CeCe on Bessie Blount

Transcript

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So after the Second World War, hospitals were full of men who had lost their arms. And a nurse named Bessie Blount Griffin watched them getting fed by somebody else, every single meal.

Now mind you, she'd been teaching them to write with their teeth, so she knew what they could do. But she kept coming back to the dinner thing.

Because it wasn't about the food, it was about the dignity. So she built a machine that pushed one bite at a time, triggered by biting down on a tube.

And that meant a man could feed himself, with nobody standing over him. But she couldn't get anybody in this country to take it. So she gave the patent to France, for free.

Long story short, she said being first was worth more than the money.