Election Communication

Christian Peoples Alliance Party

respects the individual PERSON

use your vote on Thursday

             3 May 2018

                  Vote for Ray Towey

Christian values work

www.cpaparty.net

raytowey1992@gmail.com

Published and promoted by: Ray Towey 11 Ruskin Court 4 Champion Hill London SE5 8AH         Printed by: Solopress 9 Stock Road Southend-on-Sea  SS2 5QF

I have worked in the past as both a junior and senior medical doctor in the NHS at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital for 15 years. In recent years I have worked as a doctor doing volunteer humanitarian work in Tanzania and Uganda. My national and international experience has given me a profound respect for our National Health Service and all who work in the health and social care sectors. The current politicians of all major parties have failed us. The unjust and immoral national austerity has divided society and put a severe strain on how to integrate both hospital care and our social care. Local government is now faced with making difficult choices. The Christian Peoples Alliance will put the sick and the poor the top priority and make those difficult decisions wisely.

The housing market in London is broken. Social housing is being sold off, the young cannot get mortgages and the so-called affordable housing isn’t affordable. The numbers of rough sleepers in London and throughout the UK rises year by year. This is a growing scandal to any civilised society let alone one of the richest cities in the world. The Council should work with local charities to prioritise help for rough sleepers.

In the cold weather the broken road drains cause pools of water resulting in dangerous ice rinks on our pavements. From personal experience in Champion Hill I know this is a dangerous hazard. I would put pedestrian safety a high priority.

Dorothy Day and Abortion

I feel that, as in the time of the Desert Fathers, the young are fleeing the cities-wandering over the face of the land, living after a fashion in voluntary poverty and manual labor, seeming to be inactive in the “peace movement.” I know they are still a part of it-just as Cesar Chavez and the Farm Workers’ Movement is also part of it, committed to non-violence, even while they resist, fighting for their lives and their families’ lives. (They, together with the blacks, feel and have stated this, that birth control and abortion are genocide.)

I agree with them and say-make room for children, don’t do away with them. Up and down and on both sides of the Hudson River religious orders own thousands of acres of land , cultivated, landscaped, but not growing food for the hungry or founding villages for the families or schools for the children.

Dorothy Day    Open Letter to Fr.Dan Berrigan    On Pilgrimage 1972

 It’s not often mentioned and perhaps not widely known that before her conversion Dorothy Day had an abortion. In her novel The Eleventh Virgin she describes her character having an abortion and then being deserted by her partner afterwards. This was indeed Dorothy Day’s own personal experience when 22 years old. She doubted that she would ever get pregnant again and she refers to this fear in her book, The Long Loneliness. Pelvic sepsis following this illegal and possibly unsterile procedure was not unusual and the consequent Fallopian tube obstruction could result in sterility. She rarely wrote about abortion but was profoundly remorseful of her lifestyle before her conversion. In the Long Loneliness she describes how very blessed she felt when in 1925 she realised that she had become pregnant with her partner Forster Batterham. One can only surmise how her faith journey was influenced by the remorse of her earlier abortion and her bliss at becoming pregnant again.

This time this new life would be welcomed and baptised into the Catholic Church even if she was to lose the man she deeply loved.

Many might say what right have I have to even raise the issue of abortion in this paper because I am a man. We are all touched by human life but as a medical doctor and specialist anaesthetist I was particularly involved as I was asked to anaesthetise for abortions several times and refused.

I always noticed who was Catholic in the anaesthetic department by seeing who were claiming their legal right under the 1967 Abortion Act to be conscientious objectors. One colleague even said that he wished that he was Catholic so that he could refuse despite the fact that the legal right to refuse also applies to any person on simply conscience grounds. In my personal experience I don’t recall any other person refusing who wasn’t a Catholic. I should always be grateful to Cardinal Heenan who obtained that legal concession in 1967. 

When I hear the many criticisms of the institutional Church I thank God how its intervention in 1967 protected my mind and soul.

There are probably two reasons why I could never have been a specialist in obstetrics and gynaecology. The first is that I don’t think I could have suffered well the severe sleep deprivation and secondly of how to negotiate the 1967 Abortion Act. As a young doctor with no friends in high places the last thing I needed was being a “troublesome” junior doctor with inconvenient scruples.

There are two Lenten witnesses I do when possible in London. The first is the one that the Catholic Worker reader would find not unusual. This is the marking of the Ministry of Defence building as a sign of Christian opposition to nuclear war preparations. The second is praying at an abortion clinic which this year was in Ealing London at the Marie Stopes clinic. I encourage the reader to experience both. Both require a commitment to non-violence. I was pleased to be asked to not only sign an online promise of non-violence both verbal and physical before the witness at the abortion clinic but also asked to sign a hard copy when I arrived. The antiabortionists pray the Rosary and I saw no intimidation of the patients going into the clinic. Their focus on the Rosary meant that there was little eye contact with the pro-abortion demonstrators which removed any spirit of judgement and antagonism and their prayer was combined with practical support for those women who decide to change their decision.

Would Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin have approved of my witness for peace at the Ministry of Defence? Would they have approved my witness for life at the abortion clinic? Would they see the connection between the two at a time when over 180,000 abortions are carried out in UK each year and when Parliament voted against a ban on sex selective abortion in 2015?  Can you make a call to choose life in one issue and ignore the other? The first century Bethlehem massacre of the innocents was then a gender discrimination against the male child whereas the global gender select abortion is now a discrimination against the female child.

A topic perhaps for a round-table discussion and clarification of thought?

Ray Towey

raytowey@btinternet.com

The End of the Dying Tents in the First World War

Dr. Bruce Robertson, the Toronto doctor who brought blood transfusion to the Western Front in World War 1 transforming triage and resuscitation, a centenary to celebrate.

 

July 2016 is the centenary of the Battle of The Somme where from 1 July to 18 November 1916 over 1 million men were killed or wounded in a senseless slaughter and hopeless attempt to break the deadlock of trench warfare at the end of which the front line stayed virtually the same. However there is another centenary which Toronto should recall with more hope at this time. On 8 July 1916 just a week into the Battle of the Somme Captain Dr.Bruce Robertson, a Canadian volunteer doctor from Toronto, had his paper published in the British Medical Journal entitled, The Transfusion of Whole Blood, A suggestion for its more frequent employment in war surgery [1]. This was to mark a pivotal change in the Royal Army Medical Corps, RAMC, protocol of the British Army for how casualties were to be resuscitated on the Western Front. Blood transfusion was now to be encouraged.

In 1914 at the beginning of the WW1 blood transfusion was not included in the RAMC protocol of a casualty with shock. A casualty then suffering from shock was thought to be suffering from an over stimulation of the brain and that the best treatment was morphine to reduce the effect of the stimulation, warm tea, warming of the patient with hot water bottles, blankets and perhaps a small volume of intravenous saline. The Casualty Clearing Stations situated about 6 miles behind the Front were the closest medical facilities where surgery could be undertaken safely from the shelling and the protocol initiated. However if the blood pressure remained low any form of surgery was known to be poorly tolerated and the casualty was likely to be transferred to the Moribund Ward, also known as the Dying Tents, where they would most likely expire quietly with compassionate but useless treatments. From our vantage of hindsight it is not surprising that giving anaesthesia to a casualty with severe anaemia or haemorrhagic shock would be poorly tolerated if not lethal. This would apply to spinal anaesthesia or general anaesthesia using chloroform or ether at a time when oxygen cylinders were not common on the Western Front. The casualties were therefore assigned to non-surgical conservative management and transferred to the dying tents where they quietly died.

However Dr.Bruce Robertson had an experience and an insight that was to drive him to challenge the RAMC early protocol and to work tirelessly to convert his British medical colleagues to use blood as a resuscitating agent. His previous experience set him in a unique position to be the pioneer at the early stages of WW1.

He qualified in medicine from Toronto Medical School in 1909 and interned in surgery at Toronto Hospital for Sick Children. He then moved to the Bellevue Hospital in New York where he trained in paediatric and orthopaedic surgery and then later at the Children’s Hospital Boston. He returned to Toronto Hospital for Sick Children in 1913. During his time in the United States he saw at first hand the pioneering work of the small group of American doctors who were revisiting the value of blood transfusion which Europe had then abandoned. This was the fortuitous experience that made him the ideal clinician to make the changes needed when he was to see scores of war casualties suffering from haemorrhagic shock and severe anaemia on the Western Front in 1915. New York and Boston at the beginning of the twentieth century were the medical centres leading the research into blood transfusion practice with Edward Lindeman at Bellevue and Richard Lewisohn and Lester Unger at Mount Sinai. Bruce Robertson was duly inspired and on his return to Toronto Hospital for Sick Children is reputed to have been the first clinician to give a blood transfusion in that hospital.

When war was declared in August 1914 Dr.Bruce Robertson, then a surgeon at the Toronto Hospital for Sick Children and a single man, was among the first Canadians to volunteer to join the Canadian Army Medical Corps and after some administrative delays he was to find himself embedded into the RAMC on the Western Front and dealing with the horrors of the war casualties in base hospitals and Casualty Clearing Stations in 1915. It was here he was to struggle tirelessly often on a case by case basis to demonstrate his faith in blood resuscitation to a sceptical if not hostile military medical establishment. His preferred choice of transfusion technique was always to use 20 ml glass syringes internally coated with sterile paraffin wax to delay clotting and aspirate from the donor and then simply inject into the patient through peripheral intravenous lines. During his time in France it is recorded that he had numerous episodes of sickness for what was described then as “flu”. In retrospect it is possible that his personal medical history of frequent breakdowns could be interpreted as a stress response not only to the military trauma he was dealing with but also to the burden of knowledge that he carried of how this serious haemorrhagic shock and severe anaemia mortality could be easily prevented. It is a testament to his dedication, personality, and powers of persuasion that by 1916 he had won over many senior members of the medical military establishment and with assistance from his superiors he was able to publish his seminal paper in July 1916 in the British Medical Journal just one week after the start of the Battle of the Somme. It was difficult when working in Casualty Clearing Stations and base hospitals to collect follow up data on his patients as they were quickly referred down the line or back to England to make space for new casualties and his unique method of data collection was to give his patients addressed envelopes for them to post back to him details of their clinical progress. His poor health finally resulted in him being invalided back to Canada in February 1918.

The USA entered the war in April 1917 and when their medical teams arrived in France they consolidated the practice of blood transfusion which by that time had been accepted by the RAMC. It was the Canadians and especially Bruce Robertson who had made the initial pioneering breakthrough in Europe during WW1 beginning the transformation of the dying tents to resuscitation wards which was to lead to the global acceptance of the value of blood transfusion. Sadly Bruce Robinson died at the age of 37 from the Toronto flu epidemic in 1923 leaving a widow and 2 young children. In St.Andrew’s Church Simcoe Street Toronto there is a commemorative plaque to his memory which gives him the due credit for bringing blood transfusion to the British army and thereby to the world.

 For decades after WW1 his rightful pioneering place in the history of blood transfusion was much neglected as his personal testimony was absent because of his untimely death but the more recent scholarly historical research by Kim Pelis [2] has given him the credit which he justly deserves and given us this historical publication centenary all in Toronto and beyond can celebrate with gratitude.

Raymond Towey

 

 

References

1.  Robertson L.Bruce. The Transfusion of Whole Blood: A suggestion for its more frequent employment in war surgery. Br Med J 1916; 2: 38-40

2.  Pelis K. Taking Credit: The Canadian Army Medical Corps and the British conversion to blood transfusion in WW1. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 2001; 56,3: 238-277