One-hundred years of healthier women

On this special day, it’s time to ask ourselves how lucky we are (or not) in how life has improved on the health front. Are we taking healthcare advances for granted and would we do well to occasionally glance back at the way things were?

As a person in her 50s I’m thinking today about what life was like for my grandmother and my mother’s generations compared to mine. I am even thinking of how my daughter’s experience will be different in the future from mine, as science and healthcare move on even further.

Making the comparisons is a simple way of showing the improvements – and perhaps, triggering a bit of gratitude for what we have.

Through the generations

My granny, on my dad’s side, never knew her mother. That’s because she died in childbirth in the late 1880s – Land War- time. I still have her wedding ring, bright and shiny, because she didn’t wear it for long. My grandmother was then reared by her two aunts.

She went on to marry in her 20s and have five children who, luckily, all lived. She died of old age at 80. After several turns, the occasional doctor’s home visit but no ambulance ever appearing at the door she died at home, where she had been looked after primarily by her daughter-in-law, my mother, in a busy farming, three-generation household, typical of the era.

My grandmother on my mother’s side got married very young – 16 – and experienced three days of labour on her first child, my mother. There were no caesareans, very little pain relief at the time and only the assistance of a local midwife with minimal training. A mother of five, she died at the early age of 60 of cervical cancer.

My grand-aunt Es(ther), who never married and lived in the busy Wicklow household where she often rocked the prams, developed what was probably rheumatoid arthritis, which twisted her hands practically overnight at the age of 60.

She only had aspirin to fight the pain of flare-ups. She died at the age of 90, after 30 years of restricted movement. The only wheelchair she had was an armchair with wheels that my parents had made for her locally.

MY MOTHER’S EXPERIENCE – 50s and 60s

My mother became a mother at a time of transition in the late 1950s. All her seven births were in hospital – the first five in the local district hospital. The last two pregnancies required a stay in the Coombe Hospital in Dublin, where more high-tech care was available.

Over the years, she had the benefit of smear tests, the results of which eased her mind about the illness that her own mother had died of. She had access to medication that could ease pain, control diabetes and reduce blood pressure.

When help was needed at home, as she got older, she was able to avail of home-help hours. A carer’s allowance assisted too.

Now 81 and very unwell, she is availing of nursing-home care, under the Fair Deal Scheme. The days of expecting offspring to mind you at home, beyond what was physically possible, are gone. Also gone is the resentment and stress related to caring duties that daughters-in-law who “married in” to farms often felt.

Another huge change has happened too: the long-standing “county home versus private nursing home” snobbery and stigma has been swept away by the introduction of the Nursing Homes Support (Fair Deal) Scheme.

Now everyone in any nursing home is equal. The homes previously known as “county homes” are often more expensive per week now, because they are run by the HSE and designed for high-medical-dependency cases.

As regards facilities, in my mother’s case she has her own en suite bathroom – a far (and wonderful) cry from her early married days of no toilet in the house and water that had to be carried. Sanitation has certainly come a long way since I was a child in the 1960s, with its corresponding health benefits.

MY EXPERIENCEin THE 1980s

I had my three children in the 1980s. They were normal births and involved gas and air and pethidine injections when things got rough. (Often noisy) labour wards contained several women, and the delivery room accommodated two, so you had to listen to another woman’s progress as well as your own – not a pleasant experience.

Scans weren’t a routine part of ante-natal care either. The only time I had one was in a crisis situation, when my daughter was arriving prematurely.

CHANGES FOR BETTER

In the 30 years since then, a lot has changed for the better on the general women’s health front. Women over 50 now have regular free mammograms under the State BreastCheck system and cancer monitoring under the CervicalCheck service.

Young girls can also now avail of the HPV vaccine, to prevent cervical cancer.

On the reproductive health side, up to the 1980s many women lived from month to month, never knowing from one to the next whether they’d be getting the case ready for hospital again in nine months or not. There was hushed talk of “rhythm methods” and packages being brought over from England. Again, we’ve come a long way since then, with women now having the freedom to plan their families if they want to.

On the childbirth front, high-tech facilities are available for very premature babies and you can deliver your baby in the privacy of a separate room with your partner there if that is your wish. There are birth pools and TENS machine and music in the background – and all sorts to calm you. Young women would hardly believe how things used to be!

On the medical education front, the changes have been colossal too. How many women have gone on to be doctors and consultants because they had access to free secondary level education and grants-based third-level access?

In the past, while many women became nurses, it was because they could train in hospitals with their accommodation as part of their subsistence payment while they did so. CL

>> Pioneers, improvements and how war changed attitudes

PIONEERING WOMEN IN IRISH MEDICINE

There are five Irish women who are considered trail-blazers in the world of medicine. From privileged backgrounds, they still had to fight to be accepted as doctors and one, for example, wasn’t allowed to do ward rounds when she did become a doctor, just because she was a woman.

Eleanora Fleury (1860-1940): Born in Dublin, she was the first female medical graduate of the Royal University of Ireland. She became a successful psychiatrist, working in Richmond Asylum (Grangegorman) and in Portrane.

Emily Dickson (1866-1944): A gynaecologist from Tyrone, she was refused work several times because she was a woman. She eventually became an examiner in midwifery and gynaecology and was the first woman fellow of any of the Colleges of Surgeons in Britain or Ireland.

Elizabeth Bell (1869–1934) and Dame Anne Louise McIlroy (1878-1968) from Northern Ireland also made their mark in obstetrics.

While Kathleen Lynn (1874–1955) from Mayo, who got her degree from the Royal University of Ireland, wasn’t accepted to the post of surgeon at the Adelaide hospital because she was a woman. Politically active, she treated many people with flu in 1918 and went on to set up a hospital for the treatment of infants with TB.

Source: History Ireland

HEALTH DEVELOPMENTS SINCE 1908

HOW WAR aided WOMEN’s health

War changed attitudes to what women could do as far back as the time of Florence Nightingale. Attitude change was most marked after the First World War, when women surgeons were proved capable of running hospitals in France.

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