[Q] Was meningitis something that you, you found yourself working with because it was just so much a, a feature of, of a fever physician's life or... did you find a...
It, it wasn't so hugely common. One of the chap who came to work with me from Thailand, he did a study of about 10 years of meningitis, and I think it was about just under 300 patients. It wasn't... maybe like 30 a year, it wasn't... and some of them were viruses, so it wasn't so incredibly, but I did find it very taxing and you were always so terribly worried about the risk of neurological damage and...
[Q] Yes, and the speed with which people can go off.
Speed, speed. Oh, terrifying, terrifying. Meningococcal septicaemia kills people faster than haemorrhagic smallpox.
[Q] Yes, yes.
Unbelievable.
[Q] I remember running with you down the corridor.
Do you, really?
[Q] My first case, case of...
Really?
[Q] I remember thinking this is very interesting. I don't think I'd run with a physician before except to a cardiac arrest.
Really? I don't remember that. How extraordinary.
[Q] But we... but we needed to run because the patient was beginning to get sicker in front of our eyes.
Yeah, we... felt ourselves extremely lucky to have got somebody round then. Now it's all intensive care stuff, complicated management. When I realised the circulatory side was a bit... getting too hard for me, I used to call in... long before intensive care units, which Tony Dornhorst said in his sardonic way, 'We're more intensive than careful', a... chap called Brian Robinson, I don't know if you remember him. He was a card-carrying cardiologist, but more interested, too, circulatory issues, and I used to ring him up at home. He would come in and we'd work together with this patient, trying to, I haven't got figures, anyway, you were jolly lucky to get away with it. That's the septicaemic end. Meningitis, pneumococcal meningitis was the great dreadful one. If a person had meningitis, but not septicaemia from meningococcal you really felt you should be able to get away with it.
