Lady Patricia Rose, MD, widow of Guyana’s last Governor General, Sir David Rose, is now writing stories and poetry based on her experiences in Guyana.
Dr Rose, or Lady Rose, as she is better known in Guyana, and more so for her pioneering work at the Mahaica Hospital in the Hansen’s Disease in-house and outreach programmes, told Stabroek News during a brief stay recently she was happy to be back after a 20-year absence.
She had returned to her country of birth, England in February, 1988 after working for some 18 years at the Mahaica Hospital, which she visited during her three-day trip. Her visit to the hospital, she said, was “a very heart breaking experience” but nevertheless, she was very happy to see people she knew since her time there.
Now 84, Lady Rose retired from active duty two years ago, she said, after she found it difficult to obtain professional travel insurance to various parts of the world, where she continued to serve after leaving Guyana, mostly in a consultancy capacity. She last served on a number of medical boards in England and was a clinical consultant and a member of its advisory board and executive committee to the LEPRA society. She travelled extensively in India, Bangladesh and Brazil over the past ten years as a result of her work. LEPRA is a non-governmental organization working in the fields of leprosy, tuberculosis, malaria, HIV/AIDS and disabilities.
After Sir David was killed in London when scaffolding fell on him, she said that then Prime Minister Forbes Burnham asked her to work with the leprosy clinic. She had been schooled in medicine at the Royal Free School of Medicine in London where she obtained her MRCS and LRCP in 1952. She agreed to working at the Mahaica Hospital on condition that the leprosy programme should be entirely domiciliary and that no one would be compelled to live in the leprosarium, which should become a leprosy hospital maintained only for the care and support of the patients already living there.
Before assuming control, she had to undergo an extensive period of specialist training and she did this in Trinidad and Tobago in 1970, studying dermatology and leprosy before an intensive five-week training programe at Carville, USA.
She recalled that in 1980, the World Health Organisation asked all countries to introduce a multi-drug therapy (MDT) and Guyana was the first country to do so. Not wanting to take credit for this historic move, she said that Guyana was a small country so it was relatively manageable.
She said the MDT met with a measure of success but it was a team effort involving the doctors and nurses all the way down to the drivers.
She said that today, the MDT for leprosy was effective – 99.98% – and treatment could range from between six months to two years with the contagion being halted from the very first dose of MDT administered.
Based on her visit to the Mahaica Hospital, she declared that the administrator Dr Holly Alexander was “doing a good job in a difficult situation.”
While in Guyana, she also visited her husband’s grave by The Seven Ponds in the Botanical Gardens and expressed sadness that the area around the tomb was waterlogged and the tomb was sinking since the water from the surrounding area appeared to be draining around the edges of the tomb. She said that she would have to get some advice on how to improve the conditions around the tomb.
About the Botanical Gardens itself, she thought that it was not as lush as it was in the past. The trees, she said, were getting old and it did not appear as though there were saplings being planted to replace the old trees when they were gone.
Asked what her impressions on the political situation in Guyana were, she said that she was an apolitical animal, having been a civil servant “for so long.”
She left Guyana, she said, because she missed her children who were mostly overseas studying while she was more or less without family members in Guyana. She has six children – most of whom are in the medical profession or are scientists – and 15 grandchildren, the first three of whom are medical doctors. Two other grandchildren are also pursing studies in medicine and would soon become medical doctors. She said she was “proud” of them.
Lady Rose, who also received the Golden Arrow of Achievement in 1980 and the Cacique Crown of Honour in 1987 for her outstanding work in the field of medicine in Guyana, has also published many papers on leprosy, and was a referee of medical manuscripts for the medical journal Leprosy Review.
Now residing in Northumberland in England, she is authoring short stories and poems about her life and her husband’s in Guyana, where she lived and worked, including at Whim on the Corentyne Coast in 1948 with mud roads and no electricity and running water. She said she was doing it because she feels that her younger children, in particular, need to know about their father and his background.
Her children, though living and working around the globe, including Switzerland, England and the USA, she said, have an affinity with Guyana and the Caribbean, with one of them Dr Angia Rose currently researching chronic diseases in Barbados. It was on a visit to her daughter in Barbados that she took the opportunity to visit Guyana. (Miranda La Rose)
