Medicine: Winners Every Time

The 85-year-old gaffer who got a pass from the geriatrics ward of Limerick City Home and Hospital last week hobbled down the street with the same fixed purpose as many another Irishman, sick or well. He was heading for the nearest bookie to bet a tanner or a bob on the Grand National. "The sixpenny bet," said an authority on Fitzwilliam Square (Dublin's Harley Street), "is a great piece of therapy. It keeps them living—to see if their horse wins." Last Saturday, as Quare Times won at Aintree (see SPORT), the Irish hospitals won straight across the board. From Killarney to Calcutta, more than 3,500,000 tickets (highest total since 1932) on the Irish Hospitals Sweepstakes had been sold at £i apiece. Half the money went for prizes and a fourth for overhead of the Hospitals Trust—still directed by ex-I.R.A. Fighter Joe McGrath, one of three sportsmen who first sponsored the sweeps. After the government took its bite for stamp duty, there was 38. gd. (52¢) left out of each ticket for the hospitals. The week's haul of $1,830,000 made a total of $110 million for the 25 years since the thrice-yearly s'weeps began. No other nation has ever achieved in this short time such a thorough revolution in its hospitals and public-health system as has Ireland.

The Shameful Weakness. When the Irish took over their country in 1922, the nation had only one hospital that was less than 80 years old. Most hospitals were forbidding-looking piles, built as poorhouses and stand-by barracks in the prime ministry of Sir Robert Peel (who also helped make other medical history—see below). Now the Irish have built or completely rebuilt 82 hospitals, extended or overhauled 95 others, and have a total of 253 with 40,000 beds—near the top of the European scale. With the help of the new hospitals (plus new drugs), deaths from tuberculosis have dropped from 124 per 100,000 in 1947 to 35 in 1954. Diphtheria deaths fell after 1942 from 267 to one.

In Galway, where the big modern buildings of the Western Regional Sanatorium face the mountains of Clare, the case of Bernadette Healy, 19, typified both a century of tuberculosis' ravages and the abrupt change of recent years. Her father, who raised potatoes on two acres, used to tell Bernadette how two neighboring families had been wiped out by the "shameful weakness" of TB. Though he complained about his own "weak chest," he stubbornly refused to see a doctor.

Five years ago the scourge began to collect its toll: within a few months the two youngest of seven children died; next the mother went, and a brother, 10. Last year the father died, and Berna dette, new head of a family, was coughing and losing weight. Then at last she saw a doctor. County officials moved fast.

X rays showed that she needed surgery: a lung was removed last summer. A brother, 16, had symptoms, but responded well to treatment. Two other children, apparently free of disease, are being closely watched, and doctors are confident that Bernadette herself will make a good recovery.