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On the one hand, it is obvious that any person who is sufficiently ill or injured to be taken to hospital must be in an abnormal state of mind. He is bound to become excessively self-centred, even egoistic ; he is bound to regard his own fear and suffering as something intensely personal and to imagine that he is being treated impersonally, as one only of a row of recumbent figures in a ward ;
COMMENT
NICOLSON
he• is bound to feel deserted, abandoned and unloved ; and he is bound to misinterpret the' professional attitude of the medical and nursing staff as being due to aloofness, indifference or even callous- ness. In the empty hours of the night, when the tentacles of fear creep up to clutch him by the heart, he will call to the night nurse, and whatever comfort she may give him will seem perfunctory and unsolacing. The sad humiliations of helplessness, the denial of all ordinary human privacy, will inevitably distort his resentment of his physical condition and lead him to transfer it to human agencies, leading him to associate the ministering angels with the cruelty of the very pain in which he is encased. He will end by being terribly unfair to the nursing profession and may even give voice to his indignation in terms and circumstances which leave them no occasion to reply. Obviously the nursing staff are not able, without loss of efficiency, to treat their patients too individually ; to a certain extent they are obliged to remain impersonal. Experience will have taught them that every sufferer believes his own case to be of unique importance, whereas it is their duty to distribute their ministrations impartially throughout the ward. Their attitude is thus bound to become uniform, professional, authoritative. But that does not imply that they are indifferent or inhumane.
* * The more sensible letters that I have received admit these neces- sities ; they do not criticise the nurses so much as the machine. They complain, for instance, that in most hospitals children under a certain age are not allowed to see their parents and that unneces- sary home-sickness and unhappiness are thereby caused. Clearly it is a harsh ordeal for any child to be sundered from its parents and to find itself alone and alarmed among strangers in a long gaunt room. Yet the purpose of every hospital is to heal ; and it may well be argued that a child is more injured by the excitement of a visit, and the renewed wrench of separation, than by the slow and uninterrupted ache of segregation. Most of my correspondents have also criticised what they call the " heartless and unintelligent routine " of hospital administration. Most of them, for instance, raise the familiar complaint that they are roused from their uncertain slumbers at 5 a.m. on the ground that the patients and the wards must be prepared for the visit of the doctors and their students. Yet when they have all been washed and tidied, an interval of empty hours intervenes before the doctors arrive. The explanation of this exacting habit is, I am assured that it is the night-staff who have to put the wards in order before the day-staff take over. It may be that this arrangement is convenient to the doctors ; but it is certainly one which, above all others, causes resentment and distress. Here again the layman, anxious to see both sides of the problem, is at a loss to determine on which side the correct argument lies.
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Not since my school-days have I (touch wood) found myself in a public ward. I was seriously ill with measles and one afternoon I was suddenly sick in bed ; I can still recall my resentment when scolded by the nurse for being a careless little boy and causing her extra trouble. " As if," she said, " I had not enough to do as it is." That wound still rankles, but I am prepared to believe that I behaved with lack of prevision and that she was really over-worked. Again and again have I visited sick friends in public wards and have found them comparatively contented with ,their surroundings and with the attention they received. Most people realise that a certain discipline, a certain routine, is necessary in any administration ; what they resent are what seem to them unnecessary regulations and inconveniences, the purpose of which is never explained. They would be quite prepared to be reasonable if they were treated as reasonable human beings ; what arouses their ire is that they are treated as a series of bodies which ought to be inarticulate.
THEATRE
`g Knights of Madness." (Victoria Palace.)
FINDING a Formula—the highest goal, now that gunboats are out of date, of diplomacy—is a speciality of the Crazy Gang. They embark on the quest in a most inauspicious manner. Offensive to each other, contemptuous of the audience, brutal to the orchestra and louches (to put it mildly) where female members of the cast are concerned, they seem intent on sabotaging the producer's efforts to provide some sort of entertainment. The results are not only very funny, but also, in a curious way, mellow and disarming. The beastlier they are to each other, the more strenuously they seek to alienate our sympathies, the fonder we become of them. They can seldom have been seen to better advantage than in Knights of Madness.
The trimmings—for Messrs. Nervo, Knox, Flanagan, Naughton and Gold cannot be with us all the lime, and if they were there would be nothing but each other to sabotage—are acceptable rather than distinguished. The Dassie Brothers are an engaging without being a memorable tumbling act, Messrs. Pat Hill and Lenny Delma are puppet-masters of originality rather than of genius, Mr. Jan Muzurus sings loud but long, Miss Hazel Johns, who shows promise as a mime, is given no chance to do more, and Miss Jillian Roma and Miss Linda Lee, though they do very well, too, find only precarious spells.
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