In 1943, when the war was at its height, a pretty girl of sixteen, crippled with rheumatoid arthritis, was admitted to a geriatric hospital. Today, twenty-five years later, Pamela La Fane is still there, living in a hospital surrounded by the old and the dying. Everyone agrees that she ought not to be there, that there should be some other way of caring for her and the 3,000 young chronic sick like her. This three-part enquiry looks not only at Pamela's life in hospital but her struggle to find a new life outside.
(Part 2: next Thursday)