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Babies just used to die
By Kirsten Mann
 ROSE MINTO still wonders if her two sisters and a brother who died as children might have been saved if her parents could have afforded a doctor.
Before the NHS, when people had to pay for medical treatment, families were sometimes faced with harsh decisions.
Born in Leith in 1920, Rose McIntyre, as she was then, was just five when she ended up in Edinburgh’s City Hospital suffering from diphtheria.
“The doctor was called for me, so I must have been really ill,” says Rose, who now lives in South
Queensferry.
“Doctors were 3s 6d a call at a time when wages were only £1 a week.
“My mother had four who survived so you had to be close to irredeemable before you were taken to hospital. Thankfully, somehow or other they managed to bring me back from the brink.
Killer
“When I was young it was common for babies to die at birth. Children died of scarlet fever, diphtheria or TB and pneumonia was also a great killer.
“I’m certain that wouldn’t have been the case had there been a national health service.”
Rose was just 13 when she was taken out of school to care for her mother, who had cancer.
Despite the difficult times, she fondly recalls the family GP.
“Dr Butler attended my mother well and hardly took any money. It was the Depression and towards the end of my mother’s life we didn’t have much money as my father had lost his job as a lorry driver.
“Back then, doctors worked night and day. They did it through devotion and for honour’s sake.
“He was a wonderful man, poor Dr Butler. He cared for the Leith people and didn’t always get paid for it but the job took its toll on him. We loved him and would run to greet him as he came down the street.”
When Rose’s mother’s condition deteriorated she was found a bed in Leith Hospital.
“It was a wonderful place — even viewing it by today’s standards. It was paid for by the merchants and people of Leith and was beautifully run by a matron called Maggie Smith.
“My mother was given lots of painkillers though that didn’t help in the end, so she had lumps cut off until there was nothing left to cut.”
Lost
Rose was 15 when her mother finally lost her battle.
It was 1950, two years after the NHS began, when Rose had her first experience of the service.
“My oldest son Archie was born with mild cerebral palsy in 1950. I had him at Simpson’s maternity hospital under the NHS. He also had a retracted leg which staff at the Princess Margaret Rose Hospital managed to correct.”
While her second child, Bill, was also born at the Simpson Memorial Maternity Pavilion, Rose chose a home birth for her only daughter Elizabeth, who is now a nurse.
“In my mother’s day most children were born at home and the Queen’s Nurses attended,” she recalls.
Set up to care for the poor, these were district nurses and community midwives trained and funded by what is now the Queen’s Nursing Institute Scotland.
And after 60 years of living with the NHS Rose has nothing but praise for the care of staff at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary when her gall bladder was removed in March.
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