Fresh Air and Streptomycin
In the 1940s, whooping cough in a child was one thing; miliary tuberculosis was another. It was incurable and it was usually fatal. From the little cottage in rural Herefordshire that she called home, the author was taken, at just five and a half years old, to isolation in Hereford County Hospital, after being diagnosed with TB. She was given only months to live. After a brief stay in a freezing ward at Nieuport House near Kington (a `hellhole`, as the author recalls it), the hand of hope was extended. A child`s death in Bristol Children`s Hospital meant there was a vacant bed for Rosemary under a US-funded scheme offering expensive streptomycin treatment. Would it cure her? In those dark post-war days before the NHS, drugs like...
