Front Page | News | Sports | Features | Voice Mail | Odds N' Sods

Features | Getting To Know | On The Green | Nature Watch | Wee Voice | Recipes
Financial AdVoice | Nan's Views | Tech News | Book Reviews | Inquisition | Poetry
Kelly's Music | Local Music | The Hoodie's Voice — NEW!

• Share Options
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 

Keith and Maureen Robertson

Getting to Know this week meets herbal medicine specialists Keith and Maureen Robertson.

Written by Alison Prince
Friday, 7 March 2008

1 view   0 comments


The room on the south side of the Robertsons’ house looks out across Pladda to the open sea. Sometimes it faces such gales that the double-glazed doors burst open – and yet, on this chilly February day, it is full of cosy heat rising from the warm floor. How is this done? Through ground source heating pipes. Outside is the pattern of trenches where the pipes lie below, a metre deep. Grass is already growing over them. ‘And the solar panels are charging at 70 degrees,’ Keith says, ‘even though there’s hardly any sun. After the initial investment costs, solar heating costs us nothing.’

Keith and Maureen, who set up and still run the Scottish School of Herbal Medicine in Glasgow, are enlightened, essentially practical people. Keith comes of a renowned medical family on Arran; his grandfather was Dr Buchanan, known locally as ‘the old doctor’. Buchanan and his wife, an aristocratic young woman who chose to train as a nurse rather than be presented at Court, had been medical missionaries in Peru in the 1920s, and the photographs in the well-preserved family album are wonderfully evocative. The communal farm and field hospital they founded became the University of Inca, but the good doctor himself came back to Arran with his young family, and was appointed head of the Arran hospital.

Keith thus inherits a well-established medical tradition – but on starting medical studies at Glasgow University, he realised that the narrow basis on which Western medicine is founded was too mechanistic for him. He left after a year and faced, as he admits, ‘a big hole.’ With straight A-grades at Higher, he was ‘an educated Jock’, over-qualified for any menial job. He contemplated music as a career, having inherited natural talent from his father, and travelled and played for a while, then in 1978 came back to Uni to study psychology. Again, the mechanistic approach appalled him, with its readiness to implant electrodes in cats’ heads in the hope of learning something about humans, so he took time out to become an organic gardener on Arran. He also worked in the Shetland oil industry for a while, to get some money together, and it was there that he came across the autobiography of a herbalist called Messeque.

The book proved to be a turning point. In 1986 Keith enrolled at the School of Medical Herbalism in Tunbridge, on a 4-year course that led to a degree and to his enrolment as a member of the National Institute of Medical Herbalists. He was practising in Glasgow at the time he met his future wife, Maureen, who was working for a Master’s degree in plant chemistry and pharmacology at Strathclyde University researching blood clotting, and had found plant extracts that were more effective than the standard drugs. As part of her previous degree, she had taken a student placement with a drug company and saw for herself the cruel use of animals in research that she perceived as having no real bearing on human physiology. ‘That shaped my enquiring mind,’ she says wryly. However, she pursued her course to the end, so as to be able to speak with authority on anti-vivisection. Maureen had already enrolled on a correspondence course at the same herbal school as Keith had trained, so the pair of them were working completely in parallel.

With immense energy and determination, they set up the School of Herbal Medicine now in Govan, and from the start, it filled a need that had never been supplied. It is still a resounding success, with about 60 students on its 4-year degree course and another 20-30 studying massage and aromatherapy. There are four resident tutors plus an impressive list of visiting lecturers – students typically will meet at least 70 advisors during their 4 years there. ‘People think herbalism is a “fluffy” kind of discipline,’ Keith reflects, ‘but in fact herbal treatment is as far-reaching and rigorous as conventional medicine. Confronted with a case of terminal cancer, there is no room for fluffiness.’

Home baby

Keith and Maureen still have consulting and teaching space in the Govan institution, but they are firmly settled within Arran’s community, with their three sons Kieran, Lyle and Eden attending Kilmory school. Keith and Maureen were still living in Glasgow when the first two babies were born, both of them at home, but Eden, now 20 months old, was Arran’s first home birth for decades. ‘The midwives were so thrilled,’ Maureen remembers. ‘And they were just great. It was such a good experience.’ Since then, several women on the island have opted for home birth rather than be subjected to the high-tech intervention that is so often a routine assumption in hospital deliveries.

The Robertsons are involved in the Arran Justice, Peace and Environment group, and Keith has recently taken over the chair of Roots of Arran, and has planted 10,000 trees of native species since he has been here. He goes back to Goethe, the great German writer, for his main source of wisdom, for the author of ‘Faust’ was also a natural scientist whose radical thinking inspired later pioneers such as Rudolf Steiner.

The Robertsons’ house and the 8 acres of land surrounding it demonstrate the clarity of their thinking. Species-rich grassland reaches up to the area where the underground heat-exchange pipes lie, and beyond that are planted willows and hazel, rowan and alder, with a boundary hedge of hawthorn and guelder rose. Closer to the house and poly-tunnel are the vegetable and herb gardens that supply a high proportion of the family’s food. Keith, a vegan, is adamant that many health problems stem from eating processed foods, over-stuffed with additives and animal proteins, and contends that ‘livestock’s long shadow’ prevents the world from using the available land more efficiently to produce an abundance of vegetable food. He is decisive, too, on the question of what makes people well and happy. ‘The most important indicator of longevity is a loving relationship,’ he says. ‘It doesn’t have to involve a sexual partner – it can be a loving relationship with friends in the community. It can even be with a dog or a cat. The main thing is to avoid negative impulses that are a waste of time. There’s no point in fighting things that you can’t do anything about.’

Contact with such inspired common sense leaves the enquirer feeling warm and contented for quite a long time afterwards, even with a chill wind and a smirr of rain blowing in from the sea – which, as Keith points out, goes all the way from Arran to the Antarctic. There’s a lot to be said for seeing the whole picture.

To add your own comments, you must be a registered member of The Arran Voice.
LOG-IN or Register FREE!