What We Put In Prison. And In Preventive And Rescue Homes.

London: Williams and Norgate, 1932 . Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. 159 pages, errata leaf. Neat inscription on front blank endpaper. 19 x 13 cm. A very good copy in a very good dust jacket, which is slightly darkened on the spine and edges. Neat inscription on front endpaper. Grace Pailthorpe belonged to a generation of women who achieved much but have been forgotten, or little recognised, for their achievements. With the coming of the twenty first century her remarkable life is being re-discovered and re-evaluated. In her long career she, as a woman, was a pioneer in the worlds of medicine and surgery, especially in a military setting in the first World War. Following on from these experiences Pailthorpe made notable contributions and pioneered major breakthroughs in the worlds of psychology, criminology and art. Pailthorpe was born in Surrey, England, the daughter of a seamstress and a stockbroker Grace was the only daughter of ten children and her parents were committed members of the Plymouth Brethren, a situation which led to what Grace described as an atmosphere of the 'strictest puritanism' at home. After an initial start at the Royal College of Music, in 1908 Grace decided to study at the London School of Medicine. When she qualified in 1914 she was one of only four women out of a class of 66 graduates. She tried to volunteer for war service but was rejected, because of her sex, at every hospital unit she tried to join. ' Leaving the War Office, sadly, once more with the brutal way in which one's sex was utilized by the ruling sex to domineer I made my way to every hospital unit that I heard about asking to be allowed to join up. One after the other told me either that they weren't taking women or, in the case of women's hospitals that they already had a long list and they would add my name' At the end of 1914 she sat her final exam in medicine and surgery but failed the oral section of surgery. She and other students petitioned to re-sit exams earlier than usual because of the increased need for doctors during the war. She qualified as a doctor and surgeon in December 1914, aged 31. In January 1915 Grace Pailthorpe was working as a volunteer surgeon with the French Red Cross in the Bromley-Martin Hospital Unit which had been established 60 miles behind the front line. She worked alongside an eclectic volunteer staff which included writers John Masefield and Laurence Binyon, artists Wilfred de Glehn and Henry Tonks, pianist Madeline Bromley-Martin and opera singer Susan Strong. In France Grace Pailthorpe, who was fluent in French, encountered her first cases of shell shock and would also have come across the new subject of psychoanalysis, in which the French were world leaders. Grace may also have started experimenting with art therapy while working alongside the artists at the Bromley-Martin Hospital, and when she established the Amiens Club in October 1917, for soldiers on their way to and from the front, it is likely she adopted this therapy. The second half of 1916 saw Pailthorpe working as a surgeon in the Scottish Women's Hospital at Salonika, with 200 beds under canvas. This service was followed by work in Malta and Italy before being posted to the Paris Military Hospital in 1917. In Malta it is likely she met Englishman David Eder, who was working at a hospital there as head of a neuro-psychological department. He was an early promoter of the theories of Sigmund Freud and possibly the first practicing psychoanalyst in London. In 1916 he published his paper 'The Psychology of War Neurosis', linking Freudian ideas to shell shock. He expanded these ideas the following year in his book 'War Shock' He became a member of what became known as the Integral Group, the most famous member being William Rivers, who at Craiglockhart, near Edinburgh, treated both Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. After the war Pailthorpe traveled to Australia where she worked, from 1919 to 1921, as a general practitioner, in Western Australia and New Zealand, arriving back in London in Feb 1922.