Two women who walked lonely road of the fanatic

by MARY CRAIG Christabel Pankhurst said in Shoulder to Shoulder: "It's not a question of human relationships — it's a question of politics." That's the sort of statement which announces the fanatic who, in pursuit of the Idea, is preparing to walk roughshod over People. Politics in this context means ruthless pursuit of the ends by any means that are likely to succeed. It also means that he that is not with us is against us.
The road taken by the fanatic is a lonely one, and only the toughest can succeed in walking it. Florence Nightingale and Christabel Pankhurst would have made admirable travelling companions; they would have understood each other.
Southern TV's Miss Nightingale spared us the lady with the lamp mythismus, and made it quite apparent that if Miss Nightingale had been alive today she'd have been the leader of the militant nurses before whom Barbara Castle would have quailed.
The approach to the play was a bit tortuous — a redbrick student doing a thesis on Florence solicits professional advice from a historian and a psychologist. The student was a solemn bore and involved us in even more flashbackery than we'd necessarily have been subjected to.
Indeed. the confusion of flashbacks. repetition of earlier dialogue, and flashback-withinflashback demanded considerable concentration and at times threatened to capsize us. But Janet Suzman as Florence was superb.
She managed to convey all the splendours and miseries of this redoubtable woman, her neurotic and domineering selfishness as well as the singleminded vision that placed her "halfway between God and his creatures." When she refused to treat the dying men in the Scutari hospital until the doctors asked her to, she was announcing her choice of politics over compassion. She was opting for the long term rather than the short.
If she was to reform the medical system she needed the doctors on her side, as later she was to need the politicians. Both were expendable, the Cause Was not. Perhaps history proved her right; but I'm glad I didn't cross her path. Florence Nightingale succumbed to nervous disease, Ignaz Semmelweis went out of
his mind. Discovery, fundamental change, advances in knowledge can only he made at the cost of human sacrifice. The greatest steps forward are made stumblingly and in pain.
Microbes and Men (BBC 2) is a new six-part series of dramatised documentaries, telling how medicine was transformed from hit-and-miss quackery into a modern science — and the story of the men behind the transformation. Up to the mid-1840s medicine hadn't changed since the days of the ancient Greeks. Then in the space of a mere 60 years it grew up.
At the centre of the revolution were a handful of men, and of that handful probably only one is widely known today, Louis Pasteur. The first programme in the series, The Invisible Enemy, told the story of a lesser-known pioneer, lgnaz Semmelweis (played by Robert Lang). There was a tragic irony in his story.
Distressed to find that in his maternity wing of the great Vienna General Hospital, one mother in three was dying of puerperal fever, he set himself to isolate the reason. He discovered that students dissecting corpses in "the dead house were infecting the uterus of women in the lying-in ward.
The irony was that in his eagerness to discover the cause of the disease, he himself was spending long hours in the dead house, and thus, ultimately, he was the greatest culprit of all. The knowledge unhinged him, hut not before he had dis covered the principle of antisepsis.
He never got the credit, though, because he never thought it necessary to seek scientific proof for his theories. It was Joseph Lister who introduced antiseptic procedures to a grateful world.
When new insights and understandings have been assimilated and seem part of the natural order of things, it is always difficult to understand why they were not alwa;s obvious. The possibilities were always there, awaiting man's growth in consciousness to discover them. Perhaps one day in the enlightened future we'll feel similarly surprised that we took so long finding out how to deal with our outcasts.
Granada's World In Action film, The Special Unit may well have played a part in speeding up a change of consciousness in that direction. This sensational film showed five convicted murderers in Barlinnie Prison, Glasgow.
All five had records of violence against officers in traditional prisons, but here in Barlinnie there has been no violence. The prison is run as a democracy in which prisoners and officers combine to run their lives. They work together, exercise together, spar together. Discussion is free, grievances are brought into the open and are not allowed to fester.
The whole experiment is an extremely far-sighted and intelligent attempt to tackle the roots rather than the shoots of violence, to discover an atmosphere in which violence can be defused. And it works.
"They treat you like human beings, so you act like a human being," said one of the convicted murderers. "It's really harder here because you've got more responsibility. It's the first time in my life I've ever had that sense. I feel really responsible to the people here."
Barlinnie is a start, and doubtless there will be those who cry out against it. Going soft on murderers'? Haven't %se yet learned that violence begets violence begets violence? Repression is still violence under the cloak of legality.
What sort of penal system do we want? Watch Ronnie Barker's new series (script by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais). It's very funny, but look behind the laughs — it's saying something quite serious as well. Laughter's a great defuser, but we should sometimes be prepared for the tail to sting us.