The police were not pleased I'd saved his life

The doctor who grew up in Hyndland can rewind on a stint as a kidney transplant pioneer in Iraq, his success with the Labour Party as a student activist, with nurses, and now as a writer.

Dr David, a very young seventy five year-old, once wrote the History of Medicine in Scotland. But now he’s turned his hand to a very different genre.

In Glasgow’s Café Gandolf he talks about his new book, PAPs, an acronym for the Particularly Attractive Proposals, the urban myths which rule our brains.

This A-Z of irrational ideas we rush to believe in runs from Jose Mourinho’s argument that God determines penalty shoot outs to the very existence of toxins.

It ranges from UFOs to the idea of the Noble Savage. All, he argues later, to be nonsense.

But first he tells his own story. Young David Hamilton grew up in “idyllic” Rothesay, his father a Church of Scotland minister, who was promoted to a big city church in Glasgow’s Hyndland.

Did he enjoy the move? “No,” he says, grinning. Because? “The trees were filthy,” he confesses of the smog-filled days before the Clean Air Act (1956) came in. “You climbed them and your hands were filthy and your mother gave you a row.”

What was it like growing up a son of the manse? “Difficult,” he says, the understatement clear in his voice. “You were caught between .. .” The devil and the deep blue sea? While at Glasgow University he once had a party at home, and his parents arrived back to see a barrel of beer in the living room. They were not at all pleased.”

A beer barrel? Not some orgiastic behaviour redolent of student types, all horizontally gyrating to the sound of Rosemary Clooney?

“No,” he laughs. “It was a very respectable West End society, very conservative.”

He loved the ‘golden age’ of the university Labour Club.

“There I was (in 1956), the time of Suez and Profumo decadence and me a pimply middle class boy denouncing the Government from the gallery.”

David Hamilton’s Labour life saw him chum up with the likes of John Smith and Donald Dewar, all idealists with career plans.

Indeed, he’d been a close pal with Dewar since primary school days at Glasgow Academy.

“You know, Donald failed to make it as a Prefect in school because he was deemed ‘to lack leadership potential',” he says, chuckling. “Mind, you, he did like to provoke the teachers.”

David’s career focus however was on medicine since aged 12.

“That’s when I blew myself up with fireworks and ended up in Glasgow Infirmary. My stomach was burned badly and I needed serous skin grafting. I can show you, if you like.”

A smile emerges, and he almost licks his lips in recall; “But the hospital was full of lovely young nurses and I thought ‘This is the place for me!’ It was a great healing centre, but with add-on delights.”

The world he describes as a junior doctor could have been lifted from the script pages of 1954 film Doctor In The House.

“We worked twenty-four seven yet there were less calls at night and we could often sneak out for a pint at 9pm for a couple of hours. Then it was back to living on the ward where we had a room with beds, and a coal fire.” He adds, grinning; “And the night nurses were not unpleasant, I’d have to say.”

Young Dr Hamilton liked the nurses almost as much as he enjoyed saving lives.

“I had a hundred per cent record of saving those with stab wounds to the chest,” he says, his own chest swelling with pride.

Is this because Glasgow offered so much practice? “Yes,” he says, grinning. “I saved one man who had a huge hole in his heart, stitched him up perfectly, but I heard later the police weren’t too pleased this character was back on the street.”

David married “a nurse from the Western”, Jean (no big surprise there) and the couple moved to Oxford where he studied kidney transplantation research. Then a surprise offer came his way.

“I was told of a kidney transplant unit being set up in Baghdad. Would I go? I said ‘Line me up the live donors, in threes or fours and I’ll commute once a month. And so I did all the plumbing.

“Iraq was a lovely safe place at the time. Saddam, you see, kept a lid on things, as a brutal tyrant does.

“And what was amazing was the regime was so wealthy, even the poorest Iraqis were having transplants.”

David came back to Glasgow in 1985 to work as a consultant, but continued to write books. Which brings us to PAPs, his new fun book which asks why we buy into professional wrestling, the paranormal or, closer to home, illnesses such as Cellist’s scrotum.

“It was a hoax,” he says, laughing. “The condition doesn’t exist. It’s the same with toxins. It all harks back to a time when middle class kids had their tonsils out, ‘because there was badness in the tonsils,’ which goes back to blood-letting.

“Now, high street shops sell us products to ‘remove toxins’ that just don’t exist in a health person.”

His book, a great dinner table conversation starter, flits effortlessly from Medicine to Politicians. What about Religion? Now, we’re on tricky ground here, given Hamilton’s dad had a direct link to the Almighty.

“I don’t want to offend people who seem to yearn for the existence of higher beings and heaven and hell. But religion causes so many problems. And these are faith-based things.”

You mean you can prove toxins don’t exist but not God, or the Devil? “Exactly,” he says, grinning.

His book, which took two years to compile, reveals how we can all be lured by attractive, but often ethereal ideas.

Here’s a thought however; what of quirky, brilliant doctors with an impish sense of humour who write books full of whimsical theory. Is that a PAP in itself?

“Yes!” he declares in delightful self-deprecating voice.

•PAPs is published by the Partick Press, price £6.99 on Amazon and ‘all good book shops.’