From Evelyn Lander, Perth, Western Australia
I picked up the piece by I. Glenn Cohen and Alex Pearlman on medicines that record when they have been taken (29 September 2018, p 22) at the doctor’s surgery. I was more than mildly interested in their use to ensure antibiotics for tuberculosis are taken.
In 1949, at 20, I was diagnosed with TB and rushed into the then Hampstead fever hospital. Treatment didn’t go much further than warm bed baths. My father was then a London taxi driver and took someone to an address near Wigmore Street, where private doctors were concentrated. He asked a doctor, Lee Lander, what could be done for his dying daughter. Lander said he was running an experimental treatment for TB and offered to visit me in hospital.
The next day, I heard him tell my parents of a new drug called streptomycin and ask them to sign a waiver. I was kept in an isolation room with no exercise, but constant visits by Lander and others coming to examine me.
I stayed in the hospital for three months, then went to Frimley Sanatorium. I was eventually weaned off both medicine and injections and allowed to exercise, but was still given the old treatment of crushing the phrenic nerve to paralyse my diaphragm. As you can see, I survived.
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