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Review: Comment: When love flourished in M for medical textbooks: Two weeks ago, Rachel Cooke sparked a nationwide debate by standing up for libraries under threat of closure by penny-pinching bureaucrats. Now, we publish a personal account of how libraries have the power to change lives for the better

Ibbotson, Eva

2006

Overview

We came to London in 1934, a bedraggled party consisting of my fey, poetic mother, my irascible grandmother and confused aunt, and rented rooms in a dilapidated house in Belsize Park which, in those days, was a seedy, run-down part of the city. The house was full of suddenly impoverished refugees facing exile. On every floor were lonely and muddled professors, doctors and lawyers, mostly from German-speaking countries. I had no friends, no school yet, nowhere to play. Dr [Herr Doktor Heller] came very early in the morning and did not leave until the library closed. He came with a pile of medical books - The Diseases of the Knee , The Malfunctions of the Lymphatic system .The books were in English because this eminent specialist, who had been head of the department of obstetrics in Berlin's most famous maternity hospital, was not allowed to practise medicine in Great Britain without resitting every one of his medical exams in English. The morning after my daughter's birth, there was a certain stirring in the ward, an air of expectation. The nurses stood up straighter, checked the bedclothes, patted the patients into tidiness. Matron rose from the chair behind her desk. And the procession entered. It was the specialist, the Great Man himself, come to do his morning round. No one will believe me when I describe what went on in those days when the specialist came into the ward. Spotless in his white coat, he was flanked by his registrar, his houseman and at least two students eager for his every word.

• Publisher: Guardian News & Media Limited