[The nurses] may have had their innate sympathy and kindness worn thin by the complete ungratefulness and foolhardiness of the patients, but to me it seemed more likely that they had obtained their vocational training kicking cripples and hitting small children. [loc. 1632]
An account of the author's nine-month stay in a sanitorium near Seattle in 1937-8. This was recommended to me as great pandemic reading. It took me a while to get around to it, but I can confirm that it is witty, dry and very much of its time. MacDonald is apparently better known for The Egg and I, a memoir about chicken-farming, which I would previously have said held no interest for me. After reading this, I'm tempted to familiarise myself with her other works.
Tuberculosis was known as the 'white death', spreading by airborne transmission and, in the 1930s, was the cause of nearly 7% of all deaths in North America. (By 2010 it was down to 0.0036%.) MacDonald's understanding of the symptoms was limited to popular stereotypes, and it took her a while to realise that her constant cough, fatigue, chest pains et cetera were signs of underlying illness. 'I thought that everybody who worked felt as I did.' Once diagnosed, and relieved to find that she was 'really sick instead of ambition-less and indolent', she was admitted to a sanitorium, where the prescribed treatments were complete rest (no talking, no writing, no laughing: no reading!), good food and fresh air. There were a great many rules, which MacDonald lived in constant fear of breaking. Occasionally someone would go off to have a lung collapsed. (This was deemed therapeutic.)
And yet this is an immensely cheerful account -- or, perhaps, a lonely and frightening experience seen through the eyes of a cheerful and good-humoured woman. MacDonald befriends Kimi, a Japanese woman in the same four-bed ward; encounters a number of other patients, some of whose prognosis is better than others'; undergoes a number of treatments which seem very strange from the vantage point of the twenty-first century; and is eventually discharged. Very little happens, but the little things that do happen -- a snitch on the ward, a visit from MacDonald's two young daughters, a trip to flouroscopy, the coming of the Occupational Therapy lady -- are described vividly and amusingly. Which is not to say that MacDonald is all sweetness and light: her acid observations and her black humour delighted me.
Fulfils the ‘Classic’ rubric (at least 40 years old) of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge: first published 1948.
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