Joining John and Andy for this episode are Natasha McEnroe, the Keeper of Medicine at the Science Museum in London, and novelist Lissa Evans, Backlisted's old friend and the show's Original Guest, both of whom are Betty MacDonald superfans.

Natasha is the Keeper of Medicine at the Science Museum in South Kensington, London. Her previous post was Director of the Florence Nightingale Museum, and prior to this she was Museum Manager of the Grant Museum of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy and Curator of the Galton Collection at University College London. Before that she was Curator of Dr Johnson’s House in London’s Fleet Street and has also worked for the National Trust and the Victoria & Albert Museum. Natasha was editor of Medicine: An Imperfect Science (Scala, 2019), co-editor of The Medicine Cabinet (Carlton, 2019) and co-editor of The Hospital in the Oatfield – The Art of Nursing in the First World War (Strange Attractor, 2014). Her research interests focus on 19th-century public health and the history of nursing. She is a Trustee of Dr Johnson’s House in London and of the Erasmus Darwin Museum in Lichfield and is a Freeman of The Worshipful Company of Barbers. 

 Lissa Evans writes for both adults and children when she's not guesting on Backlisted Pod.Her recent novel,V for Victory - which is out in paperback from Black Swan in June - is set in London at the end of the Second World War and completes a loose historical trilogy which began with Old Baggage andCrooked Heart. This is her seven-and-a-halfth Backlisted – for as well as appearing on the very first episode (on J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country), Lissa has been a guest on episodes 36, 78, 90, 108, and 125 discussing variously the work of Patrick Hamilton, Edith Wharton, Charles Dickens, Marcel Proust and Geoffrey Willans & Ronald Searle, as well as the one-off mini-cast on George Saunders’sLincoln in the Bardo.

The Plague and I (1948) is the author's unflinching and hilarious memoir of the nine months she spent as a patient at a TB sanatorium in the Pacific North West of America. We discuss this book and the eventful life of its million-selling author (The Egg and I, Anybody Can Do Anything, Onions in the Stew), are exposed to a selection of TB-related public information films and music, and there is even a 'communicable disease in literature' quiz.

Also in this episode Andy is grabbed by Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper (1943) by Donald Henderson, reputedly Raymond Chandler's favourite crime novel; while John has been enjoying Olivette Otele's recently published history African Europeans, which traces a long African European heritage via the lives of individuals both ordinary and extraordinary.

Books mentioned:

Beetyy MacDonald - The Plague and I; The Plague and I (audiobook); The Egg and I; Onions in the Stew: Anyone Can Do Anything
Donald Henderson - Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper
Olivette Otele - African Europeans: An Untold History
Lissa Evans - Crooked Heart; Old Baggage; V for Victory
Natasha McEnroe - Medicine: An Imperfect Science; The Medicine Cabinet; The Hospital in the Oatfield
Sathnam Sangera - Empireland
David Olusoga - Black and British
Paula Becker-Brown - Looking for Betty MacDonald
Thomas Mann - The Magic Mountain

Othe links:

Victoria Spivey - TB Blues
Defeat Tuberculosis (1950)
Rodney (1950)
Galton and Simpson interview
The Egg and I film trailer
Claire Dederer’s ‘Her Great Depression’ in Columbia Journalism Review
Jimmie Rodgers - TB Blues