£7400 DAMAGES

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 73, Issue 6284, 18 September 1946, Page 3

£7400 DAMAGES

YOUNG NURSE’S INJURIES BY BURNING GAMBLE TO RESTORE BEAUTY Twenty-year-old Irene .Nattrass, former probationer nurse, of Shrews-burn-creseent, Sunderland, left Durham Assizes to give up five years of her life in a gamble to restore her beauty, lost in a hospital fire. Damages of £7OOO had been awarded her by Mr Justice Sellers against the Sunderland Corporation. Miss Nattrass had heard her counsel, Mr Russell Vick, K.C., say that the gamble might not succeed. iShe had heard the Newcastle surgeon, Mr Gordon Irwin, say that it was extraordinary how she had survived and the judge had said that in all his long experience it was the worst case of injury by burning. he had come across. At Glindon Hall Santtorium, where Miss Nattrass was employed by the corporation as a probationer, she was helping to tear up old cinema film when a sister flicked a cigarette lighter into flame to examine a piece of film. There was a burst of flame. And in trying to push a tea' chest full of blazing films out of the room the girl was terribly burned. Mr Justice Sellers said that her whole life had been changed. She would for ever be deprived of the pleasures of bathing and dancing. She had endured great suffering, and could never again be employed as a nurse. “It is very difficult to assess her chances df marriage,” he added. The judge commented ■ that Mr Gordin Irwin had said that any attempt to restore the girl by plastic surgery would be gamble, and Mr’ Vick replied that she was prepared to make the gamble to improve her looks. A plastic surgeon had told her that it might take five years;