People have a tendency to sympathise with nurses in hospitals.  These dedicated medical workers, underpaid and overused, are somehow unquestioningly trusted to be caring.  Most are, but in case, the dedication displayed was anything but good news or those in her care, if they managed to survive it.

This was a girl with a troubled history, long before becoming a student nurse, yet this had somehow escaped he attention of the hospital that employed her.  Beverly Allitt had always suffered from Munchausen’s syndrome, causing harm to herself, to get the attention she felt she lacked.  It seems that this girl put bandages and casts over imagined wounds, that she not allow anyone to examine.

In adolescence, she gained weight, and the problem worsened. She had a violent temper, and was noted for her cruelty toward other children, yet no remedial action was ever taken. Her attention seeking worsened, so that she became a familiar visitor the local hospital, complaining of suffering from an endless list of ailments.

She was convincing enough to get a perfectly healthy appendix removed, and then deliberately preventing the scar from healing, to get more medical attention.  Eventually, local doctors knew all about her, so she started to go further afield, determined not to be turned away, in her quest for ‘treatment’.  This seriously disturbed young woman needed therapy, but somehow, nobody noticed.

Munchausen sufferers tend to ignore psychiatric referrals, anyway, preferring to move endlessly between hospitals, with their ‘illnesses’. Allitt was unusual, however, because she was one of the rare breed that suffered both from Munchausen’s syndrome(MS) itself and Munchausen’s by Proxy syndrome(MSBP), which is infinitely worse.

The horror of this is that, however much of a danger MS sufferers are to themselves, the threat is even greater from MSBP, because this involves harming others, then trying to save them, in search of attention.

It seemed perfectly natural, to Allitt, to choose nursing as a career, because it kept her close to the care she craved.  How her past history slipped by her employers is a mystery, but she duly became a student nurse, and then the real nature of her mental illness came to light.

During her training as a caregiver in a nursing home, she was suspected of smearing faeces on the walls and putting it into the refrigerator for others to find. She missed many workdays because of illness, but was still not getting the attention she felt she deserved.  She had to find an outlet for her perverted ambitions, and that’s when the real tragedy began to unfold.