Interview with Malcolm Mackay in Edinburgh
Don: When you and I first met in about 1950, I was teaching anatomy to 150 students and about 50 dental students, as a senior lecturer in the university. Before that we were out in India for 15 years, the first 10 years in the Mission Hospital and then 5 or 6 years in the army.
I was born in Kirkcaldy and I did my medical training at the University of Edinburgh. The studying came easily to me and I used to do enough to get through fairly easily. Then I got keen and worked hard at surgery and became better. There were no medical professionals in my family at all.
One thing though:- My oldest brother was in the army and wanted to be a doctor. When he was killed and I said I would be a doctor, the family approved. I graduated in 1928. I did a year in Wallasey, near Liverpool. Then I went out to India.
We were brought up with the idea of serving people. I knew that India then was very short of medicals and I really went to serve but I believed that Christianity was essential for India. I had been in the Church of Scotland for many years and that was how we heard about the needs in India. I arrived in India to do general medicine.
I was mostly running quite a small hospital so that I didn’t have much experience. We had a very varied experience and at the same time we had a lot of medical work to do. There was a great deal of malaria, guinea worm and dysentery.
It seemed obvious to me that Christian values were necessary for nations, but unfortunately when I expressed them they weren’t terribly interested in India. I was knocked back on my heels one day when one of my students, a student who was also a patient, said he couldn’t sleep, he couldn’t work. So, I gave him some good advice which he regarded as irrelevant. As he was going out the door he said to me, ‘What’s wrong with me is moral defeat. Can you cure that?’ I felt that I would not investigate that too far because it might be coincident with certain moral defeats of my own. I couldn’t help him much.
I thought about it and shortly after that we had a meeting of all the missionaries in Rajasthan. One of them had been home and told us about the Oxford Group. She told us that she had met people who believed in four absolute moral standards, honesty, purity, unselfishness and love and the guidance of God. I thought to myself, quietly and secretly, ‘I’ll find out when I go home.’ This was around 1930.
I was having amoebic dysentery at that time and I was ill and better, then ill and better again. I was also in difficulty with my colleague because he knew everything and I knew everything and we didn’t come to the same conclusions. I thought I was scientific and he wasn’t and he thought he was Christian and I wasn’t. So, I had this additional problem:- I knew that if I went home for sickness it would be all right, nobody would blame me. But if I went home because I couldn’t get on with him they would blame me. Anyhow, I went home and sought out the Oxford Group.
I found it in Princes Street, Edinburgh, in the Oak Hall. They were having a series of meetings - a whole bunch of people one of whom I knew, because he had been a student with my brother in the university. There was a Minister called Willie Cunningham who was involved and there was another one called John Watt, who was an Anglican but he was very much involved.
Quite simply, the people I saw at this meeting had something I wanted. They had a freedom and they could answer questions - like the question I had been asked before I came home – ‘can you cure moral defeat?’ I spoke to one of them and he said, ‘Well you know about the four standards’ and I said, ‘Yes I do.’ So he said, ‘Well, what about them?’ So I said, ‘Well, that is not the way I have lived.’ Then he asked an interesting question, ‘Do your family find you easy to live with?’ I replied, ‘I don’t find them easy!’ He said, ‘That wasn’t the question!’ So I said, ‘No. They don’t find me easy, because I always think I know.’
The next thing that this fellow said to me was, ‘You’re a scientist, aren’t you?’ and I said I was. ‘Then will you make an experiment that many have made and found fruitful?’ What could I say but ‘yes’. So he said, ‘All right. Get up tomorrow morning and listen to God.’ Just like that. That is what I did and I have been doing it ever since.
Certain things became clear, simple things. I had to apologise to members of my family, I had to take some books and return them to the school library, I had to get into the practice of finding God’s will. Also, as a scientist, testing it, I began to test it out in medicine. I went back to India and, for instance, I had a patient who came in from a very wild part of India, north Udaipur, very ill. We all knew what was wrong with her, we all knew she was extremely ill and that a long operation would kill her. So the question was:- was there anything that could tell us whether a short operation would cure her? There was nothing. So I said, ‘We’ll see if God has anything to say.’
I had the clearest guidance to operate, how to operate and that she would be alright. We operated, it was an intestinal obstruction. I made the incision that I had been told to make (by God) and I found a piece of fibrous tissue kinking the bowel, snipped it with a pair of scissors and closed it up. She got better. My colleagues were a bit puzzled. I think they thought I was lucky!
Very soon after that I had another patient, a boy of about 18 who had an ear infection which I operated on. Then his father came to me and said ‘My son is not well’, and I asked what was wrong. He said, ‘He seems to have forgotten the names of everything he wants. He doesn’t even know what to ask for when he is feeding.’ I said ‘Bring him in’, I knew what was wrong. I knew that he had developed a brain abscess but I tested it out. Then the question was whether to operate or not. The difficulty for me was double. My father had died under that very operation when I was quite a small boy and that had scarred me. I had that to think about and also it was a difficult operation. I knew how to do it but I had never seen it done. If I didn’t do it he would die. So, we said we would do it. We had to open up the bone behind the ear, clean it out and we found it was solid. That was why it had so quickly gone to a brain abscess, because the mastoid air cells hadn’t developed. So, we went through that bone, found the abscess, drained it and he recovered. I would not have done it if I hadn’t had guidance to do it. And the boy would not have lived.
In some ways the arrival of Ann into my life was simple. When I went out to India I was attached to somebody else. There was a half-understanding. God said to me, ‘You have to give that up. It is based on desire and selfishness. Your motives are wrong and what you are doing are wrong.’ So, I had to give it up after I had met the Oxford Group and started having guidance. When we first went to India I was sent up to a hill-station to learn the language. There were three groups of people who worked together: the Scots, the New Zealanders and the Australians. I got to know them all. It was a good combination.
When I was doing that, I was the doctor for the families of these three groups and I did that and came back. Then the next year I was doing the same and so was Ann. She is a Kiwi.
Ann: Don appeared on my horizon over the dinner table. I had been out for one of the long walks we used to do up there in the hills. When I came back it was dinner time and here was this new student sitting on the opposite side of the table. He said, ‘You must be Ann Allen’ and I said, ‘You must be Dr Robertson’, because my colleagues had told me about him the previous year, before I had come out. They said, ‘You wait till Dr Robertson comes!’ That was enough.
Then he said, ‘I have got to go down to see the Ryburns tonight, would you like to come with me?’ because he was looking after the children and there was a lot of illness. That was a good opportunity to get to know him, wasn’t it.
Don: I didn’t feel anything special when I saw Ann for the first time, frankly. I thought she was a cheerful soul. The relationship matured gradually over several years and I went down to Calcutta to do training in tropical medicine. When I was there I decided in my own mind what I was going to do. When I had a holiday I invited myself up to the Punjab - my interest in language was decreasing, my interest in Ann was increasing.
The first thing I realised in medicine was how much illness is born in the mind. In this country I would say more than half. In a tropical country less than half, because you have a lot of malaria, dysentery and so on because of the epidemic diseases. But when I went home and started to live the way God wanted me to live, one thing that became clear was that I was healthier. I went back into an area where there was dysentery and such like, I didn’t get sick again. If I got dysentery again, it did not get me down.
I began to think about that. Then I met a patient with very severe asthma, an elderly lady. I remember in the morning, when I was trying to find God’s will, I had the thought to ask her if there was anything she was afraid of. So, I went down to see her and I said, ‘Is there anything special in your life that you are afraid of?’ and she said, ‘Oh yes. But I am not going to tell you about that.’ I said, ‘Well, how long have you been afraid of it?’ And she said, ‘31 years’. So I said, ‘That’s the number of years you have had asthma. Do you think they could be connected?’ She said, ‘Even if they are connected, I cannot tell you about them.’ So I said, ‘Well, you think about it.’
A few days later I went back to see her and she was still having asthma. She said, ‘You see I am afraid that my husband will discover something that happened 31 years ago.’ I said, ‘You could tell him, and apologise. You might discover that he has something he would like to talk to you about.’ She said, ‘No, he would put me out of the house.’ So I said, ‘All right. You think about it.’
I went back about a week later and she was free from asthma. She looked about ten years younger and I said, ‘I see you have been talking to your husband.’ She smiled and said, ‘Yes I have.’ ‘And he hasn’t put you out of the house? I don’t want to know what you told him, I just want to know that you are free of it.’ And she said, ‘Yes, and he told me he knew about it all the time.’
All asthma has a psychological factor in it. I could tell you of another young man who was having asthma and he, with a friend, decided to become absolutely honest. He told this friend certain things about himself and he went and paid back some money to a Woolworths store, where the boys of his school used to enjoy themselves at lunch-break pinching things. To his surprise, and his parents surprise, his asthma disappeared. I think honesty has a very powerful effect on asthma.
There are really three things that create illness in people - fear, hate and greed. Hate doesn’t produce asthma but it does produce rhumatoid arthritis. We have known that. One example was one of my students who learned the same philosophy when he was a student. He had a patient one day who came in with a very severe wrist and she said to him, ‘Can you do anything about that?’ He said, ‘I have just been reading that very often that has to do with your closest relationships and bitterness.’ She said, ‘Thank you very much’ and walked out the door. He said, ‘Well, that’s one way of getting rid of your patients and he thought he had said the wrong thing.’ But five days later she came back and said, ‘What do you think of that?’ Her wrist was better and he said, ‘What have you done?’ She said, ‘Well I didn’t tell you but I was going to leave my husband the day I was here before but I went home and I talked to him. He was a long-distance pilot and used to go away for some days and leave me with all the work and the kids to look after. Then he would come back and the kids regarded him as a bit of a hero because he had been away in far parts. I got mad at him. Then, when you told me what you did I spoke to him and he said “Well my only reason for going on these long journeys was to get more money for you to have an easier time”. So, they sat down and worked it out and he decided to go on the European sector, not the long-haul one, and her painful wrist began to go away.
A failure - a patient of mine had been a leading trade unionist and had been a rheumatoid arthritis patient for a long time. I asked him, I said ‘I associate rheumatoid arthritis with bitterness.’ He replied, ‘I have every right to be bitter’. I asked why and he said ‘Because my first child died at the time of the slump, from hunger because we had no money to feed her. That was when I joined the communist party and became a leading member of it.’ So I said, ‘Well, what I said still applies. You may have to get something bigger to live for, something bigger than bitterness, if you want to get rid of your arthritis,' He replied ‘I am not ready for that.’ I should have been able to put it to him more compellingly than that.
During the war I was in India, of course, and I was sent to Poona, where I was in charge of a very miscellaneous group of people. I had 7,000 sappers and miners to look after, in the Indian Army, and I had a group of families - about 250 families. Then I had a miscellaneous cantonment hospital for all the rest of the people in this part of Poona. I was the anti-malaria officer as well. About 70,000 people. I had some men helping me of course, qualified doctors.
I had various things to do - one was to take the new people who had arrived from England and give them lectures on how to live in tropical countries. I remember once I gave them a lecture and after the lecture one of the fellows stayed behind and said, ‘I think you must be in the Oxford Group - so am I’, and his name was Terry Guilbride. We had never met before. We had half a dozen people who knew the Oxford Group at that time and we used to work together.
We had malaria, but my greatest problem at that time was the families. I had these 250 families and 90% of my work came from a few of them. I studied that and I realised that the parents of the families that gave me all my work were themselves nervous, anxious parents. I reckoned that this was communicated to the children and made them have recurrent illnesses - colds, coughs and that sort of thing. Minor illnesses.
There was one family that gave me a lot of work that didn’t seem to fit in to that. I went round to see them one day. He was a Colonel. I said to him, ‘I want to see you about your family,’ He said ‘Yes, they give you a lot of work don’t they!’ I said, ‘Yes, it surprises me.’ He asked why and I said, ‘Because most of the families that give me a lot of work are the children of anxious parents and you and your wife don’t seem to me to be anxious.’ He laughed and he said, ‘You don’t realise what a good actress my wife is!’ She was there and she said, ‘Yes I am terrified all the time.’ So I said, ‘Well, I think it may help you to realise that fear is very often selfishness. If you don’t demand that your children will always be healthy and if you take what God sends you, you will find that you are more at peace and they will be healthier.’ So we talked about it. She said, ‘Well, I’ll try it.’ And the family health was transformed.
Malaria was all over that area. I used to be responsible for certain people that kept the mosquitos from breeding and my wife will tell you how I did it.
Ann: The children were small at that time so they used to go out for a walk every day with their ayah (the Indian nanny). One of the things they loved to do was to look in all the pools and find ‘wrigglers’ as they used to call them. They would come home and they would say ‘Daddy, Daddy, we have found wrigglers today’. That, of course, meant malaria, so he would pass that on to the people responsible for anti-malaria and they would have to go and look in the areas where the children had been and find the breeding grounds.
Don: After a while the man came and said, ‘How is it that you always know where the mosquitos are breeding?’ I said, ‘My children go out for picnics and they see them and they tell me.’
I was 6 years in the army. After that, I came home to do my Fellowship in surgery, intending to go back to India to teach in an Indian college. But the Principal of the college had left and his successor didn’t want me so, when I was wondering what to do, I was invited to become a teacher in Edinburgh University, to teach anatomy. I stayed on to do that believing that I could do certain things: teaching of course, but also that somebody should be looking after the overseas students in Edinburgh, especially the post-graduates. In those days immediately after the war there was very little done for them and they had very few friends. They still don’t have enough friends but I reckon that for those I was teaching - because I was lecturing to them - we could do something, in the way of friendship and passing on what I had learned.
Sometimes, when a good student became a bad student, you had to try and find out why. It was my job to interview them. I remember one case - a boy who had been excellent in his first term. Second term he was doubtful and then he got 26%. So I sent for him and I said, ‘Look Ian, what’s gone wrong?’ He said, ‘Well I don’t know if this world is worth living for.’ So we talked. I had a clear thought to ask him ‘How do you get on with your father?’ He said, ‘Who told you about that?’ I told him, ‘Nobody told me but I had the thought which I think came from God.’ He didn’t say much more but he went away and I heard later that he apologised to his father whom he believed had been very unfair to his mother - and he had too. After that, he began to get to work. He passed his exams and is now a doctor. This was a Scots student.
Another day, I met a lost Egyptian on the stairs and I said, ‘You look a bit lost, are you looking for somebody?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ To my surprise he said ‘You must be Dr Robertson’. I asked how he knew. He said, ‘Well, I have been told there is a Dr Robertson who cares for Egyptians.’ We had a lot of Egyptians. Having been in India (including what is now Pakistan but was not a separate country at that time) we were interested in Islamic thought and all the Islamic group.
The result of my friendships with these people was that, when Iraq started their second medical school, they were in difficulty about anatomy and the Dean came home and asked me if I would go and teach there. He asked the Professor really, and the Professor said, ‘Well if you want somebody to go out and teach in Iraq as it is just now [it was in trouble then] you had better ask Robertson.’ So he asked me and I went. The Professor reckoned that I wouldn’t put my foot in it. This was 1959, just a year after the revolution when Nouri Said was killed and the king was killed. Mosul, which is now called Ninevah, and which was the original Ninevah, was in a mess because they had had a rebellion, a communist, nationalist civil war and people were being killed every day. The great city had become a heap. It didn’t scare us - we sat down: by this time we knew that God could guide us. Ann and I and our two children sat down to seek guidance and we all felt it was right to go.
Ann: The children were older by this time, so they didn’t come. Jean had finished her training and was actually teaching, Ian was still in the university. But he felt it was right, like the rest of us, so he went into a hostel.
Don: All that we could do when we got there was to show them what we were living for and to be honest and straightforward with them, at the same time not to be superior. When I first went to India I felt superior to the Indians and when I began to apply absolute standards I realised that. When we were going out to Iraq, the one thing I was clear about was that I was not to go and feel superior. I gathered the students together on the first day and I said, ‘I am going to teach you. I will sometimes have to tell you that you are wrong. I think the Arabs are very like the Scots - you can fight with them and they will be friends, you can quarrel with them and they will be friends, but if you tell a Scotsman he is wrong, he will be your enemy in many cases. I think we and you are similar in this. If I have to correct you, it will not be because I think I am superior to you, but only because I know certain things that you have to learn.’
A year and a half afterwards, one of the students said to me, ‘You know what you said on the first day you came - well it is true.’ So, I think they are like the Scots. It took him a year and a half to admit that he was proud, but he did admit it.
It was the days of Abdul Kassim and the government was in a difficult position because the supporters of any government in those days were a small minority. There was great temptation and if corruption crept in, another group would get themselves together and depose the original government. Dr Jamali was in jail at that time - he was the Minister of Education. He was also the Foreign Minister for the king and had been put in jail. There were people who used to march through the streets shouting ‘Kill Jamali’. He was the one man of that cabinet who came out of the cabinet without having become wealthy - that says a great deal. They really had nothing against him and so they couldn’t kill him.
We used to visit his wife, with great trepidation I may say, and with great care. We only went if we felt sure it was right. We used to visit her quietly and talk things over. Eventually certain other Arab leaders said, ‘If you don’t want to make use of Jamali, let him out and we will use him.’ Now he is in Tunis. He is Professor of Educational Philosophy in Tunis.
More recently we have just been in Rhodesia. I retired one day and we left for Southern Africa the next day. Our intention was to attend a conference in Zimbabwe, in Salisbury [now Harare]. First we went to South Africa and visited certain people in different places then went up together in a party to Salisbury. There was a conference led by men like Elliott Gabella, a leader in the African National Congress. He was a doctor, and deeply impressed by the change in Alec Smith, the son of Ian Smith. He was a powerful man and a very fine speaker. With them was Cyril Hatty. At the opening meeting in the Margolis Hall, we had 900 people, two-thirds of them black, one-third of them white. They were fascinated. One of the men who came was Arthur Kanodereka - the Methodist minister who became the Treasurer of Muzorewa’s party, the UANC. He was in a way their liaison with the guerillas because he used to meet them, argue with them, talk to them. He heard Alec’s Smith’s apology as a white man and said ‘There is no need to kill these men if they have got that new attitude’, and he decided to submit his bitterness - which was extreme because he had been working with the guerillas – submit this bitterness to God and to surrender it. He became one of the greatest leaders and influenced many people.
My attitude to Zimbabwe’s future is positive to this extent, that when my son was invited to go out and teach there I supported him. He is teaching in the university now and has made friends with many of these people. I think the hope for Zimbabwe is the number of people who are changing their attitudes. Analysis doesn’t give you an answer, but change in men does, both black and white. So, we were encouraged and we went back again this last winter. I did a little bit of teaching but mostly we were meeting people. The day we arrived we were at a gathering at the home of one of the senior African technicians. I think his story indicates the evils of the old regime and hope for the new one because, when he was promoted, he found that he had a white secretary under him and he was scared to give her instructions. He used to write up his letters and give them to a messenger to take to the secretary. That was what had built up in his mind. After a few days she came in with a cup of tea for both of them at 11 o’clock and said, ‘We usually have tea at 11’, and he realised that she was treating him as an equal and as her boss. He lost his inhibitions. Later he met some of the people who were changing their attitudes, through MRA, and is now one of the freest and most effective members of that community.
I met Frank Buchman once, maybe twice. I was fascinated by his creative, positive way of leading a meeting - many of which I did attend. He was clear-cut, he never compromised and he was always optimistic. I remember when he was leading a meeting once about Africa and he announced that the meeting of several hundred people the next day would discuss what should go into an African play, written by Africans. I thought ‘Goodness me. Hundreds of people trying to get guidance!’ But out of that came Freedom, the play and film which is being shown every week in Salisbury, Rhodesia. He told us that he was lying awake wondering what to do with a group of Africans who were at an MRA world conference in Caux, Switzerland, and the idea came to him in silence from God, ‘An African play, by Africans.’ Next morning he told the meeting about it.
Peter Howard - he had the same quality of course. What I felt about Peter Howard was that he was always fair, he was always incisive and he liked a fight.
As a family we had our moments. There was a time when Jean was in some trouble at school and one of my friends asked me, ‘Why do you think Jean is rebellious?’ and I said, ‘Well, knowing the school, I think she should be.’ But they didn’t accept that. They said, ‘Don’t you think she is rebelling against you and isn’t there something in you to rebel against?’ I am grateful for my direct friends! I realised that I always knew better and I had to apologise to her for domination. That healed the relationship.
With special thanks to Ginny Wigan for her transcription, and Lyria Normington for her editing and correction.
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