Bramwell – Nostalgia Central

1 9 9 5 – 1 9 9 8 (UK)
27 x 60 minute episodes

Ambitious young doctor Eleanor Bramwell (Jemma Redgrave) was both caring and passionate about advances in medicine. But in 1895, women were not expected to display new ideas, let alone hold any driving ambition to become a leading surgeon.

With the odds stacked against her, Eleanor is determined to pursue her dream.

She opens the charitable Thrift Infirmary for the Deserving Poor amongst the slums of London’s East End and supplements her charitable work there by working in the private Mayfair practice of her widowed father, Robert (David Calder).

Her efforts to become a surgeon are constantly frustrated by the highly paid society butcher, Sir Herbert Hamilton (Robert Hardy).

The operation scenes in Bramwell made Casualty positively cosy and Chicago Hope child’s play.

In episode one, for example, a patient’s toes were cut off his infected foot with just a shot of gin and laudanum as anaesthetic, and an eminent male surgeon thought nothing of removing both ovaries from a depressed but otherwise healthy young woman.

This was the frontline of Victorian hospitals, where the skills and opinions of the medical establishment retrospectively seem like something out of the dark ages.

Dr Eleanor Bramwell
Jemma Redgrave
Nurse Ethel Carr
Ruth Sheen
Dr Robert Bramwell
David Calder
Dr Joseph Marsham
Kevin McMonagle
Kate
Keeley Gainey
Sidney Bentley
Ben Brazier
Daniel Bentley
Cliff Parisi
Dr Finn O’Neill
Andrew Connolly
Sir Herbert Hamilton
Robert Hardy
Alice Costigan
Maureen Beattie
Lady Cora Peters
Michele Dotrice
Caslow
David Shelley