Archibald Joseph Cronin (19 July 1896 – 6 January 1981), known as A. J. Cronin, was a Scottish physician and novelist.[2] His best-known novel is The Citadel (1937), about a Scottish physician who serves in a Welsh mining village before achieving success in London, where he becomes disillusioned about the venality and incompetence of some doctors. Cronin knew both areas, as a medical inspector of mines and as a physician in Harley Street. The book exposed unfairness and malpractice in British medicine and helped to inspire the National Health Service.[3]
Cronin was born in Cardross, Dunbartonshire,[1]Scotland, the only child of a Presbyterian mother, Jessie Cronin (née Montgomerie), and a Catholic father, Patrick Cronin. Cronin often wrote of young men from similarly mixed backgrounds. His paternal grandparents had emigrated from County Armagh, Ireland, and become glass and china merchants in Alexandria. Owen Cronin, his grandfather, had had his surname changed from Cronogue in 1870. His maternal grandfather, Archibald Montgomerie, was a hatter who owned a shop in Dumbarton. After their marriage Cronin's parents moved to Helensburgh, where he attended Grant Street School. When he was seven years old, his father, an insurance agent and commercial traveller, died of tuberculosis. He and his mother moved to her parents' home in Dumbarton, and she soon became a public health inspector in Glasgow.
Cronin was not only a precocious student at Dumbarton Academy,[5] who won prizes in writing competitions, but an excellent athlete and association footballer. From an early age he was an avid golfer, and he enjoyed the sport throughout his life.[6] He also loved salmon fishing.
The family later moved to Yorkhill, Glasgow, where Cronin attended St Aloysius' College[5] in the Garnethill area of the city. He played football for the First XI there, an experience he included in one of his last novels, The Minstrel Boy. A family decision that he should study either to join the church or to practise medicine was settled by Cronin himself when he chose "the lesser of two evils".[7] He won a Carnegie scholarship to study medicine at the University of Glasgow in 1914. Having been absent in 1916–1917 for naval service, he graduated in 1919 with highest honours in the degree of MBChB. Later that year he visited India as ship's surgeon on a liner. Cronin went on to earn additional qualifications, including a Diploma in Public Health (1923) and Membership of the Royal College of Physicians (1924). In 1925 he gained an MD at the University of Glasgow with a dissertation entitled "The History of Aneurysm".
Medical career
During the First World War, Cronin served as a surgeonsub-lieutenant in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve before graduating from medical school. After the war he trained at hospitals that included Bellahouston Hospital and Lightburn Hospital in Glasgow and the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin. He undertook general practice at Garelochhead, a village on the River Clyde, and in Tredegar, a mining town in South Wales. In 1924 he was appointed Medical Inspector of Mines for Great Britain. His survey of medical regulations in collieries and his reports on the correlation between coal-dust inhalation and pulmonary disease were published over the next few years.[8] Cronin drew on his medical experience and research into the occupational hazards of the mining industry for his later novels – The Citadel, set in Wales, and The Stars Look Down, set in Northumberland. He subsequently moved to London, where he practised in Harley Street before opening a busy medical practice of his own in Notting Hill. Cronin was also the medical officer for the Whiteleys department store at the time and had an increasing interest in ophthalmology.
Writing career
A. J. Cronin in 1931
In 1930 Cronin was diagnosed with a chronic duodenalulcer and told to take six months' complete rest in the country on a milk diet. At Dalchenna Farm by Loch Fyne he was finally able to indulge a lifelong desire to write a novel, having previously "written nothing but prescriptions and scientific papers."[9] From Dalchenna Farm he travelled to Dumbarton to research the background of his first novel, using files from Dumbarton Library, which still has a letter from him requesting advice. He composed Hatter's Castle in the span of three months and quickly had it accepted by Gollancz, the only publisher to which he submitted it, apparently after his wife had randomly stuck a pin in a list of publishers.[7] It was an immediate success and launched Cronin's career as a prolific author. He never returned to medicine.
Many of Cronin's books were bestsellers in their day and translated into many languages. Some of his stories draw on his medical career, dramatically mixing realism, romance and social criticism. Cronin's works examine moral conflicts between the individual and society, as his idealistic heroes pursue justice for the common man. One of his early novels, The Stars Look Down (1935), chronicles transgressions in a mining community in north-east England and an ambitious miner's rise to be a Member of Parliament (MP).
A prodigiously fast writer, Cronin liked to average 5,000 words a day, meticulously planning the details of his plots in advance.[7] He was known to be tough in business dealings, although in private life he was a person whose "pawky humour... peppered his conversations," according to one of his editors, Peter Haining.[7]
Cronin also contributed stories and essays to various international publications. During the Second World War he worked for the British Ministry of Information, writing articles as well as participating in radio broadcasts to foreign countries.
Influence of The Citadel
The Citadel (1937), a tale of a doctor's struggle to balance scientific integrity with social obligations, helped to promote the establishment of the National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom by exposing the inequity and incompetence of medical practice at the time. In the novel, Cronin advocated a free public health service to defeat the wiles of doctors who "raised guinea-snatching and the bamboozling of patients to an art form."[7] Cronin and Aneurin Bevan had both worked at the Tredegar Cottage Hospital in Wales, which served as one of the bases for the NHS. The author quickly made enemies in the medical profession, and there was a concerted effort by one group of specialists to get The Citadel banned. Cronin's novel, which became the highest-selling book ever published by Gollancz, informed the public about corruption in the medical system, which eventually led to reform. Not only were the author's pioneering ideas instrumental in creating the NHS, but according to the historian Raphael Samuel, the popularity of Cronin's novels played a major role in the Labour Party's landslide victory in 1945.[10]
By contrast, one of Cronin's biographers, Alan Davies, called the book's reception mixed. A few of the more vociferous medical practitioners of the day took exception to one of its many messages: that a few well-heeled doctors in fashionable practices were unethically extracting large amounts of money from their equally well-off patients. Some pointed to a lack of balance between criticism and praise for hard-working doctors. The majority accepted it for what it was, a topical novel. The press tried to incite passions within the profession in an attempt to sell copy, while Victor Gollancz followed suit in an attempt to promote the book – both overlooking that it was a work of fiction, not a scientific piece of research, and not autobiographical.
In the United States The Citadel won the National Book Award, Favorite Fiction of 1937, voted by members of the American Booksellers Association.[11] According to a Gallup poll taken in 1939, The Citadel was voted the most interesting book readers had ever read.[12]
Religion
Some of Cronin's novels also deal with religion, which he had grown away from during his medical training and career, but with which he became reacquainted in the 1930s. At medical school, as he recounts in his autobiography, he had become an agnostic: "When I thought of God it was with a superior smile, indicative of biological scorn for such an outworn myth." During his practice in Wales, however, the deep religious faith of the people he worked among made him start to wonder whether "the compass of existence held more than my text-books had revealed, more than I had ever dreamed of. In short I lost my superiority, and this, though I was not then aware of it, is the first step towards finding God."
Cronin also came to feel, "If we consider the physical universe... we cannot escape the notion of a primary Creator.... Accept evolution with its fossils and elementary species, its scientificdoctrine of natural causes. And still you are confronted with the same mystery, primary and profound. Ex nihilo nihil, as the Latin tag of our schooldays has it: nothing can come of nothing." This was brought home to him in London, where in his spare time he had organised a working boys' club. One day he invited a distinguished zoologist to deliver a lecture to the members. The speaker, adopting "a frankly atheistic approach", described the sequence of events leading to the emergence, "though he did not say how," of the first primitive life-form from lifeless matter. When he concluded, there was polite applause. Then, "a mild and very average youngster rose nervously to his feet," and with a slight stammer asked how there came to be anything in the first place. The naïve question took everyone by surprise. The lecturer "looked annoyed, hesitated, slowly turned red. Then, before he could answer, the whole club burst into a howl of laughter. The elaborate structure of logic offered by the test-tube realist had been crumpled by one word of challenge from a simple-minded boy."[13]
Family
Cronin with family in 1938
It was at university that Cronin met his future wife, Agnes Mary Gibson (May, 1898–1981), who was also a medical student.[14] She was the daughter of Robert Gibson, a masterbaker, and Agnes Thomson Gibson (née Gilchrist) of Hamilton, Lanarkshire. The couple married on 31 August 1921. As a physician, Mary worked with her husband briefly in the dispensary while he was employed by the Tredegar Medical Aid Society. She also assisted him with his practice in London. When he became an author, she would proofread his manuscripts. Their first son, Vincent, was born in Tredegar in 1924. Their second, Patrick, was born in London in 1926, and Andrew, their youngest, in London in 1937.
With his stories being adapted for Hollywood films, Cronin and his family moved to the United States in 1939, living in Bel Air, California, Nantucket, Massachusetts, Greenwich, Connecticut, and Blue Hill, Maine.[15] In 1945, the Cronins sailed back to England aboard the RMS Queen Mary, staying briefly in Hove and then in Raheny, Ireland, before returning to the US the following year. They took up residence at the Carlyle Hotel in New York City and then in Deerfield, Massachusetts, before settling in New Canaan, Connecticut, in 1947. Cronin also travelled frequently to summer homes in Bermuda and Cap-d'Ail, France.
Although the latter part of his life was spent entirely abroad, Cronin retained great affection for the district of his childhood, writing in 1972 to a local teacher: "Although I have travelled the world over I must say in all sincerity that my heart belongs to Dumbarton.... In my study there is a beautiful 17th-century coloured print of the Rock.... I even follow with great fervour the fortunes of the Dumbarton football team."[16] Further evidence of Cronin's lifelong support of Dumbarton F.C. comes from a framed typewritten letter hanging in the foyer of the club's stadium. The letter, written in 1972 and addressed to the club's then secretary, congratulates the team on its return to the top division after a gap of 50 years. He recalls his childhood support for it, and on occasion being "lifted over" the turnstiles (a common practice in times past so that children did not have to pay).[17]
Pulp magazines were inexpensive fiction magazines that were published from 1896 until around 1955. The term "pulp" derives from the wood pulp paper on which the magazines were printed, due to their cheap nature. In contrast, magazines printed on higher-quality paper were called "glossies" or "slicks". The typical pulp magazine had 128 pages; it was 7 inches (18 cm) wide by 10 inches (25 cm) high, and 0.5 inches (1.3 cm) thick, with ragged, untrimmed edges. Pulps were the successors to the penny dreadfuls, dime novels, and short-fiction magazines of the 19th century.
The mad scientist is a stock character of a scientist who is perceived as "mad, bad and dangerous to know" or "insane" owing to a combination of unusual or unsettling personality traits and the unabashedly ambitious, taboo or hubristic nature of their experiments. As a motif in fiction, the mad scientist may be villainous or antagonistic, benign, or neutral; may be insane, eccentric, or clumsy; and often works with fictional technology or fails to recognise or value common human objections to attempting to play God. Some may have benevolent intentions, even if their actions are dangerous or questionable, which can make them accidental antagonists.
Dr Finlay is a fictional character, the hero of a series of stories by Scottish author A. J. Cronin.
Robert Brian "Robin" Cook is an American physician and novelist who writes largely about medicine and topics affecting public health.
The Scottish Renaissance was a mainly literary movement of the early to mid-20th century that can be seen as the Scottish version of modernism. It is sometimes referred to as the Scottish literary renaissance, although its influence went beyond literature into music, visual arts, and politics. The writers and artists of the Scottish Renaissance displayed a profound interest in both modern philosophy and technology, as well as incorporating folk influences, and a strong concern for the fate of Scotland's declining languages.
Tredegar is a town and community situated on the banks of the Sirhowy River in the county borough of Blaenau Gwent, in the southeast of Wales. Within the historic boundaries of Monmouthshire, it became an early centre of the Industrial Revolution in Wales. The relevant wards collectively listed the town's population as 15,103 in the UK 2011 census.
Francis Paul Wilson is an American medical doctor and author of horror, adventure, medical thrillers, science fiction, and other genres of literary fiction. His books include the Repairman Jack novels—including Ground Zero, The Tomb, and Fatal Error—the Adversary cycle—including The Keep—and a young adult series featuring the teenage Jack. Wilson has won the Prometheus Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the Inkpot Award from the San Diego ComiCon, and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers of America, among other honors. He lives in Wall, New Jersey.
The Citadel is a novel by A. J. Cronin, first published in 1937, which was groundbreaking in its treatment of the contentious subject of medical ethics. It has been credited with laying the foundation in Britain for the introduction of the NHS a decade later.
The Citadel is a 1938 British drama film based on the 1937 novel of the same name by A. J. Cronin. The film was directed by King Vidor and produced by Victor Saville for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer British at Denham Studios. It stars Robert Donat and Rosalind Russell. The film and book helped the creation of Britain's NHS in 1947.
The Stars Look Down is a 1935 novel by A. J. Cronin which chronicles various injustices in an English coal mining community. A film version was released in 1940, and television adaptations include both Italian (1971) and British (1975) versions.
Through its effect on the world's population and major artists in various fields, tuberculosis has appeared in many forms in human culture. The disease was for centuries associated with poetic and artistic qualities in its sufferers, and was known as "the romantic disease". Many artistic figures, including the poet John Keats, the composer Frédéric Chopin and the artist Edvard Munch, either had the disease or were close to others who did.
Drums of Fu Manchu (1940) is a 15-chapter Republic serial film based on the character created by Sax Rohmer. Though using the title of the ninth novel in the series, it actually is based on numerous elements from throughout the series to that point, cherry-picked by the writers. It starred Henry Brandon, William Royle and Robert Kellard. It was directed by the serial team of William Witney and John English and is often considered one of the best serial films ever made.
Shannon's Way is a 1948 novel by Scots author, A. J. Cronin. It continues the story of Robert Shannon from Cronin's previous novel, The Green Years (1944).
Hatter's Castle is a 1942 British film noir based on the 1931 novel Hatter's Castle by A. J. Cronin, which dramatizes the ruin that befalls a Scottish hatter set on recapturing his imagined lost nobility. The film was made by Paramount British Pictures and stars Robert Newton, Deborah Kerr, James Mason, and Emlyn Williams. It is believed to be the only film that depicts the Tay Bridge disaster.
The Lamp of God is a novella by Ellery Queen that was originally published in the Detective Story Magazine in 1935. Later, it was collected in the short story collection The New Adventures of Ellery Queen in 1940. Finally, it was published as a standalone book by Dell Books in 1950.
Jupiter Laughs is A. J. Cronin's 1940 play in three acts about a doctor who falls in love with a colleague—a woman doctor who plans to become a medical missionary. The play was first staged in Glasgow at the King's Theatre and starred Henry Longhurst, Catherine Lacey and James Mason. In September 1940, it opened on Broadway at the Biltmore Theatre and starred Alexander Knox and Jessica Tandy. Film adaptations include Shining Victory, with James Stephenson and Geraldine Fitzgerald, and Ich suche Dich with O.W. Fischer and Anouk Aimée.
Dr. Finlay's Casebook is a television drama series that was produced and broadcast by the BBC from 1962 until 1971. Based on A. J. Cronin's 1935 novella Country Doctor, the storylines centred on a general medical practice in the fictional Scottish town of Tannochbrae during the late 1920s. Cronin was the primary writer for the show between 1962 and 1964.
This is a bibliography of the works of Michael Moorcock.
Famous Fantastic Mysteries was an American science fiction and fantasy pulp magazine published from 1939 to 1953. The editor was Mary Gnaedinger. It was launched by the Munsey Company as a way to reprint the many science fiction and fantasy stories which had appeared over the preceding decades in Munsey magazines such as Argosy. From its first issue, dated September/October 1939, Famous Fantastic Mysteries was an immediate success. Less than a year later, a companion magazine, Fantastic Novels, was launched.
Tredegar Medical Aid Society was founded in Tredegar in South Wales. In return for contributions from its members it provided health care free at the point of use. This society contributed the model which established the British National Health Service. According to Colin Ward, the model had "evolved from the vast network of friendly societies and mutual aid organisations that had sprung up through working class self-help in the 19th century."
References
1 2 Before 16 May 1975 Cardross was in Dunbartonshire
↑ "AJ Cronin". University of Glasgow. Retrieved 15 January 2023.
1 2 "Booksellers Give Prize to 'Citadel': Cronin's Work About Doctors Their Favorite–'Mme. Curie' Gets Non-Fiction Award TWO OTHERS WIN HONORS Fadiman Is 'Not Interested' in What Pulitzer Committee Thinks of Selections", The New York Times, 2 March 1938, page 14. ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851–2007).
↑ Gallup Jr., Alec M. (2009). The Gallup Poll Cumulative Index: Public Opinion, 1935–1997, p. 135, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. ISBN0842025871.
↑ A. J. Cronin, Adventures in Two Worlds, Chapter 40 ("Why I Believe in God," in The Road to Damascus. Volume IV: Roads to Rome, edited by John O'Brien. London: Pinnacle Books, 1955, pp. 11–18).
↑ Cronin, A. J. (9 October 1937). "The Citadel". Australian Women's Weekly: 8–11, 47–49. Retrieved 15 January 2023. The Australian Women's Weekly is proud to present the novel to its readers as a serial. You must not miss a line of it.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
