If symptoms persist...
IN HOSPITAL wards, indignities are heaped upon the insane and the aged alike. Sometimes this is done consciously, in revenge for the suffering inflicted on the staff by patients; sometimes uncon- sciously, through thoughtlessness or in- sensibility; most often perhaps through some half-conscious fealty to routine. How easy it is to humiliate, how hard to comfort!
Of all the many indignities of madness and old age, the one I could bear with least equanimity is the constant and compulsory television. Enter any geriat- ric or psychiatric ward in the country and there, booming away unwatched in the corner of the day room, under the photo- graph in a pinewood frame of the Mat- terhorn, is the television. It is the first thing one notices, after the smell of urine. The volume is on full, or nearly so, because as often as not the television is competing for inattention with the radio, tuned to a drivelling talk show. The acoustics of most wards are echoing.
The television is on by six in the morning and is still on at 11 at night. Who switches it on in the first place? This is a mystery, because no one among either the staff or the patients will admit to having done so. An occult power is at work, and this can be proved by a simple experiment which I have performed many times. Switch off the television and leave the ward, returning five minutes later. The television will be on again, but nobody will have witnessed anyone switching it on, much less admit to having done so himself, and in the meantime there will have been no visitors to the ward. It is a phenomenon worthy of investigation by Uri Geller and Erich von Daniken.
There is another curious thing about ward televisions. From time to time patients express themselves by smashing them or hurling them through the win- dow. I have known wards go without heat, baths, windows and even bed- clothes for several days or even weeks because of an alleged shortage of funds for maintenance, but I have never known a ward in which a smashed television was not replaced within the day.
Sociologists might say this tells us something about the scale of values in post-industrial society. They would be quite right. Whenever I enter a patient's house, the television is on. The patient may be gasping his or her last; the television, however, will not be switched off just because the doctor has arrived. In my youth, when I was less sure of myself, I used often to hear a muffled version of Coronation Street transmitted through my stethoscope and the patient's chest; these days I march straight up to the television and switch it off before I even pass the time of day. If you ask a modern Briton to turn off a television, he simply lowers the volume.
Last week, I visited a man at home who was dying of cancer. He was extremely agitated, not by the prospect of eternal oblivion but because I was causing him to miss the latest episode of Neighbours.
Theodore Dalrymple
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