Judith Darmady: supercharged childcare visionary
BMJ 2020; 369 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.m1988 (Published 18 May 2020) Cite this as: BMJ 2020;369:m1988
- John Illman
- London, UK
- john{at}jicmedia.org
It is hard to imagine how a consultant paediatrician from Basingstoke initially reacted to the horror of seeing children so undernourished it was hard to tell how old they were. There was only one spoon in each room, meaning that the strongest children had the most food. The weakest were left to grab at titbits on a floor wet with urine. Toddlers with bone stick arms and legs were tied to their beds. Starving babies were unattended. Naked older children had shaved heads. The death rate was inevitably high.
Romanian orphanages and international work
This is what Judith Darmady found in 1990 in the remote village of Ungureni, north of Bucharest, in one of Romania’s 29 infamous orphanages for “incurables.” She had answered an appeal from the Romanian Orphanage Trust for a consultant paediatrician who specialised in caring for children with special needs.
How did Darmady react to the legacy of the 25 year regime of repression by Romania’s communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu? Did she wilt? She did not. A nursing friend, Jane Waldram, described Darmady as being “mentally built like a tank.” It was hard to reconcile her irrepressible energy with her plump, short stature (she was less than five feet tall) and her age. Most of her 100 or so Romanian trips were made in her retirement. She also had a formidable reputation for rising to challenges.
Few challenges were more daunting than the 100 000 abandoned Romanian children classified as incurable. Fired by the Stalinist theory that a large population would generate rapid economic growth, Ceausescu outlawed contraception and abortion, except …
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