A Scottish Public Health Officer's Early-Life Anecdotes

A Scottish Public Health Officer's Early-Life Anecdotes is the fragile volume at the centre of Poor Things’ struggle over who controls a story and what can count as proof. Presented as a work by Archibald McCandless and later contradicted by Victoria McCandless, it reaches the reader through a chain of accidental recovery, editorial intervention, archival research, and loss. Its material scarcity gives the competing accounts an uneasy force: the book is treated as evidence, yet its history cannot be cleanly separated from the people who preserve, alter, and interpret it.

Recovery and Physical Form

The volume first emerges from a heap of old box files abandoned on a city-centre pavement for destruction. Michael Donnelly finds the papers while passing by and, after a law firm refuses permission to take them, pockets a small item before learning that removing the papers could be treated as robbery. That item is a sealed packet marked for the attention of Victoria McCandless’s eldest grandchild or surviving descendant after August 1974. Someone has crossed out the instruction and written that there are no surviving descendants. The broken seal, torn paper, and carelessly replaced contents suggest that an earlier finder opened the packet but did not recognize the importance its book and letter would later acquire.

Donnelly examines the packet during a tea break in the People's Palace store. Inside is a compact volume measuring 7¼ by 4½ inches, bound in black cloth and stamped with a grotesque ornament. Its flyleaf bears a sentimental verse; its title page identifies it as Episodes from the Early Life of a Scottish Public Health Officer, by Archibald McCandless, with etchings by William Strang. It was published in Glasgow in 1909 by Robert MacLehose & Company, printers to the University. The title and the period’s fashion for privately financed memoirs initially make it seem an unlikely literary discovery, rather than an important historical record.

The object’s survival depends on decisions made long after its publication. Donnelly keeps the book when he leaves the People's Palace in 1990, expecting it to mean nothing to whoever takes his place. He lends it to the editor, who agrees to arrange publication on the condition that McCandless’s actual text remain unchanged. But the production process does not preserve the unique first edition: between editor, publisher, typesetter, and photographer, the original volume is mislaid. The editor says a photocopy would have added at least £300 to production costs and explains that the physical book was needed to make photographic plates of the etchings and facsimiles of Bella Baxter’s letter. The lost object is therefore both the source for the published reproduction and a casualty of producing it.

Author, Editor, and Competing Accounts

The book presents itself as the record of Archibald McCandless, a medical man who describes his early struggles and dedicates the account to his wife. Its final pages make that dedication uneasy: he says he dares not show Victoria the record because it contains things that she and medical science are not yet prepared to believe. He anticipates that future scientific progress will establish the factual basis of his story. The book ends not by resolving his claims, but by directing attention toward a later discovery that might vindicate them.

The editor explicitly changes the work’s framing. He replaces its long chapter headings with shorter titles and insists on renaming the whole book Poor Things. He also places Victoria’s letter after the main text as an epilogue, rather than using it as an introduction. Donnelly prefers the letter first, but the editor argues that readers would then approach McCandless’s narrative already prejudiced against it. Read afterward, the letter can be considered as the account of a woman seeking to conceal the truth about her origins. The ordering is not neutral: it controls when the reader encounters Victoria’s challenge and makes the act of editing part of the book’s dispute over credibility.

The editor and Donnelly disagree about what they have found. Donnelly reads the book as blackly humorous fiction threaded with real experiences and historical details; the editor regards it as a loving portrait of an eccentric, good man, comparable in kind to a biographical record. Their argument turns on opposite claims to expertise: the editor says that enough experience of fiction allows him to recognize history, while Donnelly’s experience of history allows him to recognize fiction. The editor responds by becoming a historian and researching archives at Glasgow University, the Mitchell Library, the Scottish National Library, Register House in Edinburgh, Somerset House in London, and the National Newspaper Archive of the British Library at Colindale. He says the material he collected proves the McCandless story to be a tissue of facts, while acknowledging that Donnelly would have found the case stronger with official certificates and newspaper copies.

What the Volume Claims and Contains

The narrative’s medical and social arguments are among the details that give the volume the character of more than a private memoir. McCandless records Baxter’s condemnation of public hospitals as institutions where doctors practise on the poor while wealthy patients seek private treatment. Baxter presents his father, Sir Colin Baxter, as a surgeon who sterilized instruments and his operating theatre when hospital boards still dismissed aseptic practice as fraudulent. He also recalls the opposition faced by Semmelweis, whose antiseptic methods reduced the death rate in a Viennese maternity hospital from 12 to 1¼ per cent; the accompanying note says that his superiors rejected his conclusions and that he later died in a mental hospital of septicaemia. These claims connect the book’s imagined or contested private histories to arguments about medical authority, hospital practice, and whose suffering is taken seriously.

Baxter’s account also challenges the hierarchy of medical education. He argues that nurses are the truest practitioners of the healing art and proposes that doctors and surgeons should begin their training in nursing or manual work. When Bella says she wants to help little girls, mothers, and prostitutes, Baxter supports the intention and discusses her future training: she should first work in a charity ward, then as a theatre nurse, before entering medical college. He and McCandless advise her to keep her intention to teach contraception private until she is qualified and able to judge when to speak publicly. The volume thus links professional training to practical experience and places women’s access to medicine alongside the social constraints on their work.

Its dramatic claims are also subjected to medical scrutiny within the narrative. Baxter tells the assembled company that specialists in mental and nervous illness examined Bella during a world tour. Their terminology differs, but the reports, as he describes them, agree that she is sane, strong, and cheerful, with an independent attitude to life. Her amnesia, he says, follows injury to her skull and the loss of an unborn child; apart from that, her powers of balance, sensation, memory, intuition, and reasoning are exceptionally keen. The episode makes medical diagnosis an argument over interpretation: the same woman can be described through competing professional frameworks, while the narrative insists that the reports do not support the diagnosis of madness.

Victoria’s Epilogue and the Unsettled Archive

Victoria’s letter radically revises the book’s apparent authority. Addressing a future descendant, she says that by 1974 her three sons will be dead or senile and that she cannot laugh at McCandless’s account. She has burned every scrap of the original manuscript and would have burned the printed volume too, but regards it as nearly the only evidence that he existed. She says McCandless paid a small fortune for the book—enough, in her comparison, to feed, clothe, and educate twelve orphans for a year—and that the illustrations must have doubled the printing costs. The volume is therefore at once a cherished production, an unwanted witness, and the remnant of a manuscript its subject deliberately destroyed.

Victoria also disputes McCandless’s portrait of their marriage and career. She says she married him because he was convenient and grew to like and rely on him over time. Against the grandeur of his title, she states that he worked as a Glasgow municipal health officer for exactly eleven months, then resigned when he became chairman of the Glasgow Civic Improvement Trust; their investments, rather than his brilliance, secured the position. She remembers his devotion to their children and describes his later illness: the finished volume gave him pleasure for weeks, he slept with it under his pillow, and as he weakened he wanted the pressure of her hand on his brow. Her testimony complicates the portrait without simply erasing his attachment to the book or her own care for him.

The epilogue leaves the reader with incompatible forms of evidence rather than a final verdict. The book’s introduction invokes archival records and dates; Victoria presents a private recollection and a history of destruction; Donnelly and the editor disagree over whether the result is fiction or history; and the sole surviving volume is itself lost during publication. Even a footnote about the garden at 18 Park Circus becomes a small dispute over what material traces can prove: Donnelly argues that the space was only a drying-yard, while the editor suggests that the coach-house may have been built later. The book’s defining significance lies in this unstable custody of truth. Its claims pass through hands that preserve, revise, contest, and sometimes destroy them, leaving the reader to weigh not only the story but also the imperfect objects and accounts through which it survives.