Marek Edelman - The children's ward for rheumatic fever (116/145) скачать в хорошем качестве

Marek Edelman - The children's ward for rheumatic fever (116/145)

To listen to more of Marek Edelman’s stories, go to the playlist:    • Marek Edelman - Recollecting my parents (1...   Marek Edelman (1919-2009) was the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. He had remained in Poland following the Nazi defeat and was active in domestic and international politics while at the same time becoming one of Poland’s leading cardiologists. [Listeners: Anka Grupinska, Joanna Klara Agnieszka Zuchowska, Joanna Szczesna; date recorded: 2003] TRANSCRIPT: We had a boss with initiative. One day, I was on the ward, he was passing and I said: 'Professor - there are 17 beds here and within a week, 12 people will have died.' He said: 'Well, that's medicine for you, you just have to get used to it.' At that time there were lots of cases of bacterial endocarditis. There was no penicillin, no way of treating this, and all these young people, usually men, interestingly, were dying one after the other so each week five, six people would die. That was awful, young men dying. The condition would come on suddenly with a fever and after two, three weeks or a month, they'd be gone. But Jakubowski, my boss, said, 'You're treating rheumatism here, endocarditis, rheumatic endocarditis yet it doesn't help; we need to see how the condition begins. Let's set up a children's ward.' So he opened a ward with about five beds in it for children with rheumatic fever, and all the cases on this ward were fatally ill, distended like barrels. I was put in charge of this ward. Sodium salicylate was used to treat rheumatism, it was administered intravenously. But in that condition, what could we do? We had no imagination so the more we gave the better. We administered colossal doses to those children, 12 gm sodium salicylate intravenously, which apart from being toxic could have driven them mad. But that's how it was. And these little 'barrels', well, today, one of them is the head of the post office in Łódź - she used to live at the back of the shop on a stone floor, bringing up her younger sister, although she was nine years old herself, the mother having died of rheumatism. She made it. Then another child pulled through. Of course, it was irresponsible to treat them with these doses but these children pulled through, otherwise she would have died straight away. Our boss didn't stand in our way because he could see that these lives were already lost. Perhaps this was going to work and a few of these children pulled through.