A few years ago, I ended up in hospital for a couple of weeks after suffering from severe pain on the right hand side of my abdomen. At first my GP thought that the pain in my side might be gallstones (unusual for one of my age, sex and health); at hospital they first thought it might be a digestive problem; the initial ultrasound scan seemed to indicate a massive tumor on my liver; finally a CT scan showed that it was, in fact, a balloon-like swelling up of my adrenal glad because of internal bleeding.
Only through the use of a doughnut-shaped radiation emitter were the doctors able to work out what was going on. They could then treat the problem, which in the end involved a series of blood transfusions. CT scanners are basically highly complex, computerized x-ray machines, which take thousands of photographs in order to resolve as complete an image of the inside of a person’s body as they can. A powerful computer is needed to make sense of the images that the scanner produced.
Hospitals around the developed world now all have CT scanners. They are a necessary part of the modern diagnostic arsenal, along with the still more technically complex MRI machines, which jostle around the water molecules in bodies in order to create a three-dimensional picture of our innards. They are indispensable to treating cancer, the disease of the developed world. But at one time, such machines were extraordinarily expensive, and not widespread. In this window of time, when technical progress exceeded the ability of most hospitals to pay for it, the promise of a cure from a CT scanner was all the more alluring for its exoticness and cost.
Pat Seed was a journalist who lived near Manchester. In the late 1970s she was diagnosed with a form of cancer that was difficult to treat, and also to diagnose, without the new technology that had just emerged in the US. She thus threw herself into a major national fundraising campaign to buy a CT scanner for her local hospital. This proved more expensive than expected, because the hospital needed to build a new wing to house the machine. In an era when the British economy seemed to be stuck down a coal mine shaft, she raised the decidedly non-trivial sum of around a million pounds through her efforts, which included two books that mixed autobiography with a kind of inspirational Christian writing that sells well in its moment, but ages poorly.
To raise money for the scanner, she marshaled a large organization that used many different means to raise money. Television appearances and newspaper editorials furthered the cause. When she traveled down to London to receive from the Queen her MBE for service to the community a random stranger gave her a five-pound note, which she dutifully sent in to her organization the next day. She herself died not long after the machine was installed in her hospital, leaving behind what seems to have been a loving and constructive husband and family.
Today, Seed’s books linger in the databases of online booksellers for less than a dollar. Her fame, facilitated in part by coverage on television in an age when Britain only had a handful of channels, has disappeared. Today, one cause would find it difficult to get this kind of profile without endorsement by very famous celebrities. Even those are like so many biblical sparrows. What’s more, now the technology that seemed so remote, and that stimulated such an urgent, desperate and ultimately successful burst of fundraising, is now common. Such is the nature of health technology, but for some reason – perhaps because I went back and read her poorly-written but earnest memoirs – I find it deeply sad.
Source: Pat Seed, Another Day (London: Heinemann, 1983)