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My father,\u00a0Dr\u00a0William\u00a0Finny retired from General Practice in 1929\u00a0when he was\u00a0aged 65. I was then\u00a0six years old so I have only a few memories of our home \u201cThamesa\u201d\u00a0(on the corner of No 6 Kingston Hill\u00a0and Wolverton Avenue)-I can remember the waiting room, the consulting room and especially the dispensary with all the rows of bottles and the pill-making machine.\u00a0In those days it was normal for the doctor to prescribe whatever was needed and to dispense it himself after surgery time and then for the\u00a0\u201cbottle boy\u201d\u00a0to deliver to it on his own bicycle to the patient that evening. Bottle\u00a0boys were quite a normal part of medical practice\u00a0and presumably we had a series but the only one I remember with great fondness was George Pepperell- scarlett hair and I suppose about 14. His job was to wash the medicine bottles, stick on labels “Three times a day” “Before meals” or whatever and then perform a magical feat of wrapping the bottle in white paper and sealing it with a red sealing wax. Sometimes,\u00a0as a very special treat, I was allowed to stick labels on bottles but never to actually wrap it up and seal it.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u00a0 My memories of car transport\u00a0are\u00a0\u00a0as follows.\u00a0Father had two,\u00a0so that one could be rested!\u00a0I do remember a car journey to Portsmouth taking three days!\u00a0Father never drove\u00a0his\u00a0pony more than 20 miles a day and so transferred\u00a0this sort of thinking to\u00a0his\u00a0car.\u00a0Therefore, it was inevitable that a 60 mile journey must take three days.\u00a0\u00a0Of course\u00a0he had started his career with\u00a0pony and trap transport.\u00a0Two ponies were\u00a0kept in what later became the garage.\u00a0\u00a0These were\u00a0kept fit by being given, in turn,\u00a0a hot bran\u00a0mash and four of\u00a0father\u2019s pink pills after\u00a0every\u00a0hard week\u2019s work.\u00a0\u00a0The\u00a0Bottle boy\u00a0sat beside father on their tour around visiting patients. Father drove and the bottle by held the reins while he went into the various houses.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Visiting patients\u00a0in Kingston Vale after dark was quite a dangerous thing to do. Because the equivalent of\u00a0our\u00a0present\u00a0day\u00a0muggers lurked on those unlit country roads. So father always carried a police whistle and a loaded stick.\u00a0\u00a0I never heard that he\u00a0came to\u00a0any harm.\u00a0\u00a0He probably terrified the muggers! \u00a0In those days, the doctor was never seen out of doors without his top hat on. I remember a row of seven\u00a0hatboxes labelled Monday,\u00a0Tuesday,\u00a0Wednesday etc\u00a0finishing with\u00a0\u201cBest\u201d\u00a0for Sunday.\u00a0\u00a0Presumably they all moved down one as\u00a0when\u00a0Monday became shabby\u00a0it\u00a0was given to us to play funerals with.\u00a0\u00a0In this way the doctor was quite conspicuous and was probably not stopped and robbed. More because the robber knew he wouldn\u2019t have much money on him, than because he was on\u00a0an errand of\u00a0mercy.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Confinements always took place in people\u2019s homes. Father said he’d stopped counting but he had dozens of godchildren. He was very much the family doctor;\u00a0seeing\u00a0his<\/em>\u00a0babies on a regular basis, going to their\u00a0christenings,\u00a0confirmations\u00a0and\u00a0weddings.\u00a0And if, after a year of them having been married,\u00a0he\u00a0had not been called in for a happy event,\u00a0he\u00a0would present the embarrassed couple with a Gooseberry bush.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n He adored babies and children and was, in return, very well loved. At\u00a0his memorial service in 1952,\u00a0the church was packed\u00a0with ex-patients,\u00a0standing in the aisles.\u00a0And\u00a0afterwards all of them lined the road from the parish church to the Guildhall to say a fond\u00a0farewell to a man who had lived for 88 years at\u00a0a\u00a0fast and\u00a0furious pace and always had had time to stop and give them his undivided attention. He had become a barrister and was elected Mayor of Kingston seven times. And had enjoyed his life enormously.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Random\u00a0additional\u00a0comments<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Slate Clubs<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n This was, of course, before the NHS. To pay for medical care for the whole family, Pubs used to run \u00a0“slate clubs”. Father was\u00a0the\u00a0slate club\u00a0doctor\u00a0for\u00a0the George \u00a0& Dragon and the Alexandra pub in Park Rd\u00a0and\u00a0probably\u00a0for\u00a0a couple of\u00a0others\u00a0too.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/strong>S<\/strong>peaking tubes<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n There was was often a queue outside the surgery door and a speaking tube ran from there to an outlet beside my fathers bed. You had to pull out a stopper and blow up the tube. This produced a piercing whistle in his ear which woke him up. Then you could hold a conversation up and down the tube\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n E<\/strong>mergency operations<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n Surgery for Acute appendicitis was performed, of course, on the scrubbed kitchen table sterilised with lots of carbolic. Dripping chloroform on a round thing – like a large tea strainer- with gauze on it, was used as the anaesthetic.\u00a0 Father always used it on me for tooth extraction. I remember the smell so well –\u00a0also the awful vomiting afterwards.\u00a0He was an\u00a0MCh\u00a0as well as MD\u00a0and BAO so he enjoyed the occasional emergency operation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When Dr Finny was Mayor of Kingston the mock Tudor <\/b><\/span>building<\/i><\/span> with Saxon Kings on the corner of the Market Square was built. <\/b><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n His daughter Elizabeth Finny who wrote the above was my patient<\/b><\/span>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My father,\u00a0Dr\u00a0William\u00a0Finny retired from General Practice in 1929\u00a0when he was\u00a0aged 65. I was then\u00a0six years old so I have only a few memories of our home \u201cThamesa\u201d\u00a0(on the corner of No 6 Kingston Hill\u00a0and Wolverton Avenue)-I can remember the waiting room, the consulting room and especially the dispensary with all the rows of bottles … Continue reading “During this medical emergency some might find it interesting to learn how things were done a century ago”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"two_page_speed":[],"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p29YAy-KG","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/onenorbiton.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/onenorbiton.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/onenorbiton.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onenorbiton.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onenorbiton.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2894"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/onenorbiton.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2894\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2903,"href":"https:\/\/onenorbiton.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2894\/revisions\/2903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/onenorbiton.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onenorbiton.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onenorbiton.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}