Martha Brooks, one of Canada’s most respected writers for young adults, has written a new novel that explores what it what like to live and be treated for TB in the Ninette Sanatorium.
Her father was medical superintendent there from 1946 to 1972. It’s called Queen of Hearts (September 2010).
Unfortunately, TB is topical: in a special TB edition of the British medical journal Lancet (May 2010), experts say that with more than 9 million people infected last year, including 2 million deaths, there is more TB now than at any other time in history.
Queen of Hearts tells the story of fifteen-year-old Marie-Claire Côté who is stricken, along with her brother and sister, with TB during World War II. This is a story about surviving loss – and finding friendship, and love, in surprising places.
In Martha’s own words:
“Can you imagine being 16 years old, contracting TB and then being confined to a long-term care facility?
“How would you respond?
“It was a question I wanted answered, fictionally …. Queen of Hearts takes place a few years before I was born, at a time before TB drugs where discovered. Rest and good food was part of “chasing the cure,” as well as various forms of collapse therapy — surgical procedures now thought archaic, were, at the time considered state of the art. These were the tools medical people worked with. But as World War II was being waged overseas, the crusade back home to lick TB still presented a fierce challenge.
“This book is a valentine to the foot soldiers of that righteous war — doctors, nurses, other staff and especially the amazing patients who sought victory over their disease and sometimes won and sometimes didn’t.”
A reading and signing of the new book will be held Sept. 18 at 2 p.m. at the Ninette Centennial Hall.