You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
8th May 1969.
Dear Dr. Conran,
You will have had a preliminary note from me soon after March 19th when you wrote me. In this note I said no more than that I valued being used, and survived what you called a flood unleased. Often since then I have thought of trying to make a further comment on your letter, or at any rate trying to learn something from what you have written in it. It seems that until today I have not really properly absorbed the contents of your letter. It would be fun if we could easily meet and talk these things over, but I think that for both of us this is truly difficult to arrange. We could, however, try. As for myself, I have at present the perfect excuse—someone has stolen my car!
Let me first make a comment on the third paragraph of your first page, if you still have a carbon of it to which you can refer. I tend to agree with your description of the child taking medicine completely innocent of pharmacology and only knowing about the mother's attitude. In some way or other medicine must be nasty. When I was seeing a vast number of mothers and small children I discovered that a lot of what we did to make medicine nice was wasted effort and seemed to the child to be part of a grand deception. We had one very good way of getting round this and that was to invent a food, such as Parrishes Food, which could be joined up with Cod Liver Oil & Malt. This now became a panacea, not only being good for slum children brought up in the dark, but also accepted as a food that you get at hospital. It did not, however, alter the general principle that medicine is nasty. I would go so far as to say that we had a category of patient, rather