Britain’s oldest surviving operating theatre has been restored and opened
to the public, together with a museum of 19th-century surgical accessories
and a herb garret for the use of hospital apothecaries. The theatre, with
its tiers of seats for ghoulish spectators, is situated above a church,
and was once part of Guy’s and old St Thomas’s hospitals.

The blurb about the theatre extols its ‘atmospheric and romantic surroundings’.
This could depend a little on your taste, but the theatre does give a fascinating
insight into the medical practices of the first half of the last century.
The idea of creating a sterile environment for surgery was unknown before
the time of Joseph Lister, so the wooden operating table on which the patients
lay (or were held down) was seldom washed, and neither was anything else
in the room. There was, however, a jug of water and a wash basin on a stand.
These were for the surgeon to wash the blood off his hands after the operation,
rather than to clean them before.

Blood was quite a problem for the Victorian surgeon, in fact. A bucket
of sawdust was placed under the operating table to catch the blood as the
operation progressed, the surgeon kicking it every now and then to the place
where most of the drips were falling. And the floor, too, was covered in
sawdust, with an extra layer being added after complaints about blood seeping
through the floor and dropping onto the congregation in the church below.

In the 1860s, the Lister revolution meant that steps were at last taken
to sterilise the theatre and reduce the number of infections contracted
during surgery. In particular, the air around the operating table was regularly
sprayed with carbolic. This move must have been welcomed by patients, since
it greatly increased their chances of surviving an operation. It was less
popular with surgeons, though, since it gave them carboluria, a condition
which meant that their urine turned black.

The Old Operating Theatre, Museum and Herb Garret is at 9A St Thomas’s
Street, London SE1.

Donaldson first shook up theories about the human mind in 1978 with
her book Children’s Minds. In it she successfully challenged many of the
ideas of Jean Piaget, the French psychologist whose view of how intellectual
abilities develop during childhood dominated the field.

Fourteen years later, Donaldson is doing it again, with a new book,
Human Minds. In it, Donaldson lays out a framework within which she believes
the development of the emotions can be charted in the same way as the development
of the intellect. And she takes the provocative view that emotions can –
and should – be nurtured in the same way as intellectual capabilities.

Donaldson’s original intention with the book had been simply to do more
of the work for which she is renowned – analysing the cognitive development
of the mind from infancy onwards. ‘But,’ she says, ‘there was the very important
question of what was happening to the emotional side of life while all this
cognitive development was going on.’

Her attempt to understand how emotions develop led her into entirely
new territory. ‘I didn’t think that I would end up looking at mysticism
and Buddhism and the history of the Middle Ages and things like that,’
she says.

It was not the first time that Donaldson had followed her instincts.
After studying French and German at Edinburgh University from 1943, she
decided that she preferred psychology. But her knowlege of French led her
to Geneva and to Piaget’s famous institute.

She was fascinated by what she found – but Piaget himself remained an
awe-inspiring figure. ‘He was very much the boss and they all called him
‘le patron’.’ However, this did not stop the still inexperienced Donaldson
from returning to Edinburgh and beginning research – much of it in a nursery
she set up in the university’s psychology department – which was to lead
to crucial modifications of le patron’s theories.

Piaget believed that young children are unable to see things from anyone
else’s point of view, and are therefore unable to reason properly. He saw
the process of development as ‘decentring’ – becoming able to adopt viewpoints
other than one’s own.

Donaldson, however, showed that if the children were asked questions
in terms they understood, they were able to see other points of view at
a much younger age than Piaget had believed.

This led Donaldson to her theory of the ’embeddedness’ of children’s
thought. Children, she said, can perform complex mental tasks – including,
most importantly, learning language – but only when those tasks are embedded
in a recognisable context. They learn words, for example, when words are
accompanied by gestures, familiar faces, favourite toys. Initially, children’s
thinking is entirely dependent on such contexts. It is only quite late on
that thought becomes ‘freed’ to the point where abstract, impersonal reasoning
becomes possible.

Donaldson has devoted the past decade to finding out exactly when and
how children make the key steps forward in ‘freeing’ their minds.

In her new book, she identifies four stages in this process, which she
calls modes. In the ‘point mode’, a child’s thinking is completely concerned
with the ‘here and now’. Then, at about the age of eight months, the child
starts to develop the ‘line mode’, becoming aware of events that happened
in the past or that might happen in the future. At around 18 months, in
the ‘construct mode’, concern shifts from specific, personal experience
to how things are or could be ‘anywhere and any time’.

In these three ‘core’ modes, Donaldson sees thought and emotion as bound
up with each other. But in a second stage of the construct mode, (the ‘intellectual
construct mode’), there can be objective, emotion-free thought about events
and structures. Scientific theorising fits this mode. In the fourth mode,
the ‘intellectual transcendent mode’, purely logical, abstract thought becomes
possible. The best example of this mode, she says, is mathematics.

As ever, her ideas are presented in Human Minds with masses of supporting
data from the Edinburgh nursery and from other researchers. For example,
a four-year-old boy called Ram is questioned about numbers. Ram is perfectly
well aware that if you have three bricks and you add another brick, you
then have four bricks.

Q: How many is three and one more?

Ram: One more what?

Q: Just one more, you know.

Ram (disgruntled): I don’t know.

Ram can add bricks but he cannot add pure numbers. He is not yet able
to operate in the intellectual transcendent mode.

So far the argument is still on familiar psychological ground. It is
in the second half of the book, however, that Donaldson asks herself that
‘very important question’: do the emotions develop in parallel with the
intellect?

She takes as her starting point the fact that many people report intense
emotional responses to works of art or to nature and, further, that many
also report having powerful ‘spiritual’ experiences. These kinds of experiences
interest her because, like the thinking of the advanced intellectual modes,
they seem relatively free of entanglement in ‘narrow personal goals’.

But such experiences are rarely the subject of scientific scrutiny.
So to study them, she is forced to look at how they have been perceived
in the past and how the world’s great religions, especially Buddhism, evaluate
and attempt to cultivate them.

She concludes that there are indeed advanced modes of development for
the emotions. Since these emotions are deeply significant for the people
who experience them, she calls them ‘value-sensing’. She identifies a ‘value-sensing
construct mode’, which is the realm of the arts and of religious myth and
ritual, and mirrors the intellectual construct mode with its scientific
thought. And then there is a ‘value-sensing transcendent mode’ which is
the realm of spiritual experience, and mirrors the intellectual transcendent
mode with its mathematics.

She describes these modes as ‘advanced in the developmental sense, in
that you can’t get them in the early stages of living. They are also perhaps
advanced in another sense, in that they have to be cultivated more than
the early ones. There may be flashes of either emotional or intellectual
insight, but to cultivate them you have to be systematic and disciplined
and you rely more heavily on teaching.’

Her ideal is to be able to move from one mode to another at will. We
may choose to think logically about a problem, for example, when that is
useful to us. In the same way, it can be useful to have transcendent emotional
experiences. ‘They put our personal goals into some sort of perspective.
By being more aware of our emotions and valuing them more, we might live
more happily and society might work better.’

She concludes by speculating on the possibility of a ‘dual enlightenment’
in which intellect and emotion are equally valued. If that happens, ‘we
may come to feel less embarrassed about and suspicious of transcendent emotion,
seeing it as no more ‘weird’ than the capacity for mathematical thought’.
Each of these, she says, is ‘a normal, though generally ill-developed, power
of the human mind’.

MARY WARNOCK sets out in her contribution to the Counterblast series
from Chatto to defend British universities against what she sees as a fundamental
attack on their independence and integrity by a ‘hostile’ government. Her
subject is the future of higher education in this country. But given the
importance of such a subject, the pamphlet is in the end a curiously down-beat
affair. The reason for this is that the position she argues is in essence
a plea for a return to past values rather than a demand for new ones. Insofar
as she acknowledges that the universities need to change, her ideas on how
they should change are are worthy, but fail to provoke. So the initiative
remains with the government she wishes to discredit.

She is at her best when she is on the attack. Much of the pamphlet is
taken up with a withering dismissal of the government’s obsession with the
financing of higher education, as opposed to a consideration of its content.
In particular, she powerfullyrejects the notion that universities should
be subservient tothe needs of the market.

As she sees it, government policy is that the higher education system
should, as far as possible, be funded by nongovernment sources such as student
fees and industrial sponsorship. Mary Warnock shows that a dependence on
such sources, far from increasing academic independence, will greatly limit
it.

Observing that we should stop thinking that the sciences are ‘useful’
and the humanities aren’t, she argues that in both cases dependence on funding
from industry, in particular, will inevitably push study in the direction
of the application of knowledge rather than the development of knowledge
itself.

The last section of the pamphlet is taken up with an attempt to define
exactly how a university education is ‘useful’, even if it isn’t immediately
applicable. This section restates the oldliberal view that such education
is essentially about the critical, imaginative ‘cast of mind’ – which, she
says, is a necessary component of democracy.

Many might agree with Warnock, but it is here that I felt the lack of
new ideas. There is also an uncomfortable implication, in her use of words
like ‘respect’ and ‘authority’, that academics occupy a specialposition
that is at one remove from the rest of society, and that is, or should be,
immune from criticism and change.

It is worth remembering that the universities are not theonly recipients
of the market-philosophy of Thatcherism. Countless other institutions have
been subjected to the same philosophy. Like these other institutions, the
universities must reply with a convincing argument for a contemporary social
and cultural relevance that goes beyond their relevance to the market. Mary
Warnock only hints at providing this.

John Hoyland is a freelance writer and editor. He is editing a book
on men’s relationships with their fathers.