The George Marshall Medical Museum holds two main oral history collections: Medicine in Worcester and Powick Hospital. There are also a number of individual recordings of eminent individuals, like Miss Ballinger, the President of the Worcester Royal Infirmary Nurses' League. There are digital copies of all of the recordings, some of which were transcribed into document form when the projects began. Currently, volunteers have started to help staff by transcribing the remaining oral histories, for which staff are extremely grateful; completing just one transcription takes a great deal of time and patience.
Please enjoy the following audio clips. More will follow!
“TRANSCRIPT: Penicillin came in while I was still, it wasn’t, you know came in during the war, to start with we didn’t have any, and then it erm, it came in and could only be used for service personnel and then ultimately became available, of course, for all others. But the pre-Penicillin days were a bit hairy. One interesting thing that you may have heard of only as rumour but is, in fact, quite true. Maggots. I can still see those filthy wounds, absolutely infested with maggots, cleaning up over-night almost, and healing beautifully. One blue bottle could do as much as the Penicillin did; quite amazing! I don’t think we actually ever introduced them deliberately, but there were so many bluebottles that they just did it automatically!”
“The main labs were at Castle Street, not at Ronkswood as they are now, and they, they were built just like sort of chemistry labs with wooden benches and wooden flooring and wooden cupboards and all the rest of it, and very little instrumentation, and a typical day would be you’d come into the lab, put your white coat on, grab a wooden box full of syringes and needles and bottles and go off onto the wards and start bleeding the patients on the wards, because without any blood samples you couldn’t do anything. So you spent a couple of hours going round the wards visiting the patients, bringing all the specimens back and then you’d process them and do the tests on them. All our reports were handwritten, you had to maintain your apparatus and do all your own washing up and cleaning of test tubes and this sort of thing and you had ovens and driers and the rest of it, and one part of, one of my jobs, later on was to sharpen all the hypodermic syringe, needles, on a grinding wheel, it was a terrible job but er I used to do them for the whole county it used to take me hours!””
For more clips, visit the George Marshall Medical Museum's Audioboom site: https://audioboom.com/gmmedicalmuseum or contact us to read transcripts or listen to whole files for research purposes.