In a hospital run by Government which shall be nameless, a
remarkable experience befell me some months ago. I was then without any income.
The visit to the hospital was for the sake of a surgical operation for a little
daughter, aged eight. When I announced nil in response to the usual enquiry
about income, the admission nurse raised her eyebrows in frank token of
disbelief. A friend had taken me to the ward in a car and she had seen me get
down from it. How could the poor have car rides? She made the entry with a
knowledgeable wink and the air of one conniving at a conspiracy.
* * *
On the day fixed for the operation I sat with the patient on
a bench in the verandah waiting for her to be called to the theatre. She was
not a particularly brave girl. As, every half an hour or so, she saw the
‘cases’ being carried on trollies from the doctor’s room to their beds in an
unconscious condition with blood all over, terror filled her imagination and it
was all I could do to persuade her to stay and not run away. After two hours’
waiting she was called in. Then in two minutes, she was sent back minus her
case-sheet in order that priority might be given to some more favoured
patients. This was repeated three times at intervals of about an hour each
time. Only on the fourth occasion was the operation eventually made.
* * *
There are, it would appear, two classes of patients: those
who come in after paying a fee to the doctor in his private consulting room,
and the rest. Many doctors of great ability work on next to nothing in
hospitals, and it is not unnatural if some of them use their position for the
greater advantage of those who pay them for it. The merely non-unnatural is
not, it should however be proudly said, the standard for the elect. I have
known doctors so exemplary that they made no difference whatever in their
treatment of patients on any ground pertaining to benefit for themselves. Their
hearts were filled with mercy for sufferers. Fees were accepted by them only
incidentally, with no taint of integrity of their professional service.
* * *
Between the elect who act as saints and the mere mercenaries
whose universe of interest is filled with fees, there are many grades of
doctors, but as it is a calling concerned for the relief of people in pain, it
should I feel, develop a collective conscience against the inroads of avarice
on the character of its practitioners. Any doctor who exposes a mortally
terrified girl to three avoidable repetitions of the sort of experience I have
narrated above, will then be treated as a misfit in the profession of healers,
however great the skill of his hand in wielding the surgeon’s knife.
* * *
In the particular hospital I have referred to, everything was
in a bad way. The beds were not made daily. They were infested by swarms of
bugs. The sheets were dirt-smeared. Cleanliness was at a discount. The nursing
was inadequate. The provisions intended for the patients were regularly
flinched. The fleecing practiced on visitors by the menial staff was
prodigious. What with exorbitant charges mulcted from the necessitous for
services that should have been rendered freely, readily and cheerfully as part
of efficient hospital administration itself, a sordid black market atmosphere
prevailed in the precincts. The plight of the poor condemned to rely on an
institution like this is truly unenviable.
It calls for immediate relief at the hands of any Government worth the
name.—(April 6, 1946) S A K A
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