How Princess Diana changed the perception of AIDS
The History Hour
BBC
4.4 • 912 Ratings
🗓️ 10 April 2017
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The royal handshake that changed attitudes to AIDS, America enters WW1, plus Egypt's Facebook girl, Nagorno Karabakh and remembering Jane Fonda's workout (Photo: Princess Diana with an AIDS patient at the Middlesex Hospital April 1987. Credit REX/Shutterstock)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome this is the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson, |
| 0:05.6 | the past brought to life by those who were there. This week it's now 100 years since the Americans |
| 0:11.6 | joined the First World War. |
| 0:13.0 | The enemy was only 30 feet away from us. They come out of trenches. We come out of trenches. |
| 0:18.0 | We met one another like a bunch of animals. We lost our senses. |
| 0:24.0 | Plus the war in Nagorno-Karabakh in the 1990s. |
| 0:27.8 | All district was surrounded and bombs and life ammunition were falling into city center only way through mountain to get out from here. |
| 0:38.0 | And... |
| 0:39.0 | Ready, exhale, up, hold, hold and down, up hold hold and down up hold it and down all the way the Jane Fonda workout |
| 0:48.4 | but we begin with a moment from the 1980s which was truly iconic, the world's most famous |
| 0:55.7 | woman taking on the stigma surrounding the decades most feared disease. It was in April |
| 1:01.0 | 1987 that Princess Diana opened the UK's first purpose-built HIV AIDS unit |
| 1:07.0 | and shook hands with a patient suffering from AIDS. The photo of that handshake made the front pages of newspapers around the world |
| 1:15.0 | and helped to change attitudes towards the disease. |
| 1:18.0 | Fahanahyther has been speaking to John O'Reilly |
| 1:21.0 | who was a nurse on that HIV AIDS ward. |
| 1:24.0 | People were frightened, |
| 1:31.0 | really frightened. |
| 1:32.0 | And because we didn't really know what it was to begin with, |
| 1:35.3 | and you know even other medical staff in this hospital wouldn't come forward to work on the unit. |
| 1:52.0 | John O'Reilly was a 23-year-old nurse who'd volunteered to work on that first HIV AIDS unit, and he believes that Princess Diana's involvement |
| 1:55.4 | really made a difference. You know for Royal was allowed to go in and shake a |
... |
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