“Have a cup of tea, a Bex, and a good lie-down!”
It’s an old-timey phrase from a bygone era that’s become part of Australia’s vernacular, shorthand for “can everyone just relax and stop making such a fuss?” But few know the shocking true story behind these words.
Sixty years ago, Australia had one of the highest and fastest-growing incidences of kidney disease in the world. An illness that had previously only affected older Australians had become rampant among otherwise healthy women in their thirties and forties. Between 1940 and 1980, kidney disease cases more than quadrupled. In the early years of the epidemic, women were dying in their thousands, while later, thousands more were only kept alive through dialysis and transplants.
It’s 1958. Priscilla Kincaid-Smith, a formidable young South African kidney specialist in her sixth year of training at Hammersmith Hospital in London, is on the brink of a prestigious career when she meets Ken, a charming Australian doctor, over an autopsy. Six weeks later they are married and bound for Melbourne, ready to begin a new life.
But in Australia, her career dreams come to a halt. When Priscilla discovers that married women are barred from working in the public service, she is forced to take a lowly laboratory role. There, she notices something deeply troubling: kidney lesions unlike any she has seen before. Comparing notes over the dinner table with Ken, a pattern begins to emerge. Young women are arriving with catastrophic kidney damage—and many share a common habit: the daily use of Bex and Vincent’s analgesic powders, aggressively marketed as a cure for headaches, exhaustion, and the pressures of modern womanhood.
As Priscilla pushes to prove the connection, she faces fierce resistance from a male-dominated medical establishment, evasive politicians, and powerful pharmaceutical companies determined to protect their profits.
A Good Lie Down tells the remarkable true story of the deadly analgesic powder epidemic through the intersecting lives of the people caught in its wake—and the unstoppable, stubbornly brilliant woman who fought to expose the truth, ban the products, and save the lives of tens of thousands of Australians.
