One baby when studying medicine 50 years ago (Letters, 9 February)? That’s nothing. In 1947 St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School took in female students for the first time. My mother, Ann Dally, was one of the three women admitted. By the time she qualified in 1953, she had two children. She found work in a non-teaching hospital, where the hours were less demanding than in a teaching hospital. The consultant physician there was sympathetic to working mothers, but still said: “If the baby gets measles, you can’t have any time off.”
Emma Dally
London
• Re music in restaurants (Letters, 6 February), a possible strategy is one I tried in a Sheffield hotel at breakfast time – the loud dance music was so unbearable that I told the waiter that if he didn’t turn it down or off, I’d show him my dance moves. He went off, almost at a sprint, and turned it off.
Mary Gameson (aged 66¾)
Norwich
