NHS: A Socialite’s Surprise Tribute

Sir David Tang is not the first person one would expect to champion the National Health Service.

The wealthy socialite spent his life preferring the private medical care of Harley Street specialists, along with the most expensive forms of culture, food, clothes, clubs, cigars and anything else one can enjoy.

The Hong Kong-born entrepreneur was such a famous snob and bon vivant that he wrote an eccentric column for the Financial Times as that newspaper’s “Agony Uncle”, chronicling his own take on modern manners, high society and subjects such as the joys of large yachts and private jets.

Which is why it was so remarkable that the UK’s public health system became a passionate final subject for Tang, who died of liver cancer on August 29 at the age of 63.

Jane Owen, the deputy editor of FT Weekend and the person who first gave Tang his column, says many of the newspaper’s readers were taken aback to see Tang go from writing about his usual exotic subjects to penning what she called “a tribute to our fantastic health service”.

Published on August 7, the column proved to be his second last, and explained how he was holidaying by the sea at St-Jean-Cap-Ferrat when an ulcer began to haemorrhage.

NHS “Magic carpet”

He was raced back to London on a friend’s private jet enroute to a private hospital but collapsed before he could disembark and had to be rushed to the nearest hospital, the NHS’s Hillingdon.

According to Owen that “was not David’s idea of a good thing but as soon as he got there he was so well treated and so well cared for that he then wrote this paean for the NHS.”

Tang wrote that the diversion to Hillingdon was a “miracle, like a magic carpet.”

“Had I managed those five steps out of the plane myself, I would have made it to the London clinic where a private room was waiting for me.”

“Yet the moment I was wheeled into that hospital, I knew this was nothing like my preconception of an NHS A&E department, about which we hear so much criticism.

“The long and the short of it was five doctors and 10 nurses saved my life at Hillingdon that Sunday afternoon. I was moved into a general intensive care unit that evening and, for the first time in my life, experienced sleeping in an open ward in a long room with five beds on one side facing a long counter of doctors and nurses.

An Open Ward

“In the middle of the night, in my half slumber and weak waking moments, I realised that sleeping in a space like an open office was rather nicer than being cooped up in a private room.

It had never occurred to me that sharing with other patients and seeing the dependable shadows of the moving and half-whispering nurses could engender such a soothing and warming feeling. I also felt a bond with my fellow patients.

“I woke and experienced another extraordinary day of meticulous care. Each and every staff nurse, in their wonderful blue uniforms, could not have been more kind and helpful, including wiping me down with wit and humour, both of which, I can assure my readers, demanded a very high standard!

“There was one exceptional doctor from Hungary who became one of my greatest friends without my knowing it. His application of knowledge and experience to my case was one of those rare occurrences when you know a piece of fortune has been stitched into the hem of your life.

“So, ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you now the fountain of all serendipities: if you were in the magical labyrinth of the Hillingdon NHS, you would, like I, never ever have a single doubt about the NHS as an institution of the greatest cultivation. I will howl and hunt down anyone who dares to question the NHS.

“My mother always told me that the UK provided the best education in the world, to which I now add the best hospital care in the world. The fact that it was free at the point of service defies even Einsteinian space-time. So I am glad I have paid my taxes in this country — before with reluctance, but now with alacrity. I hereby demote Asclepius (the Greek god of medicine) and genuflect to Nye Bevan, founder of the NHS.”

 

By Peter Wilson

 

The post NHS: A Socialite’s Surprise Tribute appeared first on Felix Magazine.