The Hospital

I’m reading Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon in small chunks, enjoying gorgeous prose, wonderful landscape descriptions, and fascinating vignettes about the characters she and her husband meet as they travel through Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, etc.  The book comes in at 1,300 big pages, and has yet to lose my interest.  West had great command of language, an artist's eye for countryside and detail, and a piercing understanding of the passions simmering within the people she meets.  

I’d like to share with you parts of a chapter named Two Castles. One castle is a monastery and the other a hospital for those who have contracted tuberculosis.  Both are actual castles converted, but it is the second castle, the hospital, that I’m interested in.  The doctors were competent, even excellent, but they had a very different view of how to treat the physically ill from western doctors.  Here the patients were free to roam around and act out as they pleased as long as they did not get violent.

In the dark beam of [the patients’] hypnotic and hypnotized gaze the strangeness of their plight became newly apparent, the paradox of the necessity which obliged them to accept as a savior the cold which their bodies believed to be an enemy, and to reject as death the warmth which was the known temperature of life.  The doctors beside us appeared to take for granted the atmosphere of poetic intensity, and made none of the bouncing gestures, none of the hollow invocations to optimism which in England are perpetually inflicted on any of the sick who show consciousness of their state.

As we passed along a corridor overlooking the courtyard, there trembled, in one of the deep recesses each window made in the thickness of the wall, a shadow that was almost certainly two shadows, fused by a strong preference. 

‘Yes,’ said the superintendent,’they sometimes fall in love, and it is a very good thing.  It sometimes makes all the difference, they get a new appetite for living, and then they do so well.’ 

That was the answer to all our Western scruples.  The patients were doing well.  Allowed to cast themselves for tragic roles, they were experiencing the exhilaration felt by great tragic actors.  It was not lack of self-control, lack of taste, lack of knowledge that accounted for permission of what was not permitted in the West,  Rather it was the reverse. Our people could not have handled patients full of dangerous thoughts of death and love; these people had such resources that they did not need to empty their patients of such freight.

Later the doctors have a dinner in honor of their English guests.  There is food aplenty — innumerable bottles of plumb brandy, a platter of cold meat, suckling pig, veal, ham, sausage, tongue, and slabs of butter and cheese.  The superintendent informs West that this is what the patients eat every day.  This reminds me of the 4 or 5 meals Hans ate every day while incarcerated in another tuberculosis sanitarium high on a mountain in The Magic Mountain.

But all the food makes West think.

Here was the authentic voice of the Slav.  These people hold that the way to make life better is to add good things to it, whereas in the West we hold that the way to make life better is to take bad things away from it.  With us, a satisfactory hospital patient is one who, for the time being at least, has been castrated of all adult attributes. With us, an acceptable doctor is one with all asperities characteristic of gifted men rubbed down by conformity with social standards to a shining, cornerless blandness.  With us, a suitable hospital diet is food from which everything toxic and irritant has been removed, the eunuchized pulp of steamed fish and stewed prunes. Here a patient could be adult, primitive, dusky, defensive; if he chose to foster a poetic fantasy or personal passion to tide him over his crisis, so much the better.  It was the tuberculosis germ that the doctor wanted to alter, not the patient; and that doctor himself might be just like another man, provided he possessed also a fierce intention to cure.  

One of the doctors raised his glass to me; I raised my glass to him, enjoying communion with the rich world that added instead of subtracting. I thought of the [religious] service at Shistine, and its unfamiliar climate.  The worshippers in Western countries come before the alter with the desire to subtract from the godhead and themselves; to subtract benefits from the godhead by prayer, to subtract their dangerous adult qualities by affecting childishness. The worshippers at Shistine had come before the alter with a habit of addition, which made them pour out the gift of their adoration on the godhead, which made them add to themselves by imaginative realization the divine qualities which they were contemplating in order to adore.  The effect had been of enormous reassuring natural wealth; and that was what I found in Yugoslavia on my first visit. I had come on stores of wealth as impressive as the rubies of Golconda or the gold of Klondike, which took every form except actual material wealth.  Now the superintentent was proposing the health of my husband and myself, and when he said, ‘We are a doing our best here, but we are a poor country,’ it seemed to me he was being as funny as rich people who talk to their poor relations about the large amount they have to pay in income tax.