Themes
Interviewees
Helen Wainwright
Department of Pathology, University of Cape Town, South Africa
Interview location: UCT Medical School, Cape Town
Interview date: 15th January 2008, and 25th March 2009
Profile | Transcript Summary | Full Transcript
PROFILE
As a clinician sometimes you’re feeling in the dark: you give a particular treatment and you hope for the best. But with pathology you find out actually what happened – in most casesWhen she began studying medicine, Helen Wainwright was following in the footsteps of her father, who became Professor of Anatomical Pathology at Durban Medical School after emigrating to South Africa from the UK with his family. But Wainwright was unable to train in Durban because the medical school was reserved for non-whites. She remembers how the rules of apartheid affected the practice of medicine when she began her career.
She has found the exploration of disease processes a satisfying and richly fascinating field. “Pathology is interesting, because you actually find out the answers to a lot of the diseases.”
Besides her duties to teach new generations of pathologists, Wainwright is in charge of fetal and neonatal pathology services for all the maternity units in the Cape Town area. Since the demise of apartheid the city’s population has swelled with rural migrants. Diseases of poverty are rife, health services are overloaded, and the rate of still births is exceptionally high. She describes in some detail the abnormalities she regularly encounters, many of which she feels are preventable.
At autopsy, Wainwright finds very many babies damaged by diabetes, infections, including HIV and rheumatic fever, and alcohol abuse. “Paying people in alcohol, that’s the root. [In former times] when people worked on the wine farms, part of their wages were alcohol. And it’s an addiction... Whole communities are caught up in this."