Episode 1 A Picture of Health

In this world of transplants, microsurgery and life-saving medicines,

it's too easy to take for granted the amazing things our doctors do for us.

We forget just how far we've come in our lifetime.

So I'm going to take us on a journey to remind us how things used to be.

I'm Larry Lamb. Welcome to A Picture Of Health.

Coming up, the changing role of a father-to-be...

One hospital had a white line on the floor

across which the fathers did not pass.

..how one woman changed medicine forever...

She was an amazing woman. She was not going to take no for an answer.

..the iconic advert that saved thousands of lives...

..and Larry's special guest in the Picture Of Health surgery today

is broadcaster Angela Rippon who will be reliving her own medical memories.

-It was very well done.

-It was graphic, but it made the point.

-Yeah.

But we start with the extraordinary story of a disease

that killed many people and left others disabled for life.

The mere mention of the word polio

brought fear to families across Britain.

And whilst a vaccine was developed,

its effects still linger on today.

'Over these families hangs a new threat -

'the menace of polio.

'An explosive epidemic, in the words of the city's medical officer.'

-'They too should fall victim to the scourge.'

-'Sudden attack of that most dreaded disease, polio.'

I contracted polio at the age of 15 months old.

They said my parents had to accept the fact

that I would spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair,

I would never walk and, more or less, don't bother coming back

because there was nothing they could do.

Bryan Rowley is 77 years old, and his passion is sailing.

Every week at Ferry Meadows in Peterborough,

Bryan and his Challenger take to the water.

It's something that takes him away from painful childhood memories

The sense of freedom,

the sense of being totally in control of everything.

And it's entirely up to me whether I succeed, whether I fail.

These feelings are far removed from Bryan's early life experiences.

A childhood plagued by a devastating disease.

'Over the children of Britain,

'as early summer draws near, a cloud gathers.

'Poliomyelitis may reach epidemic proportions.'

'Great scourge which has yet to be conquered, but which is...'

Bryan is one of the thousands of children to have contracted polio

or infantile paralysis as it came to be known.

'To this cruel disease medical science still has no complete answer.

'It is heart-rending that children should suffer.'

Polio has caused paralysis and death for much of human history.

But it was in the 1940s and '50s that cases reached an all-time high.

'An explosive epidemic, in the words of the city's medical officer.'

'Parents have taken matters into their own hands

'and banned their children from bathing here, lest they too should fall victim to the scourge.'

Up to 8,000 cases a year were being recorded.

Hospitals and doctors were pushed to their limits.

Sadly, it was children like Bryan who suffered the effects of this strain.

Nobody really understood the disease

so treatment varied across the country

according to which ideas a particular consultant had.

And children weren't told anything.

Various hospital procedures -

you weren't allowed to cry or you got told off.

Polio is an infectious viral disease

that destroys the body's motor neurones

causing muscle weakness and sometimes paralysis.

It left some children unable to walk,

others completely paralysed and parents unable to cope

Many children were institutionalised. They were just literally put away.

But Bryan was lucky.

His parents never considered leaving him.

They sold their house to pay for whatever treatment he needed

to straighten out his impaired limbs.

I have in my hand a plaster cast of my left foot.

You'll see the enormous deformity of the ankle

and the way the foot is twisted over

and also the fact that the sole of the foot is pulled up quite considerably.

Even though Bryan had his parents' support

he still faced a terrible ordeal.

It began with a series of painful operations

I'd been told that I would be going to the hospital

to have my feet made better.

Of course, I was so young, I'd lived with it so long,

there didn't seem anything wrong with them to me.

Apart from the fact I didn't run round like other children.

When I woke up from the anaesthetic, I was in this terrible pain.

That wasn't better to me.

But Bryan's treatment didn't stop at surgery.

He faced years of rehabilitation.

I can remember when, to have polio meant

that you remained a cripple all your life.

A great deal has been done since then.

Like many children,

this involved learning to walk in painful leg braces or callipers.

They are Victorian structures.

Metal bars which are pinned to a socket in the heel of a boot

with straps round a pair of metal bars coming up the leg

to a ring just below the knee in my case.

They wore through the leather lining

then rivets started chewing holes in your leg.

And they were, well, very unpleasant.

After years of painful operations and rehabilitation,

doctors finally straightened out Bryan's limbs.

He's since gone on to live a full and active life.

I don't know how I feel. It's... It was a bit of me and it isn't now.

That's probably the simplest way of putting it.

It just illustrates to me how thankful I am to my parents.

'Dr Jonas Salk, discoverer of the first successful vaccine against infantile paralysis.'

Thankfully, cases of polio are now rare in our country.

In the mid '50s,

we finally adopted the vaccine that had been developed in America.

'Tests which have ended for all time the threat of one of the world's most vicious diseases.'

'The British type of anti-polio vaccine proceeds as fast as possible.'

The polio sugar lump came next and made the vaccine sweeter to swallow.

'Oh, come now. That was lovely.'

By the mid 1960s, polio epidemics in Britain were finally at an end.

But this devastating disease has left behind many, many memories.

The development of the polio vaccine was fantastic

because I wouldn't wish on anyone the sort of problems that I knew about.

You have two choices with a disability -

either you sit in a corner and give up or you get with life.

And I was fortunate that I had parents who encouraged me

to get on with life.

Bryan's here with us in the Picture Of Health surgery.

-Hello, Bryan.

-Hello.

-That's extraordinary.

I mean, I have to say, your parents were your saviours really,

-weren't they?

-Oh, yes.

-What a sacrifice.

I don't know just how much they did sacrifice.

It was an incredible thing.

Without them, I would have been in a wheelchair and never walking.

Such generosity.

Because, as we saw in the film, it could have gone so differently

and now, there you are, living this extraordinary life.

Yes, I hate to be idle. LAUGHTER

And sailing like that. I mean, that boat was going along at an extraordinary lick.

Well, yes, because on the water I'm the same as anybody else

-because I don't have to move about.

-No.

-Angela, do you remember this sort of thing of people with polio when you were...?

-Oh, yes.

-Yeah.

I can remember at school.

It was at school we were given, first of all, a little sugar lump

with the polio vaccine on it.

That was the first time that it really came home to us.

I remember that from when I was about three or four,

when you were first aware that some children were not able to run

and play and do all of the things that we could do.

But I think it's extraordinary listening to you talk about

the way your parents gave such enormous support to you

because I suspect you probably met young people who didn't have that support from their parents

who perhaps didn't do quite as well as you.

Oh, yes. I mean, as I say in the film,

many children were institutionalised.

It's awful to think of that happening because it wouldn't happen now. It wouldn't be allowed to.

Were you fitted with things that would assist you in walking

when you were a boy?

When I was small, I had - this is a much more modern one -

but I had a calliper vaguely similar to this -

in fact, I had two - which straps round the leg

and the pins go into sockets in the heel of the boot.

-Then there were various straps that went round to hold the ankle.

-Yep.

Horribly uncomfortable things to wear.

And of course the rivets wear badly, they wear through the leather

and chew chunks out of the side of your leg.

I always had bits missing from the side of my legs,

but...you've got no choice, you live with it.

That's it. Bryan, thank you so much for sharing that.

Just an extraordinary story and everything in that film was...

-just really, really got to me. Thank you.

-Very inspiring.

-VERY inspiring.

-Very glad to be able to share it.

-Thank you.

Nowadays when we get into a car,

there's one thing we do without even thinking.

We belt up.

But it wasn't always like that.

Clunk the car door and click the seatbelt.

It's an iconic advert that has saved thousands of lives

and changed a nation's habit.

It can be very unfunny.

This is the story of why Clunk Click was made

and how Britain's drivers were finally persuaded to belt up.

In the mid 1900s, mass production began of the motor car

and our roads were getting busy.

But no-one had really thought about

how dangerous these vehicles could be.

I remember as a child being in a car with no kind of safety at all.

We'd be hanging out of the car, then we used to go around - all six of us - packed onto the back seat.

You were kind of on your own and, I guess, because of that

the injuries that people suffered were really quite severe.

Road casualties were on the increase

and this was putting a real strain on our health service.

I was driving a mini-van and I hit a bus.

The impact caused me leg to break at the femur, at the thigh.

..one, go!

So research began looking at how to make driving safer.

And in 1967, every car had to be fitted with a seatbelt.

But even if your car had one, most people failed to belt up.

I can remember very well

driving my kids to school

without seatbelts.

Nobody ever thought that it was particularly dangerous.

There was a great resentment because a lot of people who were macho drivers

didn't want to and found it an encumbrance.

Do you think if you'd been wearing a belt

-you'd have been less seriously hurt?

-I think so, yes.

-Are you in favour of safety belts?

-Well, I am now.

Most people realised that seatbelts could save you.

But they preferred comfort.

That seatbelt will reduce your chances of being seriously injured by 50%.

It will, yes, I know, but you don't do it automatically, do you?

I resisted them because I didn't want my clothes to get creased.

Can you imagine?!

We just didn't think ahead as to what might happen.

And so there wasn't a great deal of consciousness

that cars actually were weapons.

Evidence was mounting that seatbelts saved lives

and would prevent serious injuries.

'Demonstration films with dummies and live drivers

'have helped to build up the scientific case for seatbelts.

'Dummies in fearful crashes can show how the body is protected.'

And Labour Transport Minister Barbara Castle agreed.

I've just got to keep on telling them

that they're taking a stupid and unnecessary risk

with their own lives and wellbeing on the roads.

With the car quickly overtaking everything as the biggest killer on the roads

and hospitals pushed to their limits, the government had to act.

People started to realise that more and more people were getting cars

and the NHS are suddenly realising, "We are dealing with road accident after road accident.

"We should be pre-emptive.

"We're a health service. We're not just about picking up the pieces,

"we can actually inform and educate the public

"to keep them out of trouble,

"mainly, to keep them safe and healthy - that's the big thing -

"but also to save the NHS money."

But to break Britain's habit, something special was needed.

In the 1970s, Jimmy Savile was a household name.

The face of Top Of The Pops.

I can't stand any more. See you next week for another edition of Top Of The Pops.

He became the number one choice to front the campaign.

See you again. No, too much, too much, too much. Come on.

In this interview filmed just before his death,

the late Sir Jimmy remembers why clunking and clicking was so important.

Smashed faces and smashed bodies and spines were par for the course

if you had a shunt in a car.

If you were strapped in with a seatbelt,

it was an 85-90% chance you'd get away with it.

So it was logic. Pure logic.

You can put almost any frail objects in a box

and provided it's held firm, you can shake it about no end.

But if it's loose in a box that's another matter.

And he kind of shook eggs in a box.

When you saw the eggs shaking, you thought, "Careful, it might break!"

And then he said, "This could be you."

"Golly! I might break."

It doesn't matter who or what you are.

You can be the world's most experienced driver

but, to the law of gravity, you're the world's most experienced loose object.

And it can be very unfunny.

And you think, "That's going to be my brains or my internal organs

"scrambled up like some kind of omelette."

No matter how short the journey, nag yourself to remember this drill.

Clunk the car door and click the seatbelt.

Clunk, click, every trip.

Clunk, click, every trip. Brilliant.

Five or six syllables. Bang! You didn't forget it.

The ads struck a chord. The campaign to wear seatbelts gathered momentum.

The clunk-clickers are growing in number,

responding to £60,000 worth of publicity

in the form of papers, posters and television commercials.

And finally people did start to change their driving habits.

'Over the last six weeks,

'the number of drivers wearing seatbelts has doubled.'

Suddenly, you'd get in a car with somebody and they'd buckle up.

There was a big press campaign saying how well this was succeeding

and how idiotic you are if you're not doing it.

So the whole message came in hard and heavy, which was good.

'The human body is surprisingly vulnerable,

'even at 7mph.'

LAUGHTER

-Are you going to wear a seatbelt next time?

-Er, yeah.

Then finally, in 1983, a bill was passed

which made the wearing of seatbelts law.

People realised that they didn't particularly want to be smashed to smithereens, like an egg in a box

so therefore they took to wearing seatbelts.

So when they said it's now law. Bang! There was no problem.

The seatbelt campaign was huge.

It used a famous face...

Clunk the car door and click the seatbelt.

..and a punchy slogan to get results.

Belting up has undoubtedly saved our health service millions of pounds

and has also saved thousands of lives.

-Clunk, click.

-Clunk, click, eh? I'll remember that.

-So, Angela, Clunk, click, every trip. Remember that?

-Yes, don't I just?

In fact, Jimmy Savile was an old friend of mine

and I know that he was incredibly proud of the fact that

-that particular campaign had such a dramatic impact on reducing accidents.

-Yeah.

And I think what was the great thing for him

was that it wasn't just that he was very popular at the time -

everybody knew him, so he was the perfect face to have for that campaign -

but he gave real credibility to the argument for clunking, clicking every trip

and wearing a seatbelt

-because of the work that he did at Stoke Mandeville.

-Yeah, he was very involved.

Yeah, he personal experience there of meeting people

who had been in car accidents, as well as every other kind of accident,

who would perhaps have to spend the rest of their life in a wheelchair or whatever.

He was so proud of having been part of that campaign.

I bet he was. It was so vivid.

I don't know if they'd get away with that nowadays

with the egg inside the box.

Shake the egg up and tip it out. It was very well done.

-It was graphic, but it made the point.

-Yeah,

because you didn't have to at the time, did you?

As we found out, it was a few years before it was made compulsory.

-It was a long time before it was made compulsory.

-Yeah.

I had to empathise with the lady who said,

"I don't want to wear it because it messes up my clothes."

Been there, darling.

I think every woman thinks you don't want it to muck up your collar,

and if you're wearing something pale or whatever.

The funny thing is that now, if I get in the car,

even if I just drive 100 yards,

-I feel there's something missing if I haven't got the belt on.

-Yep.

I actually do not ever drive without my seatbelt

-because it just doesn't feel right somehow.

-You don't feel dressed. It's weird.

I remember lots of friends and friends of friends,

youngsters, really badly damaged in car accidents in those days

because once it went, that was it. You were bashed and crashed around

and invariably thrown through the windscreen.

But that's how important it was and how it caught on.

Suddenly, they realised,

"You've got to wear you seatbelt - health and safety."

So it all becomes another bit of the procedure.

-And thank goodness it is, frankly.

-Yeah.

Now, an area of medical care that we've all had experience of

one way or another - having babies.

The modern maternity unit is stacked with equipment

that would have been unrecognisable to previous generations.

Heart-rate monitors, pain-relief equipment,

ultrasound scanning machines, even the occasional father-to-be.

Since the beginning of the 20th century,

having a baby has gone through huge changes.

One family who have seen some of the changes is the Howes family.

Great-grandma Lillian, grandma Virginia,

and new mum, Sophie.

Lillian is the start of the story,

and remembers her own mother's experience in the early 1900s.

Lack of contraception meant big families were the norm.

And, if you wanted a midwife to help at the birth, you'd have to pay.

My mother had eight children,

and six of those children were born at home.

They didn't even used to have to have a midwife in her early days.

My auntie delivered one baby,

and perhaps a neighbour because they couldn't afford the midwife.

Poor health and a lack of proper medical care

meant lots of babies and women were dying in childbirth.

But then, in 1948, maternity care received a massive shake-up.

On July 5th, the new National Health Service starts,

providing hospital and specialist services,

medicines, drugs and appliances,

care of the teeth and eyes,

maternity services.

The new NHS promised women safer childbirth,

managed by experts few could previously afford.

For most, that still meant a home birth

but now a qualified midwife or doctor would attend.

For midwives like Julia Allison,

the big issue they had to deal with was hygiene.

We'd have constant boiling kettles

and boiling saucepans

because we sterilised some of the instruments

that weren't in the sterilised pack by boiling,

or if we were using them for the second time.

I can remember going into one house

and we were looking round for clean cloths.

We couldn't find any, and she said, "Go into the kitchen,

"see if you can find a clean tea towel."

I came back and said, "There's no clean things!" She said, "Find a tablecloth."

She said, "Give me that Daily Mirror."

"Give me that Daily Mirror," and it hadn't been opened.

She said, "The middle pages, if they haven't been touched by hands, are the cleanest thing in this house."

We delivered the baby into the Daily Mirror, and we did!

We delivered the baby into the Daily Mirror.

How's my water getting on, Mrs Anderson?

Ready as soon as you like, Nurse.

Hygiene and infection control were beginning to improve

but there was still little in the way of pain relief.

Sometimes the mothers didn't call the midwives out

until fairly late on though.

Sometimes mothers were very stoic and just got on with it.

You just encourage them to be calm,

and, "Just work with me and we'll soon have the baby born."

But then, in the late '40s, came a big change.

Pain relief was introduced in the form of a drug called pethidine.

Science repays humanity's debt to mothers.

The introduction of pain relief was a huge step forward.

In a few short years, childbirth had been transformed.

Medical help for mothers had arrived.

In the 1950s and the 1960s,

the availability of medical help continued to grow.

And so childbirth began to move out of the home into the hospital.

Here, mothers had to observe strict rules and regulations.

In the old days, the babies were taken away.

They were washed, cleaned up, hair combed,

before the mother actually got a proper look at her baby.

When the babies are born, they're taken to the nursery,

and you only get them at 10 o'clock at night,

er, six o'clock in the morning. Every four hours you get them.

And the father certainly wouldn't be made to feel welcome.

Fathers didn't get near the nursery.

In fact, one hospital had a white line on the floor

across the threshold of the nursery, across which the fathers didn't pass.

On the third day, my husband got home, and the staff nurse,

whoever was in charge, felt sorry for him and let him come in to see me.

So they pulled the blinds round me, the nurse came round the curtain,

and she said, "Don't tell anybody, this is against the rules."

And she brought my son, and laid him on the bed

so my husband and I could both see him together,

but that was never done.

In the small hours of the morning at Queen Charlotte's maternity hospital,

Pathe News looked in on a man with more on his mind than just a hangover.

Mister, you're really worried!

BABY CRIES

Ah, there you are! The cry of a newly born.

It was considered of matters underneath the skirts,

and it was women's work, and nobody else need know about it.

It's like old-fashioned movies

where the dad is walking up and down the hospital corridor waiting for the news -

you have a son, you have a daughter.

He was a million miles away from the action.

Ha-ha! That's it, chum. You've had it.

By the end of the 1960s,

84% of babies were being born in hospital.

This is the postnatal ward.

When you've had your baby,

you come back into bed here from the labour ward.

But the experience wasn't always a happy one.

I was told I had to go in to be induced.

I went in the night before, I was shaved, I was given an enema,

I was starved.

The next morning, I was taken down to the labour ward,

injected with pethidine, which is an opiate - I didn't ask for it -

and my waters broken, and a drip started.

I was given a compulsory episiotomy, yeah.

Everybody was cut, whether they needed it or not.

And the baby was born, you know, some time later that day.

At the time, and even up until I trained as a midwife,

I thought I'd had a great experience,

and that just shows me

that you don't know what you're missing

until an alternative is shown to you.

So, now I'm a midwife, and now I know how beautiful it can be,

now I know I had a pretty awful experience for all four of my children.

Virginia's story was typical of thousands of women.

Intervention had become routine.

A change was needed to make having a baby a more pleasant experience.

There was a huge pressure, movement as it were,

to move things into a better place for birth.

25 years on, Virginia, a midwife herself,

was able to help her daughter Sophie have a very different experience.

I had him at home. My mum was my midwife.

It was just amazing.

The best feeling in the world.

I feel sorry for women that have,

like, an impersonal experience in hospital.

It is a special time for women, and families,

and I think it should be more of a family affair.

While not all women may be as lucky as Sophie,

by the turn of the century,

maternity care in Britain was again seeing radical changes.

You know, our maternity services are always being hammered and criticised,

but, my golly, we've come a long way

since the days when we delivered into the Daily Mirror!

LULLABY PLAYS

BABY GURGLES

And we have Julia, who's in the Picture Of Health surgery with us.

-Welcome.

-Thank you.

-Wonderful, wonderful film, no?

Yes, absolutely wonderful.

I absolutely empathise with the midwife

who now realises that she had four least good experiences.

One of the things I always say when anybody asks me

why I had my second child at home, I only have one answer -

-because I had my first in hospital, and that says it all, I think.

-Yes.

-The whole thing has changed so dramatically, hasn't it?

-Yes.

The fact that fathers now take such an important role in the birth of their children,

and do you think that's actually made it easier for the women as well,

knowing the father is there?

If that's what both of the couples want, it's the natural thing to do.

What do you think about it yourself, Larry, as a bloke?

The thing is, my last two, I've got a 12-year-old and an eight-year-old,

and I thought to myself,

you know the logical thing to do is invite her mum to come along.

So Nana came along,

and she and I assisted in the birth

and it was quite an extraordinary experience, as we both...

As she was shouting and screaming, we were looking across her back,

going, "Oh God, please get on with it!"

-What a great family occasion!

-It was, a real family occasion.

And it happens a lot now, Larry,

and there's no judgement about who should be there or who shouldn't be there.

-If it's at home, they're usually found a job.

-Yes. Boil something!

-Make tea!

-Make some tea.

Yes, they don't do all that boiling thing any more, do they?!

Boil water, boil water, fetch pots!

No, because usually a lot of the boiling water was for washing the mother and washing the baby

and it's quite easy now to fetch water from the bathroom, of course.

Were you a home birth, Angela, or were you a hospital birth?

-I was born in hospital.

-Were you?

Yes, but the only reason I know exactly what time I was born

is because I was born in 1944,

and of course Plymouth was subject to a number of air raids and Blitz,

you know the famous Blitz they had in Plymouth, as they had in Coventry and London,

and apparently my mother always used to tell me the midwife said to her,

"We've got to get this baby born before the blackout"

so I know I was born at ten to six.

That was so extraordinary, thank you.

Thank you so much for coming and sharing that with us.

Often, we have a brilliant scientific breakthrough

or a remarkable piece of surgical skill to thank

for a great advance in healthcare,

but sometimes it's down to the courage

and determination of an ordinary man or woman.

April 1973, and a 20-month-old baby called Simon Bostic had made medical history.

Simon had to be almost literally wrapped in cotton wool.

He became the first baby in the world

to receive a bone marrow transplant using cells from a complete stranger.

Bone marrow transplants had been carried out before,

but only when there was a match within the family.

In Simon's case, there was no match.

They always knew it was an incredibly risky and pioneering procedure,

so I don't think anybody was under any illusions

as to the fact that it might not be successful.

However, thank God that they kind of persevered and did what they did,

and I'm incredibly grateful to the people involved in those days.

When you look at Simon Bostic today, having a riotous time

at a children's party, it's hard to believe

that this is the boy whose life, 18 months ago, hung in the balance.

Simon owed his life not only to the surgery,

but to his mother, Elizabeth.

In 1973, there wasn't a register of bone marrow donors to turn to.

It was down to Elizabeth to find a donor herself.

She went to the local press,

the local television, radio,

everywhere, and whipped up the enthusiasm of everyone,

persuaded some doctors, nurses, to take their blood samples,

and the public responded amazingly to that,

and that was the start of the whole bone marrow story.

Elizabeth's campaigning had worked.

With the help of the press,

she'd raised awareness and a donor came forward.

Simon was given the transplant that saved his life.

To this day, the British public are amongst the most giving,

I think, of all, and this really brings it all home.

But the fact that all this happened for me is, you know, it's...

Yeah... It's something else.

Simon grew stronger every day and the media followed his progress.

BALLOON POPS

LAUGHTER

But Simon's story didn't just hit the UK.

On the other side of the world, another desperate mother was also reading the news.

Shirley Nolan's son had a condition called Wiskott-Aldrich Syndrome.

Without a bone marrow transplant, he would die.

Shirley was in Australia, where she'd been living for some years,

and she just read in the paper about this pioneering transplant.

She then, being Shirley, decided,

as the doctors in Australia couldn't do anything for Anthony,

she'd come over to the UK and find a donor.

She'd heard of the successful bone marrow transplant

that saved baby Simon Bostic, but it wasn't until they got here

that Mrs Nolan found out that the odds against success with Anthony were considerably more.

Anthony's condition had left his immune system extremely weak

and he was in constant danger.

Any visitor to the house must go through this strange procedure -

facemasks and covering for the feet must be worn

just to be absolutely sure. And that includes everybody.

Though Shirley was determined to raise awareness,

she also had to protect him from infection.

One is constantly in fear of losing one's only child.

My mother, myself, and Anthony live in this cottage in total isolation

to protect Anthony from infection as long as possible

in the hope that eventually we'll find a donor that can save his life.

Shirley's fight was twofold.

As well as saving the life of her own son,

she set out to save the life of others by establishing the world's first bone marrow register.

When she was told, "There is no register,"

she said, "Well, I'll start one."

So she started off by going to the local pub around the corner from the hospital

and telling them her son was dying

and slapping a tin or something on the counter,

and she started to raise money.

His mother, acknowledging dejection, tries to keep his spirits up.

-Anthony's plight soon became major news.

-This is Anthony Nolan today.

Newspapers and television followed the story with interest.

I think it's his spirit,

its Anthony's tenacity that's kept him going for so long.

And Shirley even took to the streets to get her message across.

Finally, in 1974, Shirley succeeded in setting up the Anthony Nolan Register,

the world's first list of bone marrow donors.

She was an amazing woman. Very forceful.

If you didn't do what Shirley wanted you to do,

she'd make sure it happened somehow.

She was not going to take no for an answer.

Now everyone was hoping the register would help find a donor for its namesake.

Obviously I'm optimistic.

Chances are very, very good,

and I think and I hope, my mother hopes,

and I'm sure everybody who knows about the story of Anthony

will be hoping with us that this is it.

CHILD BABBLES

That's better.

Sadly, despite the hope and years of searching,

no match was ever found for Anthony and he died in 1979.

In her heart, she always thought it was unlikely

that she was going to find a donor for Anthony.

But, even though she'd lost her son,

Shirley didn't want any mother to experience what she'd gone through.

When Anthony died, she was determined that it wouldn't end there.

Losing a child, or the threat of losing one,

I think must be the worst thing that anybody could go through.

To have that, yet still be driven and determined,

I think is fairly amazing.

Since the 1980s, the Anthony Nolan Register has continued to grow,

and other bone marrow registers have followed across the world.

She has saved thousands, hundreds of thousands of lives,

by starting the Anthony Nolan charity in 1974.

And it's truly remarkable that all this began with one very sick boy back in the early 1970s.

The fact that I had anything to do with any of that starting

is a great thing, and I'm glad that my story,

and the story of my family, um... have been able to, in some way,

inspire this amazing achievement.

But the achievement itself is down to Shirley Nolan, primarily.

Angela, what an extraordinary legacy.

It is, isn't it, and I'm sure that Mr Bostic, a grown man now,

how proud he must feel that it was actually his story

that gave that enthusiasm and that impetus to Anthony Nolan's mother

to come over to Britain and try and find again an unrelated donor

to save her son, and as we know, sadly that didn't happen.

She still had that great drive,

which meant she set up the Anthony Nolan Trust.

I looked on their website before I came on the programme,

and they've now got more than half a million people that are on that site

prepared to give their bone marrow to those people who need it.

-Just terrific.

-Yes. Thank you.

-My pleasure.

-Thanks, Angela.

I've enjoyed being on the programme,

and I think you have some fascinating programmes and fascinating films.

A real journey.

-Thank you.

-My pleasure.

You can find out more about how healthcare has changed from an Open University expert.

Go to...

and follow the links.

Coming up tomorrow,

the story behind the antibiotic that saved millions of lives.

What could your feelings be? Job well done.

How our love of cigarettes went up in smoke.

It was part of the culture, it was part of the ethos then.

And we remember the time that matron ruled the roost.

This battleship of healthcare swanning through the ward.

Far more frightening than a consultant or the doctor.

And that's all from A Picture Of Health for today. Goodbye.

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