Philip C. Burcham

2014

Some five or six decades ago, the normal perils of childbirth were shockingly escalated for an unsuspecting generation of mothers in Germany, Canada, Australia and the UK. In a ghastly epidemic that unfolded over several years beginning in the late 1950s, distraught parents were confronted by the birth of babies with severely disfigured upper and lower limbs. By the time the sedative drug thalidomide was identified as the culprit, some 10,000 infants were affected – assailed within the womb by a poison that condemned its victims to lives of struggle and significantly reduced horizons.