Health & History ● 16/2 ● 2014 167 Isabel Gillard, Circe’s Island: A Young Woman’s Memories of Tuberculosis Treatment in the 1950s (Glasgow, Unbound Press, 2010). ISBN 978-0-9558360-5-3 (PB). 140pp. Beautifully crafted by an author skilled in literary work, Circe’s Island is an intriguing title for a memoir about a young girl’s experience being treated for tuberculosis in the 1950s. The young Gillard, Bella Strahan is three-quarters through her second year studying literature at Edinburgh University. Results from a tuberculosis-screening program reveal that she has calcified deposits on her lungs. Bella has to be admitted for treatment, but the mildness of her condition allows her to see out the academic year. This grace period, however, is not without its complications. No longer to share a room with her sister Louise, Bella is prescribed bed rest, a high protein diet, and, in the hope of gaining an edge in the fight against the tuberculosis disease, the foot of her bed is raised 18 inches to increase blood flow to her lungs. Recounting these dramatic lifestyle changes, Gillard charms her reader with an engaging literary style. Tuberculosis infection rates in the UK had been declining in the first half of the twentieth century due to the development of a tuberculosis management system. World War II saw a drastic reversal of these promising advances. A perceived need for hospital beds for war-wounded soldiers meant that eight thousand patients with tuberculosis were vacated from sanatoria and ‘decanted into the community, where infection spread like wildfire’ (p. 128). By the time Bella Strahan was admitted to the Edinburgh sanatorium, the war had ended, household provisions were still tight, but the National Health Service had commenced and her treatment for tuberculosis was free. Her treatment occurred during a critical period in the history of tuberculosis where remedies were transitioning from the rest and fresh air method—otherwise known as the cold cure (p. 30)—through to surgical interventions, and finally to chemotherapy. During her eighteen-month stay in the Edinburgh Sanatorium, all three-treatment methods were used and thankfully chemotherapy ultimately proved successful. Success was unexpected as cure was not a certainty when Bella was first admitted. In a chilling reflection, Gillard writes: ‘of course, the real shock was the realisation that the outside world was being protected from the patients rather than the other way round. We assented of course in keeping our infection to ourselves, but it is one thing to volunteer and another to be constrained, however kindly the 168 BOOK REVIEWS constraint is applied’ (p. 56). The harshness of the cold cure and her surgeries leave the twenty-first-century reader spellbound. To an anthropologist, Bella’s crude surgical treatments seem no more scientific than any shamanic healing. Therefore when Gillard writes, ‘Doctors were revered like the Delphi Oracle and nurses were their acolytes’ (p. 85), her words appeal to the anthropological imagination. With surprising equanimity, Gillard is neither spiteful nor sycophantic towards the treatments that she received despite little or no explanation other than what more experienced patients told her. Through characters such as Dr E and The Black Douglas, Gillard demonstrates the mean personalities that the institutions of her generation tolerated. Through Grace, Amy, John, Isla Jamieson, Dr M, and Mr D, she reveals the beautiful friendships that accompanied her to recovery. She talks about the music that she enjoyed, the radio programs that she ardently followed, and the books that she plunged herself into. Passages like the sermon attacking worldly excesses to a sanatorium audience (pp. 102–3) and a personal reflection on caged domestic pets being the ‘sizzling emblem of liberty’ (p. 64) are particularly worthy of deeper contemplation. Each chapter offers a different portrait of Bella’s experiences. Her forays into life outside the sanatoria offer a delightful exegesis on her situation during treatment. In a place where hot baths, boiled eggs, and haircuts were a luxury, these interludes demonstrate the relationship of human interactions in these strict settings to the social norms of 1950s post-war Edinburgh. The title, Circe’s Island, is a reference to Odysseus’s drugged mariners who were enchanted by the sorceress Circe...