patients in Larne. The practice started with 5,800 patients between the three doctors, but within two years this had risen to 7,000. A fourth doctor, Dr Ronnie Esler from Larne, would later join the practice.

In the early days of the practice there were several surgeries in Whitehead. Dr Dundee, for instance, continued to operate a surgery from his home on the Promenade. John also had his own surgery in his home in Cable Road to deal with patients at weekends where he could be assisted by his wife who was a trained sister at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast.

At one point home calls were transferred through to his house and his wife, who was a native of Whitehead, answered them. One day a call came through and when he answered he was told, “It’s not really you I want to talk to it’s your wife.” The next time he saw this patient he asked why this was so and was told, “You get better information from her and you can understand it better.” In 1969 a new health centre was opened on Edward Road.

By the time that John retired in 1996, when he had reached the age of 65, he had witnessed many changes in the medical profession. For example, when John started out in general practice home deliveries accounted for about 20 per cent of births, though this was phased out over the next decade. He feels that doctors used to have more time with each patient. He emphasised the importance of knowing each family’s medical history as this assisted with the diagnosis of particular health issues. According to John, ‘You were looking after the patient as a member of a family, and that, to me, meant you looked after the family in totum.’

Dentists

Listening to the interviewees it would seem that a visit to the dentist was as dreaded an experience seventy years ago as it is now. There were, however, fewer opportunities to visit a dentist and basic dental treatment was often carried out by the local doctor.

Mary Ann Higgins laughs now when she thinks back to her early dental experiences: ‘Dr McCaughey would have pulled the teeth for you … pulled them many a time. … I remember going there until I got two or three out and then he said, “Oh, you should go to the dentist, they might fill that for you”. After that we started going to the dentist.’

Cahal Boyd also remembered having his teeth pulled by the local doctor and noted that he was 15 or 16 when he went to a dentist for the first time.

Sheila Herdman recalls that dental services in Whitehead in her early childhood were provided by Dr Barney Dickson who had studied both medicine and dentistry. Sheila still vividly remembers one particular dental experience: ‘When I was seven years of age, for some reason or another, all the enamel came off my first teeth. And I was laid out in King’s Road on our dining room table. Dr Martin gave me the anaesthetic and Dr Dickson pulled out the teeth and I woke up in the front room in King’s Road minus seven teeth.’

Brian McKenna’s father Arthur qualified as a dentist in Belfast and came to Whitehead to set up a practice in the mid 1930s People would have come to his father’s dental practice from Islandmagee, Ballycarry and round to Carrickfergus. When he set up his practice in Whitehead Arthur worked two days a week in Carrickfergus – this went on for about 20 years – because Whitehead’s population was then much smaller. Sunday morning could be busy for him with holidaymakers turning up at his door who had broken or lost their dentures the night before or were suffering with toothache.