Nursing a plague: nurses’ perspectives on their work during the United Kingdom HIV/AIDS crisis, 1981– 96

Abstract

One evening shortly before Christmas 1984, David Ruffell began to feel ‘very peculiar’. Walking around his local grocery store, he ‘felt so ill [he] thought [he] was dying’. Thinking that he might have a venereal disease, he visited the Genito-Urinary Medicine Clinic in Hammersmith, London. The doctor at the clinic took one look at David and said, ‘My God, you look absolutely awful’, and immediately sent him for an X-ray. Upon reviewing the X-rays, he took hold of David’s hand and told him, ‘You’re quite seriously ill. I’ll be perfectly blunt: you’ve probably got a rare type of pneumonia called pneumocystis, which is connected with the AIDS problem. Until we can do a biopsy on your lung, we’re going to admit you to Charing Cross Hospital immediately to treat you for that pneumonia.