A Matter of Minds

As a student nurse in one of the great mental hospitals in the UK, Mary Fairbairn was trained to provide meticulous and compassionate nursing care. This training, necessarily tough to weed out those who might harm the patients, served her well as she later worked on the observation ward of a general hospital in Guildford during The Blitz, at a home for Downs Syndrome men, and as a private nurse to wealthy and eccentric aristocrats in the south of England. Always spirited and adventurous, she emigrated to Canada in her mid-forties and worked in that nation's most progressive institutions in Saskatchewan and British Columbia. She was on the wards when psychotropic drugs began to offer some hope that patients might be treated in their communities. Her account is honest and amusing and her compassion shines through on every page. She also shows that mental hospitals were not the snake pits of popular imagination, but were small cities where there was laughter and humanity.