conversations about medicine and life

Boracic snuff, camphor bags and masks

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Pamela Wood

Red Cross volunteers during the Spanish flu epidemic, USA, 1918.

How do you protect yourself against a pandemic virus? The current debate about the efficacy of wearing face masks in public as protection against Covid-19 echoes the difference of opinion during the ‘Spanish flu’ pandemic a century ago. And while we all now pay attention to handwashing and social distancing, in 1918 people followed government advice to breathe deeply in public inhalation chambers filled with a zinc sulphate mist or where a machine sprayed it directly into their mouth. Responsibility for their own health meant they also shared their own preventive measures for warding off influenza.

To mask or not to mask? According to the 1919 commission of inquiry which considered the best ways to deal with any future pandemic, there was complete agreement that doctors, nurses and other attendants in close contact with influenza patients should wear masks. This was probably prompted by the shock that in less than eight weeks, three quarters of hospital nurses had contracted the disease from pandemic patients. The question was whether citizens should wear masks in public.

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Friends in high places

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Margaret Austin     

Something most of us get told early on in life is that the really influential, important people in the world are ones like politicians, policemen, professors, preachers, pontificators – the ones who make a lot of noise, a lot of money, a big impact and get the most publicity. They’re the ones who affect us most, evidently, make a difference to us, govern us, tell us what to do, keep us in order, advise us, even get us jobs … that sort of thing. But my experience tells me something different. My experience tells me that the most significant and influential people in one’s life are not the ones mentioned above, but quite different ones. I call them friends in high places. As a matter of fact, I often found them in very low places!

On my OE during the ’70s and ’80s of last century, new to Amsterdam, I got a job (illegal) as a breakfast waitress in a seedy little hotel on one of the canals. On my first day, shouted at by an irascible Dutch boss, hassled by diners, and struggling with unfamiliar tasks, I was anxiously awaiting the arrival of the dishwasher, who was apparently always late. In walked a personage who was to effectively change the course of my life. He was a black American of extraordinary grace whose way of dealing with the dishes clearly demonstrated that he was no more a dishwasher than I was a waitress. When I eventually plucked up the courage to ask him what his day job was, I learned that he was a dancer.

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Beat

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A. W. 

According to Wikipedia, a beat is the moment in a scene at which increasing dramatic tension produces a noticeable change in the consciousness of one or more characters. An event, a decision, a pivot.

Beat.

Someone suggested Big Little Lies as a good lockdown watch. I remembered to breathe and then remembered turning the page to the first tellings of domestic abuse in that book when I read it years ago. It made me shake and cry. I didn’t see it coming. I’d bought in completely to the perfect smiling family, because it must be so, because look at the pictures on their wall.

Beat.

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These are the Hands: Poems from the Heart of the NHS

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Emma Storr

The publication of this new anthology of poems by UK National Health Service (NHS) staff could not have come at a more apposite time. The coronavirus pandemic has made we who live in the UK acutely aware of the vital role of our free health service. Appreciation of the hard work and dedication of its workforce is paramount and sales of the anthology have rocketed.  I am privileged to have had two of my poems included so this review cannot be totally unbiased and objective.

These are the Hands is the brainchild of Dr Katie Amiel, GP and the Emergency Poet Deborah Alma, well known for touring the UK in her converted ambulance and prescribing poetry for support and enjoyment. You might wonder if we need yet another anthology that deals with the everyday drama of illness, recovery or death. But this collection is different and refreshing because it gives voice to ‘unseen and unsung’ people in the NHS such as cleaners, library and managerial staff as well as healthcare students and clinicians. It allows those providing nursing and medical care to show us their own vulnerability. The poems are in a variety of forms and voices, often unpredictable but easily accessible and engaging. The Foreword to These are the Hands is by Michael Rosen, well-known writer, broadcaster and poet, whose own poem, written for the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the NHS, gives the anthology its title. He describes the contributors as revealing  ‘the hidden places of their minds in these intimate moments’ of clinical and workplace encounters. The final poem is by poet Lemn Sissay titled “Making a Difference”, a performance piece that should be read in a loud voice from every hospital balcony, GP surgery or Care Home doorstep.  It is celebratory, life-affirming and splendid, as you might expect from this skilled, outspoken poet.

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“Tooth and Veil”

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Barbara Brookes

A 1953 film advertising a ‘Friendly Career’ promised young New Zealand women ‘dignity and satisfaction’ in becoming dental nurses. Noel O’Hare’s Tooth and Veil: The life and times of the New Zealand dental nurse (Massey University Press, 2020) gives a rather different view. From 1921, when training began, reams of rules, military discipline and rigid inspections governed the lives of the young women who enrolled. In this, their experience was probably not so different from general nurses training at the time. Once the dental nurses completed their training, however, they stood a good chance of being sent to live in a remote area with substandard accommodation and little support.

In lively prose and with an eye for telling details from oral history, O’Hare romps through the rise and fall of the once lauded New Zealand dental nurse service. O’Hare acknowledges his debt to Susan Moffat’s thorough PhD thesis. Unlike her work, his aim is less to understand the rise and fall of the service than to give voice to many of the women who polished copper sterilisers, cleaned waste tanks, and cut perfect sets of teeth from soap while in training. After two years at the training school, dental nurses were thrown on their own resources in single-nurse clinics scattered from the far north to the deep south. In small places like Otautau in Southland, adults might call looking for ‘dentures to be mended, gold inlays to be replaced’ and extractions, seeing the new dental nurse as a source of free treatment. Parents of school children might resent a nurse who felt compelled to wash a child before attending to their teeth. One parent scribbled the nurse a note of advice: ‘My boy ain’t no rose, drill him, don’t smell him.’ The anecdotes from the nurses themselves, and the images, are the highlight of this attractively-produced book.

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