Wednesday 27 March 2013

Fact, fiction and interpretation

Accuracy has been bugging me a lot with respect to the telling of Isabella's story. How can I link the facts together to tell the story without allowing error to creep in? But sticking solely to the 'facts' results in a turgid list, losing the essence of whatever story there is.



Katherine Angel expressed the dilemma beautifully in an article in Aeon magazine:

I want to understand the past — the past of others, and of myself: what has shaped us, why we feel and think and do the things we do. But I don’t want to fossilise it, to preserve it in aspic. I don’t want to tell a solid, stolid story. And the reason I don’t want to do that is because it’s a way of killing the past, immobilising it: pinning its arms down, and saying, ‘I understand you now. Don’t move. Don’t you dare elude me again.’


But I do want to understand, and to tell a story even if that story is never closed, never complete, never conclusive. The writing of history — whether that of past epochs, people, events, or that of ourselves — has been profoundly challenged in recent decades. Access to the past is woefully indirect and unreliable, goes the argument. The evidence we have is incomplete and our own investments — theoretical, political, personal — shape what we find in it.

That excavatory urge vies in me with something else: a feeling that there is something absurd and impossible about attempting to know — definitively, once and for all, truthfully — about the past, any past, even if that search must always be pursued. There is no control experiment; we have nothing against which to test our speculations. All we have is our own life, our own singularity. And in both realms — in things outside ourselves, and in things within — all we have are hypotheses, some good, and some less so. Which is, I think, perfectly fine.

Simultaneously, I came across two instances of 'facts' which were less than 100% accurate. 

My first find was on a website documenting the CVs of the women who went out to Malta with the army in 1916. Isabella is listed, as she should be.  Stenhouse Isabella

I was excited to discover that she had been awarded the Wellcome Medal, (gold medal), in the History of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh graduation ceremony. I knew she had won one prize. Had she won two?

A spot of internet research and careful sifting through the hundreds of files on my computer told me what had happened. The published list of prize winners was not tabulated, it ran straight from one line to the next. Did the name of the prize come first, or the name of the graduate who had won it? The website creator had read the list one way, and given Isabella a prize for History of Medicine. I read the list the other way, and awarded her the Dorothy Gilfillan Prize for most distinguished woman medical student. Thankfully for my confidence in my research, a second source corroborated my reading of the list rather than the website's interpretation, but for posterity, the information on the website will be regarded as true, and Isabella has won a new prize with no effort, but been deprived of her true trophy.

My second discovery concerned an error from a century ago. A letter described her as 'Sister Isobel Stenhouse' instead of 'Dr. Isabella Stenhouse'. The context of the letter confirmed other things I knew about her, and the name error seemed like a mistake that anyone could make when meeting face to face. The writer would have met her socially in France, but simply hearing her name didn't tell him how it was spelt. He would have sensed that she had greater authority than the other women, so concluded that she was a senior nurse, not imagining she could be a doctor. The sort of mistake that happens every day.

Those ideas combine to release me into attempting to convey Isabella's story vividly, seeking its essence without losing its truth. Has accuracy several meanings?

Now what about that picture at the top? How do you interpret that? 





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