Skip to main content

Denis Thorpe's best photograph: a brave boy's vaccination

‘His stoic expression took me back to my own childhood when I had diphtheria. It made me weep’

I was five when diphtheria visited us in Mansfield. I remember lying on a sofa sweating as a doctor swabbed the back of my throat, my parents’ anxious faces looking down at me. There had been thousands of deaths from the disease – this was before a vaccination, before the NHS.

I was taken to the local isolation hospital. My parents had no phone: a friend of theirs would cycle up to the hospital gates and read the daily bulletin board, which gave the condition of patients. Eventually, my parents were allowed to come into the hospital grounds and I was taken to a window on the second-floor ward to wave to them. I was lucky and recovered, and was able to come home just before my sixth birthday. Years later, I came across the letter my parents were sent by the hospital when I was discharged: “The child should sleep in a room not occupied by other children … the towels, cups, spoons, forks used by the patient should be kept separate and distinct from those used by other members of the family for a week at least and then boiled before use by anyone else … they should not visit other houses or entertain friends for two weeks following discharge … they should not attend any school for a period of two weeks.”

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3gdVObZ
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars

Beauty, strength and bags of energy: BBC Four’s Men at the Barre documentary gets up close and personal with the Royal Ballet dancers on the rise ‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top. I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...
Post a Comment
Read more