Making Friends and Learning to Live with the Strict but Caring Regime at Draycott Hospital in the 1950s

Summary

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In 1951, teenager Sylvia Carman (later to become Sylvia Townley) found herself sent to Draycott Isolation Hospital, near Derby, to be treated for TB. Here, Sylvia, left, now 74, of Duffield, left, recalls, in vivid detail, the strict regime, the people she met - nurses, doctors and patients - and the wonderful feeling when she was finally given the all-clear and dashed off to marry her Royal Navy fiance, Alan, before he was posted abroad.

I Was a patient in Ward 3 at Draycott Hospital in 1951. We had two rooms with four beds in each, with a small kitchen and a bathroom separating them. There was a long veranda running the length of the building.

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Making Friends and Learning to Live with the Strict but Caring Regime at Draycott Hospital in the 1950s

We were on food rations, yet the meat on our plates each day was as much as one person had in a week "outside" and we had to eat it all up. The idea was to put on weight. We used to save up our chocolate rations and the scoff the lot just before we got weighed each week, in the vain hope to secure those extra pounds.

We also had to down some revolting medicine called ...

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