Fresh Air and Streptomycin

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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 streptomycin were still at the test stage. They carried side effects. They didn't always work. Rosemary Brown's story is one of hope and faith in her parents, who visited her with some difficulty throughout her twenty-two-month stay in hospital. Was her cure achieved because of or in spite of the care she was given? This revealing account, packed with homely details of life in those far-off times, tells us the answer.