On the hospital toast controversy

Tidying up a bulging family medicine chest is one of the main New Year resolutions for Maurice Gueret as he visits a Dickensian institution in London

Medicine Cupboard

January is a good month to rummage through your medicine cabinet to see what bottles leak, which bandages reek, and what’s gone beyond its expiry. Over the coming months, I’ll have a look at home remedies in my own cupboard. First up, is the Vicks Inhaler Nasal

Stick. “Fast relief from stuffy noses” says the blurb, and it delivers short-term on its promise. I always associate Vicks Inhalers with trees, like a brisk walk through an alpine forest. Active ingredients are camphor, menthol, and methyl salicylate. Today’s version also includes oil from the needles of Siberian pine trees. In my young days, the inhaler contained oil from roots of the sassafras tree, but evidence of carcinogenesis led the FDA to ban the use of sassafras oil in medicines. Today you’ll only find sassafras compounds in illegal street drugs such as MDMA (ecstasy). Vicks Inhaler is still going strong with its current formulation. It shouldn’t be offered to children under six and should be disposed of 28 days after opening it for hygiene reasons. Joshua Vick was a family doctor in North Carolina who helped his brother-in-law, Lunsford Richardson, get started in the chemist business. Richardson developed a lot of menthol-based remedies, and called them Vicks to honour his benefactor. Next week, we’ll cast an eye over Bonjela.

Palliative toast

Following the news that more hospitals are citing ‘health & safety’ or ‘insurance’ as reasons to deny toast to patients, your stories on the value of toasted bread in clinical settings continue to arrive. The benefits of postpartum tea and toast in maternity hospitals is well documented. But toasters can bring great comfort at the other end of life. A reader tells me that her mother died 21 years ago, two weeks after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer as an inpatient in a Dublin hospital. “Among the indignities she suffered while there was the refusal to make her toast. It was all she fancied eating. She was told they were not allowed to make toast for patients for insurance reasons. When I then asked on her behalf, thinking she must have misunderstood, I was told no, she absolutely could not have toast.” The good lady decided to bring her mum home, where she died in peace and with dignity, and was able to have any toast that she asked for.

Chez Dickens

I was in London over the new year, a lovely quiet time to Oyster Card around the city and take in some of the less heralded sights on the tourist trail. I caught the end of the Christmas turkey celebrations at 48 Doughty Street, which was the home of Charles Dickens, pictured above right, when he completed The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby. The museum is a short walk from the Bloomsbury area, and well worth the few pounds to get in. Among the delights is one of many letters Dickens wrote to his personal family doctor, Dr Frank Beard. Dickens had a mountain of medical ailments during his lifetime, and, in his final decade, would regularly consult in person and by letter. Dickens once wrote to Dr Beard requesting an appointment. “I should like to be inspected though I hope I can offer no new attractions.” Two attractions on higher floors of the Dickens house are his personal commode and hip bath. It was the job of stair-hopping servants in the 19th Century to regularly empty one and frequently fill the other. To this end, 48 Doughty Street had an advanced bell system in place. There was no need for any servant to ask “What the Dickens?”

Piles of trouble

On London trips, I like to brush up on my cockney rhyming slang. There’s always a risk that one of the capital’s verbose taxi drivers will open up a conversation on minor or major ailments. Some are easy, as they rhyme directly. Brown bread means dead. Jam tart is heart. Vera Lynn is skin (or chin). But the cockney dialect also allows tangential rhyming slangs and the omission of certain words, and it’s here that non-natives have trouble understanding the boys and girls of the East End. Your hair is your Barnet, because Barnet is famous for its fair, which rhymes with hair.

‘Shut your boat’ means ‘shut your face’ because boat is shorthand for boat race. If your taxi driver starts moaning about his Emmas or his Judiths, you know he has been sitting in traffic too long. Emmas are Emma Freuds, or haemorrhoids. Judiths are Judith Chalmers, which rhymes with Farmers, which means Farmer Giles or piles. London can be exhausting.