Poor Things

by Alasdair Gray

He then asked Bella if she wished to be a general practitioner or to help particular kinds of people. She said she wanted to help little girls, mothers and prostitutes. He said this was a good idea because at present almost all who worked with these people had different sexual organs from their patients. Bella said she was determined to teach all the women who came to her the most modern and effective contraceptive methods. Baxter and I advised her to keep this intention secret until she was able to practise it. What she then told her patients in the privacy of a consultingroom would be unlikely to cause a public scandal. If she wished to argue publicly for birth control she would do so most effectively after working as a fully qualified clinician for at least five years. She only agreed with us when we admitted that the length of the waiting-period must be her choice and no one else’s.