1950s Pnuemonia treatment

[theunknown47]

I'd like to know how pneumonia was treated in the 1950s. I'm writing a story that takes place in West Germany in the 1950s(don't know exactly what year yet). My story features a character who had pneumonia before he fled East Germany to come to West Germany. He received treatment in East Germany, but wasn't deemed well enough to travel when he left

Comments

[anonymous]

Agreed. And in 1950, all the Occupation Zones of Germany were still pretty much the same, in terms of living conditions. (And in 1950, both the governments would have still been rather provisionary and completely under the thumb of the occupying military forces. Remember that the uprising in East Germany in 1953 was ended by Russian tanks rolling through Berlin again.) The problem wouldn't have been the burgeoning socialism in the East, but general rationing (though the actual famine probably was over by then), possibly lack of manpower (look up when the German POWs were sent home - those were pretty much all that was left of the ablebodied male population that had been between 16 and 50 in 1945) and insufficient housing. (I've read that something like 80% of the housing in cities had been destroyed by bombing campaigns.)

Some annecdotes that may help put things in perspective: My mother was often ill as a child, because childhood vaccinations weren't really a thing yet for many common diseases, and at 4 or 5 (about 1949) she got a form of tuberculosis that resulted in eyes glued together with pus. The general housing and supply situation in post-war East Berlin may have been bad, but she was still hospitalised for more than a week and treated with sulfonamides (antibiotics that were discovered before penicillin). This despite the fact that her father was a pharmacist and could probably treated her by himself. Similarly, when my father ran away from his farming family to go finish highschool and study in East Berlin (which was highly subsidised in the GDR for the children of farmers and workers), he quickly became malnourished and contracted tuberculosis of the lung. He was put in a sanatorium for months on the state's expense to cure it and get his strength back. (This was about 1957.) My mother also tells me there was a serious dysentery epidemic in Berlin when she was just finishing highschool (about 1961/1962; she got sick for so long that she had to repeat her final exams), and the GDR government simply ordered all the nursing and medical students to go out and help the medical staff (all doctors in the GDR were officially state-employes) to get the epidemic under control.
Socialism may not have been very good at providing everything you might wand or at making people rich, but they DID take the health of the population seriously. (It's very similar to Cuba today, actually. Cuba has low material living standards, but the same life expectancy as in the US, and the most doctors per capita in the world.) Especially back when the people in the new GDR government were actually still young and idealistically believing in the communist goals they had learned after fleeing from the Nazis to Russia.

I don't know how things worked in the West at the time (it's entirely possible that they had special emergency cervices for people fleeing from the East, though the official political refugee program didn't start until much later). If they already had an insurance system in 1950, it's possible that your refugee would have been worse off in the West because he isn't a citizen and can't pay out of pocket. Remember that West Germany started issuing its own currency in 1948 (1949 in West Berlin) - mainly to cut down on the widespread black market bartering (with cigarettes as exchange tokens), which had been the main mode of getting whatever wasn't on your rationing card. Though Wikipedia tells me there was a kind of official exchange office for people who lived in East Berlin but worked in West Berlin, so it was possible to earn West currency as an East German citizen. (This was not particularly unusual. My mother had a school friend who regularly visited her grandparents in the Western part of town and slowly smuggled over half her family's household stuff in her school bag in preparation for making a stealthy exit. As long as you didn't carry suspicially large luggage, the Eastern border police didn't bother you much, though they did check the trains, of course.)

[anonymous]

Argh, so many typos! Sorry - I do know better, it's just very late over here. And I was trying to reply to Majolika, hence the "Agreed" at the beginning.

[anonymous]

Hm... Actually, my mother's childhood tuberculosis may have been treate with streptomycin (invented in 1943 and according to Wikipedia the first antibiotic that really helped against tuberculosis). Either that, or my mother misremembers the source of her eye infection.

However, while the Wikipedia article on lung sanatoriums states that those were closed throughout the Western world in the 1950s due to now available antibiotic treatment of lung tuberulosis, I know for sure that my father still spent some time in one of them in the late 1950, possibly in addition to antibiotic treatment. (The sanatoriums had been aroumnd since the late 19th century and operated on the principle that with fresh air, good nourishment and lots of lying in the sun in a deckchair bundled up against the cold, the body would fight the disease off by itself. Which did work to a certain extent - the 19h ccentury clichée of the prostitute or starving artist dying of 'consumption' exists for a reason. Rich people often managed to recover.)

[anonymous]

(still the same person)
Okay, I'm insomniac and bored, so I tried looking it up in my father's old medical textbooks (printed in the early 1960s - that's the best I can do). But the one I found in a hurry listed like two dozen different disease (not all of them caused by bacteria) as possible reasons for "Pneumonie" (the word just means "infection oof the lung", after all). Even "bacterial pneumonia" can be caused by a host of different sppecies, which don't all respond to the same antibiotic. So I guess you're going to have to be more specific, if you want details for the treatment regime.

[anonymous]

A little detail that might be of interest: In the GDR, the patient probably would have been prescribed metamizole against the fever and pains of any pneumonia. (Well, at least he would have if he was curing it at home in a later decade. Maybe they had something even better in hospitals, and I don't know what the supply situation was like so shortly after the war. But it was first introduced to the market in 1922, so there's no reason why it shouldn't be available.) The thing is, at least at the time of the reunification, the East German brand name of the stuff was "Analgin", while the same stuff was sold as "Berlosin" in the West. So that might cause some confusion in your story. But I think "Analgin" was the older, pre-war brand, so the nursing staff in the West hospital or any German 1950s doctor writing him a new prescription would probably still know what he meant. That is, if metamizole was even a prescription-only drug already in the 1950s. I remember my father saying that it only is now because some people are allergic or hypersensitive against it, not because it has any addiction or overdose risk like most other serious pain killers. This allergy risk may not have been known yet in the first half of the 20th century, so you might have been able to buy it over-the-counter.