GLASGOW’S very own Frankenstein and the city politician who ‘invented’ an early National Health Service are just two of the fascinating characters who feature in a new book about Scotland’s ‘forgotten history’.
Alistair Moffat, an award-winning writer and historian, delves into tales of lesser-known places, people and events – mislaid, misplaced or misunderstood – that have been “submerged by the wash of history” in Scotland’s Forgotten Past.
“I began writing about Scotland’s story in 1999, and 25 books later I find that my curiosity is nowhere near exhausted,” he says in the introduction to his book.
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“I remain fascinated, still writing about this quirky, bad-tempered little nation on the northwest edge of Europe, still discovering new insights, untold stories, and things I don’t understand. That’s so for a simple reason. The story is still in the process of becoming known, and much waits to be revealed about our ancestors and the land they made.
“For this book, I’ve chosen thirty-six episodes, half-forgotten or misunderstood tales that had been submerged by the wash of history across the country. They are arranged in chronological order, link to each other and, I hope, avoid falling into the beartraps of cliché. They show how different Scotland is and was, but their guiding principle for me was always - really? I didn’t know that.”
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One of the tales Alistair revisits concerns a shocking experiment which took place in 1818, in a Glasgow University lecture room.
Alistair explains: “On Wednesday, November 4, 1818, the corpse of Matthew Clydesdale, a freshly hanged convicted murderer, was made to come briefly alive.
“Andrew Ure, a professor and a product of the Scottish Enlightenment, attached electrodes to the corpse that made his chest heave, his eyes open and enabled him to walk a few steps.
“The experiment was halted by Dr James Jeffery, who plunged a scalpel into Clydesdale’s jugular vein, executing him a second time.
“This was the bizarre culmination of years of medical experiment and by no means an unusual incident in the intellectual ferment of 18th and early 19th century Scotland.”
Clydesdale, from Clarkston, was a young weaver who beat 80-year-old Alexander Love to death with a coal pick after a drunken night. When the Anatomy Act of 1832 was passed, only bodies of murderers from the gallows were allowed to be used for anatomical research at Glasgow University.
Clydesdale’s body was sent to Ure and Jeffray and while the real story is probably much more dramatic – the ‘galvanic’ experiments undoubtedly caused involuntary movements in the dead body - it would have been enough to make shocked onlookers’ hair stand on end at any rate…
It is said that Mary Shelley, who attended anatomy lessons at universities around the UK, may have been in the audience for this one and had the idea for her novel, Frankenstein, from the idea of using electricity to bring a body back to life.
The book also tells the story of Kirkintilloch-born Labour politician Tom Johnston, who was appointed Secretary of State for Scotland by Winston Churchill during the Second World War. After the Clydebank Blitz in March 1941, and fearing more air raids, especially on the heavy industry of the west of Scotland, Tom set up the Emergency Hospital Service.
Alistair explains: “At safe locations, well away from cities and factories…hospitals were quickly built to cope with a flood of casualties. New annexes were added to existing hospitals and several of Scotland’s grandest country house hotels were commandeered as convalescence facilities.
“When the expected bombs did not fall…Johnston filled the empty hospitals with patients whose care and operations had been delayed because of the war, or because they could not afford them. By 1944, more than 33,000 Scots had been treated, and none had paid a penny.
“Through a mixture of opportunism, idealism and guile, Tom Johnston had shown how a national health service might work in practice.”
Scotland’s Forgotten Past: A History of the Mislaid, Misplaced and Misunderstood by Alistair Moffat is published by Thames & Hudson on January 19.
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