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How the Poor Die
"How the Poor Die" is an essay published in 1946 by George Orwell. Orwell gives an anecdotal account of his experiences in a French?public hospital which triggers a contemplation of hospital literature in the context of 19th-century medicine.
152 pages, Unknown Binding
First published November 1, 1946
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About the author
George Orwell
1,254?books47.8k?followersEric Arthur Blair was an English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to all totalitarianism (both authoritarian communism and fascism), and support of democratic socialism.
Orwell is best known for his allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), although his works also encompass literary criticism, poetry, fiction and polemical journalism. His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in the industrial north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), are as critically respected as his essays on politics, literature, language and culture.
Orwell's work remains influential in popular culture and in political culture, and the adjective "Orwellian"—describing totalitarian and authoritarian social practices—is part of the English language, like many of his neologisms, such as "Big Brother", "Thought Police", "Room 101", "Newspeak", "memory hole", "doublethink", and "thoughtcrime". In 2008, The Times named Orwell the second-greatest British writer since 1945.
Orwell is best known for his allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), although his works also encompass literary criticism, poetry, fiction and polemical journalism. His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in the industrial north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), are as critically respected as his essays on politics, literature, language and culture.
Orwell's work remains influential in popular culture and in political culture, and the adjective "Orwellian"—describing totalitarian and authoritarian social practices—is part of the English language, like many of his neologisms, such as "Big Brother", "Thought Police", "Room 101", "Newspeak", "memory hole", "doublethink", and "thoughtcrime". In 2008, The Times named Orwell the second-greatest British writer since 1945.
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February 23, 2025
George Orwell’s essay How the Poor Die makes for grim reading. It was first published in the magazine “狈辞飞” in 1946. The periodical had been founded 6 years earlier “for publishing literary matter and also as a forum for controversial writing”, so it must have been the perfect vehicle for this essay. Also, significantly, even though How the Poor Die had been written a decade or more before, it was first published in the very year when the British National Health Service (NHS) Act became law.
The NHS was part of a social welfare policy under Clement Atlee’s Labour government, and stated:
“It shall be the duty of the Minister of Health to promote the establishment of a health service to secure improvement in the physical and mental health of the people and the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of illness.”
The fine details were sorted out and the National Health Service started 2 years later, on 5th July 1948. The Minister of Health, Aneurin Bevan, was given the task of introducing the service. Its aims were to provide universal and free benefits to all those in need. Britain was on the cusp of arguably the greatest change in social policy there had ever been; an incredibly exciting time full of optimism, looking forward to a hopeful future, when all would have access to the best healthcare possible, irrespective of their means. (So far, in Britain, this is still the case, and honoured by all governments, whatever their political party.) Two years earlier then, keeping the public’s mind on the issue, and focusing on what the alternative might be, must have seemed crucial.
George Orwell had probably written How the Poor Die between 1931 and 1936, when his work revolved around the unemployed, tramps and beggars. For example “Down and Out in Paris and London”, had first been published in 1933. It has been suggested that he may have reworked it between summer 1940 and spring 1941, and he had certainly submitted it to “贬辞谤颈锄辞苍” magazine a few years later. However, it had been rejected at that time, probably because readers would have been unwilling to read about “how the poor die” in the middle of World War II. A decade on from its creation, the timing was now critical. This then is the background to the publication of George Orwell’s essay.
George Orwell expresses his concerns about hospital and medical care, and exactly pinpoints the preoccupations and worries of the public at that time, when he says:
“The dread of hospitals probably still survives among the very poor, and in all of us it has only recently disappeared. It is a dark patch not far beneath the surface of our minds.”
George Orwell does not write about conditions in English hospitals, instead recalling a public hospital in France. In 1928, he had gone to live in Paris, and had stayed there for 18 months. In early 1929 he began to feel unwell and spent two weeks in a public ward in “H?pital X” from 7th to 22nd March 1929. In fact this was the H?pital Cochin, rue Faubourg Saint-Jacques, in the 15th arrondissement of Paris. The hospital still exists, although with a much improved reputation.
George Orwell was 25 years old, and although he was very ill, he continued writing, giving the hospital address to a publisher. Presumably it was notes from this time which he worked into the essay later. George Orwell was subject to bronchial conditions throughout his life. He had been admitted suffering from influenza or pneumonia—it was never established which—and describes vividly the squalor and primitive treatments he received:
“You got very little treatment at all, either good or bad, unless you were ill in some interesting and instructive way.”
On admission, George Orwell was interrogated dispassionately and at length by a clerk, and then given a bath:
“a compulsory routine for all newcomers, apparently, just as in prison or the workhouse.”
He was marched without slippers along the frosty path, while shivering from a high fever. He was not alone in this; it was standard practice. Entering a low ill-lit room full of murmuring voices, three rows of beds packed close together, he noticed a “foul smell, faecal and yet sweetish.”
In a nearby bed, a doctor and a student were performing a vaguely familiar medical procedure on someone, although it was not until later that George Orwell realised what it was. It was cupping, an “barbarous remedy” dating from the 19th century and before. Without a word, and using the same uncleaned glasses, the two medics started treating him the same way:
“I had never been in the public ward of a hospital before, and it was my first experience of doctors who handle you without speaking to you, or, in a human sense, taking any notice of you …
As I lay down again, humiliated, disgusted and frightened by the thing that had been done to me, I reflected that now at least they would leave me alone.”
But no, next was a mustard poultice, applied by “two slatternly nurses”. This was routine for all new patients, and also regarded as routine entertainment for the ward.
“These things are normally applied for a quarter of an hour and certainly they are funny enough if you don’t happen to be the person inside. During the second five minutes this belief evaporates, but the poultice is buckled at the back and you can’t get it off. This is the period the onlookers most enjoy.”
George Orwell did not sleep that night, and the next day he experienced daily life on the ward. The nurses woke the patients at 5 am, and took their temperature, but did not wash them. That was left to patients themselves, as was fetching bottles and “the grim bed-pan, nicknamed ‘la casserole’”.
Breakfast consisted of a thin vegetable soup with slimy hunks of bread floating about in it. Scraps of food and dirty dressings were discarded in the ward in a huge packing case infested with crickets. A tall, solemn, black-bearded doctor sped through, making his rounds, followed by a retinue of interns and students:
“sometimes followed by imploring cries. On the other hand if you had some disease with which the students wanted to familiarize themselves you got plenty of attention of a kind. I myself, with an exceptionally fine specimen of a bronchial rattle, sometimes had as many as a dozen students queuing up to listen to my chest …
As a non-paying patient, in the uniform nightshirt, you were primarily ‘a specimen’, a thing I did not resent but could never quite get used to.”
The patients had no privacy. They lay exposed, suffering, urinating, and defecating in full public view.
“In most of the other beds within my angle of vision some squalid tragedy or some plain horror was being enacted”.
George Orwell gives details of some of those in the beds nearest to him. It makes for starkly grim reading. They died alone, their organs already marked for a bottle in the museum; their bodies designated for dissection. One such was known as “numéro 57”, who had cirrhosis of the liver. The doctor would sometimes wheel him into the middle of the ward on a sort of trolley, poke and examine him, whilst giving a medical lecture to yet another new group of students:
“As usual he neither spoke to his patient nor gave him a smile, a nod or any kind of recognition”.
The patient remained utterly uninterested. His liver had long since been marked down for a bottle in some pathological museum. He died some time during one night. Nobody knew or cared when.
“When the nurses came they received the news of his death indifferently and went about their work.”
The body was not removed until much, much later, and George Orwell had time to look and reflect on his fellow patient, and on the difference between this degradation and the violent deaths he had witnessed in India and Spain:
“[His] eyes were still open, his mouth also open, his small face contorted into an expression of agony … it struck me that this disgusting piece of refuse, waiting to be carted away and dumped on a slab in the dissecting room, was an example of ‘natural’ death, one of the things you pray for … that is how the lucky ones die, the ones who live to be old … ‘Natural’ death, almost by definition, means something slow, smelly and painful …This poor old wretch who had just flickered out like a candle-end was not even important enough to have anyone watching by his deathbed. He was merely a number, then a ‘subject’ for the students’ scalpels. And the sordid publicity of dying in such a place!”
George Orwell comments that these appalling conditions had become a thing of the past, in England. “Just dying like animals, for instance, with nobody standing by, nobody interested” reminded him of Victorian times. He says that the nurses had “a tinge of Mrs. Gamp about them”, alluding to the dissolute, sloppy and generally drunk “nurse” of sorts, Mrs. Gamp, a famous character invented by Charles Dickens in his “Martin Chuzzlewit”. She was happy to “cure” anyone for the price of a bottle of gin. Anyone recognising the reference would instantly then know how neglected the patients were.
As soon as George Orwell had got his clothes back and was strong enough to walk, he:
“fled from the H?pital X, before my time was up and without waiting for a medical discharge. It was not the only hospital I have fled from, but its gloom and bareness, its sickly smell and, above all, something in its mental atmosphere stand out in my memory as exceptional.”
How the Poor Die is one of George Orwell’s longer essays, at just over 4500 words. In the second half he tells how this affected him, remembering tall tales in England about doctors cutting you open out of sheer curiosity or thinking it funny to start operating before you were properly “under”. Dreadful screams were said to issue from a little room in H?pital X, and on one occasion George Orwell did see two students cause the death of a sixteen-year-old boy by a “mischievous experiment”. This made him wonder whether the stories were sometimes more than rumours.
“Well within living memory it used to be believed in London that in some of the big hospitals patients were killed off to get dissection subjects … H?pital X … was a hospital in which not the methods, perhaps, but something of the atmosphere of the nineteenth century had managed to survive, and therein lay its peculiar interest”.
For the concluding part of the essay, George Orwell refers to the horrors of hospitals in the 19th century, and the literature of the period; as extreme as the scenes in ?mile Zola’s “La Déb?cle”, and the field hospitals in Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”, or “that shocking description of an amputation in Herman Melville’s ‘White-Jacket’”. In “H?pital X” too, the patients were subject to barbaric horrors; virtual prisoners, they were held captive by their poverty. George Orwell describes H?pital X as:
“an old-?fashioned, dungeon?like prison … a place of filth and torture and death”.
Patients were denied humanity, but were moved quickly through the system. The hospital was about the “business of people dying like animals”; the doctors, with “the generic nickname ‘sawbones’, about as grim as they are comic”.
Since operations had to be conducted without anaesthetics, he says:
“it is difficult not to suspect the motives of people who would undertake such things. For these bloody horrors which the students so eagerly looked forward to (‘A magnificent sight if Slasher does it!’) were admittedly more or less useless: the patient who did not die of shock usually died of gangrene, a result which was taken for granted … But anaesthetics were a turning-point, and disinfectants were another”.
The English public reading this essay when it was first published on the eve of the NHS, would have had experience in various types of hospital. For the large part, they would be from the working and lower ?middle classes, and the threat of what an experience in a bad hospital could be like, must have been at the forefront of their minds. Perhaps some had even had experiences similar to this themselves. They would be certain to champion the founding of an NHS, if this was a possible alternative. Memories of being unlikely to return once admitted to a hospital were routine in the 19th century (although it has to be said that some do still have this dread even today).
The essay is full of vivid and explicit images, and we feel the pathos of it all. We see many examples of traumatic experiences in “H?pital X” which left George Orwell hurt, frustrated, humiliated, angry and frightened. He must have been full of bitter resentment, yet he remains emotionally detached and critical; never self-indulgent. Occasionally George Orwell is ironic, or satirical, but this is for ease of reading, as the facts are so relentlessly grim. Mostly his descriptions are deliberately neutral, to avoid bias. Yet his explicit comparison with medical treatments and institutions of the 19th century show that this experience had nonetheless affected the 25 year old George Orwell mentally and psychologically.
George Orwell finishes his essay with a note of warning. He had been reminded of a poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, called “The Children’s Hospital”, which a old sick-nurse had read to him when he was tiny. It was full of horrors and suffering in an old-fashioned hospital, but it had been a vivid memory to her. He had forgotten the poem, but it came back to him word for word in H?pital X.
It was a critical time for the original readers to read this essay. It is also a critical time right now, in a world pandemic. Health care systems in some countries are fragile at the best of times, and virtually nonexistent for the poor. With overwork, not enough drugs and equipment, and no end in sight, it would not take much for some formerly caring individuals, now under intolerable pressure, to lose heart, and slip into the callousness of H?pital X.
The essay has been reprinted in various collections:
Now. — GB, London. — November 1946.
Reprinted:— ‘Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays’ 1950.
‘The Orwell Reader, Fiction, Essays, and Reportage’ — 1956.
‘Collected Essays’. — 1961.
‘Decline of the English Murder and Other Essays’. — 1965.
‘The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell’. — 1968.
The NHS was part of a social welfare policy under Clement Atlee’s Labour government, and stated:
“It shall be the duty of the Minister of Health to promote the establishment of a health service to secure improvement in the physical and mental health of the people and the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of illness.”
The fine details were sorted out and the National Health Service started 2 years later, on 5th July 1948. The Minister of Health, Aneurin Bevan, was given the task of introducing the service. Its aims were to provide universal and free benefits to all those in need. Britain was on the cusp of arguably the greatest change in social policy there had ever been; an incredibly exciting time full of optimism, looking forward to a hopeful future, when all would have access to the best healthcare possible, irrespective of their means. (So far, in Britain, this is still the case, and honoured by all governments, whatever their political party.) Two years earlier then, keeping the public’s mind on the issue, and focusing on what the alternative might be, must have seemed crucial.
George Orwell had probably written How the Poor Die between 1931 and 1936, when his work revolved around the unemployed, tramps and beggars. For example “Down and Out in Paris and London”, had first been published in 1933. It has been suggested that he may have reworked it between summer 1940 and spring 1941, and he had certainly submitted it to “贬辞谤颈锄辞苍” magazine a few years later. However, it had been rejected at that time, probably because readers would have been unwilling to read about “how the poor die” in the middle of World War II. A decade on from its creation, the timing was now critical. This then is the background to the publication of George Orwell’s essay.
George Orwell expresses his concerns about hospital and medical care, and exactly pinpoints the preoccupations and worries of the public at that time, when he says:
“The dread of hospitals probably still survives among the very poor, and in all of us it has only recently disappeared. It is a dark patch not far beneath the surface of our minds.”
George Orwell does not write about conditions in English hospitals, instead recalling a public hospital in France. In 1928, he had gone to live in Paris, and had stayed there for 18 months. In early 1929 he began to feel unwell and spent two weeks in a public ward in “H?pital X” from 7th to 22nd March 1929. In fact this was the H?pital Cochin, rue Faubourg Saint-Jacques, in the 15th arrondissement of Paris. The hospital still exists, although with a much improved reputation.
George Orwell was 25 years old, and although he was very ill, he continued writing, giving the hospital address to a publisher. Presumably it was notes from this time which he worked into the essay later. George Orwell was subject to bronchial conditions throughout his life. He had been admitted suffering from influenza or pneumonia—it was never established which—and describes vividly the squalor and primitive treatments he received:
“You got very little treatment at all, either good or bad, unless you were ill in some interesting and instructive way.”
On admission, George Orwell was interrogated dispassionately and at length by a clerk, and then given a bath:
“a compulsory routine for all newcomers, apparently, just as in prison or the workhouse.”
He was marched without slippers along the frosty path, while shivering from a high fever. He was not alone in this; it was standard practice. Entering a low ill-lit room full of murmuring voices, three rows of beds packed close together, he noticed a “foul smell, faecal and yet sweetish.”
In a nearby bed, a doctor and a student were performing a vaguely familiar medical procedure on someone, although it was not until later that George Orwell realised what it was. It was cupping, an “barbarous remedy” dating from the 19th century and before. Without a word, and using the same uncleaned glasses, the two medics started treating him the same way:
“I had never been in the public ward of a hospital before, and it was my first experience of doctors who handle you without speaking to you, or, in a human sense, taking any notice of you …
As I lay down again, humiliated, disgusted and frightened by the thing that had been done to me, I reflected that now at least they would leave me alone.”
But no, next was a mustard poultice, applied by “two slatternly nurses”. This was routine for all new patients, and also regarded as routine entertainment for the ward.
“These things are normally applied for a quarter of an hour and certainly they are funny enough if you don’t happen to be the person inside. During the second five minutes this belief evaporates, but the poultice is buckled at the back and you can’t get it off. This is the period the onlookers most enjoy.”
George Orwell did not sleep that night, and the next day he experienced daily life on the ward. The nurses woke the patients at 5 am, and took their temperature, but did not wash them. That was left to patients themselves, as was fetching bottles and “the grim bed-pan, nicknamed ‘la casserole’”.
Breakfast consisted of a thin vegetable soup with slimy hunks of bread floating about in it. Scraps of food and dirty dressings were discarded in the ward in a huge packing case infested with crickets. A tall, solemn, black-bearded doctor sped through, making his rounds, followed by a retinue of interns and students:
“sometimes followed by imploring cries. On the other hand if you had some disease with which the students wanted to familiarize themselves you got plenty of attention of a kind. I myself, with an exceptionally fine specimen of a bronchial rattle, sometimes had as many as a dozen students queuing up to listen to my chest …
As a non-paying patient, in the uniform nightshirt, you were primarily ‘a specimen’, a thing I did not resent but could never quite get used to.”
The patients had no privacy. They lay exposed, suffering, urinating, and defecating in full public view.
“In most of the other beds within my angle of vision some squalid tragedy or some plain horror was being enacted”.
George Orwell gives details of some of those in the beds nearest to him. It makes for starkly grim reading. They died alone, their organs already marked for a bottle in the museum; their bodies designated for dissection. One such was known as “numéro 57”, who had cirrhosis of the liver. The doctor would sometimes wheel him into the middle of the ward on a sort of trolley, poke and examine him, whilst giving a medical lecture to yet another new group of students:
“As usual he neither spoke to his patient nor gave him a smile, a nod or any kind of recognition”.
The patient remained utterly uninterested. His liver had long since been marked down for a bottle in some pathological museum. He died some time during one night. Nobody knew or cared when.
“When the nurses came they received the news of his death indifferently and went about their work.”
The body was not removed until much, much later, and George Orwell had time to look and reflect on his fellow patient, and on the difference between this degradation and the violent deaths he had witnessed in India and Spain:
“[His] eyes were still open, his mouth also open, his small face contorted into an expression of agony … it struck me that this disgusting piece of refuse, waiting to be carted away and dumped on a slab in the dissecting room, was an example of ‘natural’ death, one of the things you pray for … that is how the lucky ones die, the ones who live to be old … ‘Natural’ death, almost by definition, means something slow, smelly and painful …This poor old wretch who had just flickered out like a candle-end was not even important enough to have anyone watching by his deathbed. He was merely a number, then a ‘subject’ for the students’ scalpels. And the sordid publicity of dying in such a place!”
George Orwell comments that these appalling conditions had become a thing of the past, in England. “Just dying like animals, for instance, with nobody standing by, nobody interested” reminded him of Victorian times. He says that the nurses had “a tinge of Mrs. Gamp about them”, alluding to the dissolute, sloppy and generally drunk “nurse” of sorts, Mrs. Gamp, a famous character invented by Charles Dickens in his “Martin Chuzzlewit”. She was happy to “cure” anyone for the price of a bottle of gin. Anyone recognising the reference would instantly then know how neglected the patients were.
As soon as George Orwell had got his clothes back and was strong enough to walk, he:
“fled from the H?pital X, before my time was up and without waiting for a medical discharge. It was not the only hospital I have fled from, but its gloom and bareness, its sickly smell and, above all, something in its mental atmosphere stand out in my memory as exceptional.”
How the Poor Die is one of George Orwell’s longer essays, at just over 4500 words. In the second half he tells how this affected him, remembering tall tales in England about doctors cutting you open out of sheer curiosity or thinking it funny to start operating before you were properly “under”. Dreadful screams were said to issue from a little room in H?pital X, and on one occasion George Orwell did see two students cause the death of a sixteen-year-old boy by a “mischievous experiment”. This made him wonder whether the stories were sometimes more than rumours.
“Well within living memory it used to be believed in London that in some of the big hospitals patients were killed off to get dissection subjects … H?pital X … was a hospital in which not the methods, perhaps, but something of the atmosphere of the nineteenth century had managed to survive, and therein lay its peculiar interest”.
For the concluding part of the essay, George Orwell refers to the horrors of hospitals in the 19th century, and the literature of the period; as extreme as the scenes in ?mile Zola’s “La Déb?cle”, and the field hospitals in Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”, or “that shocking description of an amputation in Herman Melville’s ‘White-Jacket’”. In “H?pital X” too, the patients were subject to barbaric horrors; virtual prisoners, they were held captive by their poverty. George Orwell describes H?pital X as:
“an old-?fashioned, dungeon?like prison … a place of filth and torture and death”.
Patients were denied humanity, but were moved quickly through the system. The hospital was about the “business of people dying like animals”; the doctors, with “the generic nickname ‘sawbones’, about as grim as they are comic”.
Since operations had to be conducted without anaesthetics, he says:
“it is difficult not to suspect the motives of people who would undertake such things. For these bloody horrors which the students so eagerly looked forward to (‘A magnificent sight if Slasher does it!’) were admittedly more or less useless: the patient who did not die of shock usually died of gangrene, a result which was taken for granted … But anaesthetics were a turning-point, and disinfectants were another”.
The English public reading this essay when it was first published on the eve of the NHS, would have had experience in various types of hospital. For the large part, they would be from the working and lower ?middle classes, and the threat of what an experience in a bad hospital could be like, must have been at the forefront of their minds. Perhaps some had even had experiences similar to this themselves. They would be certain to champion the founding of an NHS, if this was a possible alternative. Memories of being unlikely to return once admitted to a hospital were routine in the 19th century (although it has to be said that some do still have this dread even today).
The essay is full of vivid and explicit images, and we feel the pathos of it all. We see many examples of traumatic experiences in “H?pital X” which left George Orwell hurt, frustrated, humiliated, angry and frightened. He must have been full of bitter resentment, yet he remains emotionally detached and critical; never self-indulgent. Occasionally George Orwell is ironic, or satirical, but this is for ease of reading, as the facts are so relentlessly grim. Mostly his descriptions are deliberately neutral, to avoid bias. Yet his explicit comparison with medical treatments and institutions of the 19th century show that this experience had nonetheless affected the 25 year old George Orwell mentally and psychologically.
George Orwell finishes his essay with a note of warning. He had been reminded of a poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, called “The Children’s Hospital”, which a old sick-nurse had read to him when he was tiny. It was full of horrors and suffering in an old-fashioned hospital, but it had been a vivid memory to her. He had forgotten the poem, but it came back to him word for word in H?pital X.
It was a critical time for the original readers to read this essay. It is also a critical time right now, in a world pandemic. Health care systems in some countries are fragile at the best of times, and virtually nonexistent for the poor. With overwork, not enough drugs and equipment, and no end in sight, it would not take much for some formerly caring individuals, now under intolerable pressure, to lose heart, and slip into the callousness of H?pital X.
The essay has been reprinted in various collections:
Now. — GB, London. — November 1946.
Reprinted:— ‘Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays’ 1950.
‘The Orwell Reader, Fiction, Essays, and Reportage’ — 1956.
‘Collected Essays’. — 1961.
‘Decline of the English Murder and Other Essays’. — 1965.
‘The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell’. — 1968.
January 6, 2022
"How the Poor Die" is a 1946 essay by George Orwell telling about his experiences in a French public hospital in 1929. He was treated for probable pneumonia in an underfunded, understaffed filthy hospital for poor patients who could not pay for their care. One doctor was responsible for the sixty patients in Orwell's ward, as well as patients in several other wards. The public hospital was a place for medical students to learn from the doctor on rounds, and a source of bodies for dissection. The patients were treated like numbers, and ignored if their cases were not considered interesting.
Orwell compares the hospital in Paris with better hospitals in Spain and England. He also discusses literature set in hospitals:
"If you look at almost any literature before the later part of the nineteenth century, you find that a hospital is popularly regarded as much the same thing as a prison, and an old-fashioned, dungeon-like prison at that. A hospital is a place of filth, torture, and death, a sort of antechamber to the tomb."
One wonders if some of the distrust of hospitals that exists in people even today goes back to horror stories people heard from their ancestors. I think healthcare today is very good in some parts of the world, but very primitive in other locations. The COVID crisis now is really bringing out the differences that exist in people's perception of healthcare and hospitals, especially among the poor and minority groups. Mistreatment in the past created long-term attitudes of distrust in some groups.
Orwell compares the hospital in Paris with better hospitals in Spain and England. He also discusses literature set in hospitals:
"If you look at almost any literature before the later part of the nineteenth century, you find that a hospital is popularly regarded as much the same thing as a prison, and an old-fashioned, dungeon-like prison at that. A hospital is a place of filth, torture, and death, a sort of antechamber to the tomb."
One wonders if some of the distrust of hospitals that exists in people even today goes back to horror stories people heard from their ancestors. I think healthcare today is very good in some parts of the world, but very primitive in other locations. The COVID crisis now is really bringing out the differences that exist in people's perception of healthcare and hospitals, especially among the poor and minority groups. Mistreatment in the past created long-term attitudes of distrust in some groups.
January 22, 2022
“I had never been in the public ward of a hospital before, and it was my first experience of doctors who handle you without speaking to you, or, in a human sense, taking any notice of you.”
I have been seeing the most horrific images from hospital wards in Afghanistan: babies dying from hunger or because there was no money for medications. This reminder that the world is still such a brutal place for so many was fresh on my mind as I read Orwell's account of his experience in a French hospital for poor patients in 1929. It is difficult but important reading.
Orwell mentions that national health insurance was beginning to help bring about humane treatment of the poor, and I read that the National Health Service was created by an act passed in 1946, the year this essay was written. But as an American who has personally been warned off “Welfare hospitals” in different areas I’ve lived, known countless who avoid needed treatment due to cost, and others who have gone bankrupt after seeking it, I know how far my country still lags behind in improving cruel conditions.
In his essay, Orwell stated his wish to make political writing an art. This one--with its blend of personal account, stinging detail, and broader implications--is a demonstration of that wish fulfilled.
Available online here: '.
I have been seeing the most horrific images from hospital wards in Afghanistan: babies dying from hunger or because there was no money for medications. This reminder that the world is still such a brutal place for so many was fresh on my mind as I read Orwell's account of his experience in a French hospital for poor patients in 1929. It is difficult but important reading.
Orwell mentions that national health insurance was beginning to help bring about humane treatment of the poor, and I read that the National Health Service was created by an act passed in 1946, the year this essay was written. But as an American who has personally been warned off “Welfare hospitals” in different areas I’ve lived, known countless who avoid needed treatment due to cost, and others who have gone bankrupt after seeking it, I know how far my country still lags behind in improving cruel conditions.
In his essay, Orwell stated his wish to make political writing an art. This one--with its blend of personal account, stinging detail, and broader implications--is a demonstration of that wish fulfilled.
Available online here: '.
June 8, 2022
Так же как Достоевский описал свой опыт пребывания на каторге в своих ?Записках из мертвого дома?, Оруэлл описал свой опыт пребывания в государственной больнице в Париже, где он проходил лечение от пневмонии. Его возмутили безразличие врачей, равнодушие медсестер, отношение студентов-медиков к людям, как к учебному материалу, а не живым, чувствующим существам. Он поражен был бедностью больницы, убогостью палат, где койки стояли настолько близко друг к другу, что невозможно было даже поставить между ними ширмы. Его смутили некоторые методы лечения, как банки и горчичники. Вообще говоря, я не имею ничего против таких методов, тем более, что его лечили в доантибиотиковую эпоху (пенициллин был изобретен в 1928 году, на год раньше произведения, но я сомневаюсь, что он был широко доступен, во всяком случае, Оруэлл о них не упоминает). Могу сказать, что во многих государственных больницах в моей стране, я не имею в виду в крупных городах, а в глубинке, маленьких городках, такие больницы все еще можно найти. А равнодушные врачи есть и платных клиниках. В любом случае, такие произведения полезны, потому что мы можем сравнивать ?тогда и сейчас?, ?там и у нас?.
January 7, 2022
Published in 1946, Orwell talks about his experience as a patient in Hospital X in France in 1929. He describes the treatments and care and also muses about dying; and hospitals/medical care in the previous century.
January 12, 2022
A cruel, tormenting world!
Free to read here:
Pulling no punches, mincing no words, here George Orwell delivers the sour, and the unpleasant, facts of being an "invalide" in a rundown Parisian public hospital, H?pital X, when admitted with pneumonia in 1929.
In filthy surroundings, treated in life and death, as having little worth beyond that of an animal, some succumbed, or survived by escaping their tormentors. Then, comparing fates to previous literary exposure of healthcare/ torture in Zola's "Debacle" and Tolstoy's " War and Peace".
Interest was only shown if one had interesting signs to display, to the enthusiastic medical students, clustering around their austere black frock-coated specialist master, or when a particularly painful procedures were being performed, when the audience were the other inhabitants of the long, narrow room with close adjacent beds. There was no privacy or attempt to minimise the exposure to the sufferings of the afflicted.
He compares the experience of in-patient life between this French and the more endearing British public Hospitals, and comments on the noted differences between their respective nursing staffs. I suspect, that the influence of Florence Nightingale has much to explain the latter's respect for both people, both in their lives, but also, death. Similarly, the enhanced cleanliness of a British Hospital ward may well equate to the Protestant ethos of "Cleanliness being next to Godliness"?
The sordid death of a patient in the French hospital ward serves to expose his horror of a slow, painful, "natural" death compared to that of a soldier dying during war-time "in his boots". The lack of privacy, or respect, shown by the staff, as well as other inmates, to this individual is compared to that of one experienced by a fellow in-patient of a British Hospital ward, when the (dead) patient miraculously disappeared from his bed during a mealtime when they were in the dining room.
The expectation that you were unlikely to return from a trip to a Hospital particularly in the 19th century is briefly discussed, ie, "you went to a Hospital to die", is still prevalent in some places today. I have certainly met it in my practice in healthcare, for example, when ringing up a certain patient's family, the comment to the intended recipient would be, "It's the Death Centre on the phone for you," as the receiver was passed over!
Overall, though, a sobering essay on the treatment through healthcare of the impoverished, both in life and in death, which reflects the glaring disparities of both individual attention, respect and outcome that remain still so prevalent today. Reference any public health publication for the requisite confirmation.
Plaudits to Bionic Jean and the lively and always illuminating George Orwell Matters! Book Group for encouraging my reading activities!
Free to read here:
Pulling no punches, mincing no words, here George Orwell delivers the sour, and the unpleasant, facts of being an "invalide" in a rundown Parisian public hospital, H?pital X, when admitted with pneumonia in 1929.
In filthy surroundings, treated in life and death, as having little worth beyond that of an animal, some succumbed, or survived by escaping their tormentors. Then, comparing fates to previous literary exposure of healthcare/ torture in Zola's "Debacle" and Tolstoy's " War and Peace".
Interest was only shown if one had interesting signs to display, to the enthusiastic medical students, clustering around their austere black frock-coated specialist master, or when a particularly painful procedures were being performed, when the audience were the other inhabitants of the long, narrow room with close adjacent beds. There was no privacy or attempt to minimise the exposure to the sufferings of the afflicted.
He compares the experience of in-patient life between this French and the more endearing British public Hospitals, and comments on the noted differences between their respective nursing staffs. I suspect, that the influence of Florence Nightingale has much to explain the latter's respect for both people, both in their lives, but also, death. Similarly, the enhanced cleanliness of a British Hospital ward may well equate to the Protestant ethos of "Cleanliness being next to Godliness"?
The sordid death of a patient in the French hospital ward serves to expose his horror of a slow, painful, "natural" death compared to that of a soldier dying during war-time "in his boots". The lack of privacy, or respect, shown by the staff, as well as other inmates, to this individual is compared to that of one experienced by a fellow in-patient of a British Hospital ward, when the (dead) patient miraculously disappeared from his bed during a mealtime when they were in the dining room.
The expectation that you were unlikely to return from a trip to a Hospital particularly in the 19th century is briefly discussed, ie, "you went to a Hospital to die", is still prevalent in some places today. I have certainly met it in my practice in healthcare, for example, when ringing up a certain patient's family, the comment to the intended recipient would be, "It's the Death Centre on the phone for you," as the receiver was passed over!
Overall, though, a sobering essay on the treatment through healthcare of the impoverished, both in life and in death, which reflects the glaring disparities of both individual attention, respect and outcome that remain still so prevalent today. Reference any public health publication for the requisite confirmation.
Plaudits to Bionic Jean and the lively and always illuminating George Orwell Matters! Book Group for encouraging my reading activities!
December 21, 2020
????? ?????? ?? ???? ????? ???? ?????? ??? ?????. ????? ?????? ??? ?????? ??????? ???????. ???? ?????? ????? ???? ?? ??????? ?? ??? ???? ??????? ??????? ?? ???? ??????? ??? ???? ?????????? ??????? ??? ?????? ???? ????? ?? ????? ??????? ???????? ???????? ?????? ?????? ??????? ??? ?????? ????? ????? ???????? ??????????? ?? ??????? ?????? ?? ?????. ????? ?? ?????? ?? ??????? ???? ??????? ??? ???? ???? ?????????? ?? ????? ?? ???? ????????????? ?? ?? ??? ????.... ????? ???? ????? ??????? ??????? ?? ??????? ??? ???? ????? ?? ?????? ????? ??? ?????? ??????? ????? ??? ???? ?? ????? ???? ? ????? ???? ????? ??????? ?? ??? ?? ??? ?? ??????? ?????? ???? ?????? ???? ????. ??????? ??????? ?? ??????? ??????? ? ?? ??? ???? ????? ?? ?????? ?? ????? ??? ??????? ???? ??????? ??? ??? ???? ?????.
????? ?????? ?????? ??? ?????? ?? ???? ?????? ??????? ????? ????... ???????? ???????... ????? ????? ????? ??????? ??? ?????? ?????? ?? ???? ?????. ????? ????. ?????? ?? ????? ???? ????? ????? ?? ????? ??????? ?????????.
????? ?????? ?????? ??? ?????? ?? ???? ?????? ??????? ????? ????... ???????? ???????... ????? ????? ????? ??????? ??? ?????? ?????? ?? ???? ?????. ????? ????. ?????? ?? ????? ???? ????? ????? ?? ????? ??????? ?????????.
October 7, 2021
?????? ????? ?? ???? ?????? ????? ??????? ?? ?????? ???? ??? ???? ??????? ???? ???? ???? ??????. ???? ?? ???? ????? ???? ?? ?????? ?? ????? ???? ????? ??? ?????? ???? ????? ?? ???? ?????? ?? ???? ???? ??? ????? ????? ?? ????? ???? ?? ?? ??? ????? ??? ????? ??????? ???? ????? ???????? ?? ?? ??? ?? ????? ????? ????????? ?????? ???? ?? ???? ?? ??? ?? ?????? ??????. ???? ?? ???? ??????? ??? ???????? ?????? ?????? ????? ????? ?????? ???????? ??????? ???? ???????. ???? ?? ???? ????? ????? ?? ???? ????? ??????? ????? ??????? ????? ??? ??????? ???? ????? ??? ????? ?????.
June 2, 2022
George Orwell’s How The Poor Die is an essay where he contemplates the state of public hospitals in the twentieth century in France. It is unhygienic and he witnesses some of the most inhumane treatment of ill people. He reflects on literature from the eighteenth century and the horror stories illustrated in them about hospitals and surgeries and concludes that only the poor, the ones who can’t pay hospital bills, are the ones who are most affected by the apathy and cruelty in public hospitals.
This is how the poor die.
I love Orwell’s way of using language, including the subtle sarcasm he sprinkles at points: In reference to the question-asking, form-filling stage before entering the hospital, he says that the hospital workers put him through “the usual third degree.” I liked how skilfully he created empathy for the patients dying in H?pital X while putting a very well-researched point across.
While the horrors of the nineteenth century no longer exist (and wasn’t as wide-spread anymore when Orwell wrote this), this piece transcends time: this essay is still relevant to us. In a different way perhaps, it is still the poor who bear the brunt of a discriminatory, bureaucratic medical system.
This is how the poor die.
A hospital is a place of filth, torture and death, a sort of antechamber to the tomb. No one who was not more or less destitute would have thought of going into such a place for treatment.
I love Orwell’s way of using language, including the subtle sarcasm he sprinkles at points: In reference to the question-asking, form-filling stage before entering the hospital, he says that the hospital workers put him through “the usual third degree.” I liked how skilfully he created empathy for the patients dying in H?pital X while putting a very well-researched point across.
While the horrors of the nineteenth century no longer exist (and wasn’t as wide-spread anymore when Orwell wrote this), this piece transcends time: this essay is still relevant to us. In a different way perhaps, it is still the poor who bear the brunt of a discriminatory, bureaucratic medical system.
However great the kindness and the efficiency, in every hospital death there will be some cruel, squalid detail, something perhaps too small to be told but leaving terribly painful memories behind, arising out of the haste, the crowding, the impersonality of place where every day people are dying among strangers
May 12, 2022
3 Stars
I know that I am going to upset some people that work in the medical field, oh well, not sorry. Many of the observations from this essay are not history from the 1940’s, they still occur today. Especially, the arrogance of many doctors and a patient being treated as a case, not as a person.
I know that I am going to upset some people that work in the medical field, oh well, not sorry. Many of the observations from this essay are not history from the 1940’s, they still occur today. Especially, the arrogance of many doctors and a patient being treated as a case, not as a person.
March 6, 2025
Kitaptaki ilk b?lümle birlikte “Aman yarabbim acaba yeni bir Dünün Dünyas? m? okuyorum!!!” diyip ?ok heyecanland???m ama sonraki b?lümlerin s?nüklü?ü sebebiyle ?ok da etkilenmedi?im bir kitap oldu.
December 5, 2023
"Bir ??mine meselesi" adl? denemeyi okumas? ?ok keyifliydi.
October 12, 2021
?? ??? ?????? ??? ?? ????????. ?????? ???? ??? ???? ?????? ??? ?????? ???? ??? ????? ?? ??? ?????????? ????????. ??????? ???? ??? ??? ????? ????? ???????? ?????? ??????????.
June 25, 2024
????? ??????? ?????? ?????? ?? (?????? ????? ??????? ????) ??? ?? ?????? ???? ????? ?? ????? ??????? ?????? ??????. ??? ?????? ????? ?????? ???? ?????? ???????? ??????.
??? ??? ?? ????? ????? ?? ?????? ?? ???? ????? ??? ??????? ??????? ?? ?? ????? ?????? ??? ???? ?? ????? ?? ??? ??? ???? ???? ?????.
???? ?????? ???? ????? ????? ????? ???? ?? ???? ??? ?????? ????? ??????? ?????? ?? ??? ?? ?????????.
????? ???????? ???????:
???? ??????(1937)
??????? ?????????: ??? ????????? ??? ??????? ????(1944)
??????? ? ??????
??????? ??? ??????? (1944)
??? ???? ????????
???? ?????? (1944)
???? ???? ????????
?? ???? ?????
?????? ????? (1940)
??? ??? ?? ????? ????? ?? ?????? ?? ???? ????? ??? ??????? ??????? ?? ?? ????? ?????? ??? ???? ?? ????? ?? ??? ??? ???? ???? ?????.
???? ?????? ???? ????? ????? ????? ???? ?? ???? ??? ?????? ????? ??????? ?????? ?? ??? ?? ?????????.
????? ???????? ???????:
???? ??????(1937)
??????? ?????????: ??? ????????? ??? ??????? ????(1944)
??????? ? ??????
??????? ??? ??????? (1944)
??? ???? ????????
???? ?????? (1944)
???? ???? ????????
?? ???? ?????
?????? ????? (1940)
August 31, 2020
Essay Orwell tentang bagaimana orang-orang miskin meninggal, di rumah sakit. Dan bagaimana rumah sakit menjadi sebuah tempat yang mengerikan bagi orang miskin. Bisa menjadi sebuah kritik sosial yang sangat baik dan efektif untuk dunia medis terutana dalam perlakuan mereka merawat pasien miskin.. yang tentu saja hingga kini masih sangat relevan.
September 26, 2024
"However great the kindness and the efficiency, in every hospital death there will be some cruel, squalid detail, something perhaps too small to be told but leaving terribly painful memories behind, arising out of the haste, the crowding, the impersonality of a place where every day people are dying amongst strangers."
April 14, 2022
Yine George Orwell ve yine hayranl?k uyand?ran bir eser…denemelerden olu?an bu yap?tta hastanelerin i?ler ac?s? haline dahi vurgu yap?lmakta..ki yazar?n kendi ya?ad??? d?neme ait siyasi ve kültürel ele?tirileri zaten art?k al???lagelinmi? bir ?ey..gelecek ad?na varsay?mlar? ise ola?anüstü..
August 11, 2024
‘A year or two later the celebrated swindler, Madame Han-aud, who was ill while on remand, was taken to the H?pital X, and after a few days of it she managed to elude her guards, took a taxi and drove back to the prison, explaining that she was more comfortable there.’ - Caught me off guard (hohoho, get the pun) and I actually laughed out loud which is quite rare for me!
September 20, 2019
Is it possible to forget George Orwell? In every age defined by totalitarianism and institutional lies, Orwell’s work has been invoked and apparently continues to be invoked invariably. His writings continue to lend to publications comparisons for political situations around the world every other day. Very few works have left an impress on the minds of readers in any age equivalent to that of Animal Farm and 1984. The peculiarity of his writing that made him a hero among common readers was his simplistic style of writing and his clarity of thought. He made writing look like a piece of cake. And what made his writing so robust were his rich experiences and his keen observations. But how many of us have really known Orwell as an essayist? Without a shred of doubt, Orwell was one of the finest essayists of all time. From criticism of personalities to advice on writing and from reflections on human despair to making tea, his essays portray a vivid picture of his observant and analytical mind.
In the early years of his life, Orwell spent several years bumming and slumming in the squalid localities of London and Paris. Most of his early work is inspired by his personal experiences and observation of the life around him. In How the Poor Die, Orwell paints a grim picture of his first ever experience of being admitted in a public ward of a hospital in Paris where he was being treated for pneumonia. He recounts the horrors of being an unpaid patient in a gloomy, smelly, sordid hospital where patients are cramped together in dingy rooms. Where the inconsiderate and lazy staff treats human beings as inanimate objects and the doctors and the medical students see patients as subjects of curiosity and pedagogy. He recalls the revulsions of the dreadful conditions his inmates suffered from and the misery of dying in a hospital alone with no one to be by the bedside in the last moments. Reminded of strange familiarity of something similar to the conditions in the hospital, he alludes to the memories of all the atrocious nineteenth-century literary descriptions of hospitals and surgeries before the discovery and regularization of the use of anesthesia. But in the essence, through his compelling prose, he makes us aware of the reality of how the poor die.
In the early years of his life, Orwell spent several years bumming and slumming in the squalid localities of London and Paris. Most of his early work is inspired by his personal experiences and observation of the life around him. In How the Poor Die, Orwell paints a grim picture of his first ever experience of being admitted in a public ward of a hospital in Paris where he was being treated for pneumonia. He recounts the horrors of being an unpaid patient in a gloomy, smelly, sordid hospital where patients are cramped together in dingy rooms. Where the inconsiderate and lazy staff treats human beings as inanimate objects and the doctors and the medical students see patients as subjects of curiosity and pedagogy. He recalls the revulsions of the dreadful conditions his inmates suffered from and the misery of dying in a hospital alone with no one to be by the bedside in the last moments. Reminded of strange familiarity of something similar to the conditions in the hospital, he alludes to the memories of all the atrocious nineteenth-century literary descriptions of hospitals and surgeries before the discovery and regularization of the use of anesthesia. But in the essence, through his compelling prose, he makes us aware of the reality of how the poor die.
June 6, 2022
I gave this essay 4 stars, not because I really liked it, but rather for the truth that it tells. Orwell write about an incident in 1927, about 100 years ago now. He mentions incidents 100 years previous to himself. This essay about the state of a hospital for the poor brings out the sad state of human existence as we approach death. Even today, with all the advances, it is as if we know so much about human physiology but we still can fix the things that go wrong. We can make things better, but not truly fix it in the end.
I liked his positive thoughts about the good things that were happening in the English hospitals of his day.
I liked his positive thoughts about the good things that were happening in the English hospitals of his day.
March 1, 2022
?ngiltere'de yoksullar ko?u?unun oldu?u bir hastanede g?zlem yapan bir hastan?n ya?ad?klar? ve g?rdükleri betimsel dille anlat?l?yor.
*"Ben buraya fa?istlere ate? etmeye gelmi?tim ama pantolonunu toplamaya ?al??arak ko?an bir adam fa?ist de?ildir. Size benzeyen bir insanc?kt?r ve ona ate? etmek istemezsiniz."
*"Oyobiyografilere sadece yüz k?zart?c? ?eyleri if?a ettiklerinde güvenebiliriz. Hayat?n? ba?tan sona güzel bir hik?ye gibi anlatan biri büyük olas?l?kla yalan s?ylüyordur. ?ünkü i?eriden bak?ld???nda hayat, bir dizi yenilgiden meydana gelir."
*"Ben buraya fa?istlere ate? etmeye gelmi?tim ama pantolonunu toplamaya ?al??arak ko?an bir adam fa?ist de?ildir. Size benzeyen bir insanc?kt?r ve ona ate? etmek istemezsiniz."
*"Oyobiyografilere sadece yüz k?zart?c? ?eyleri if?a ettiklerinde güvenebiliriz. Hayat?n? ba?tan sona güzel bir hik?ye gibi anlatan biri büyük olas?l?kla yalan s?ylüyordur. ?ünkü i?eriden bak?ld???nda hayat, bir dizi yenilgiden meydana gelir."
March 29, 2019
This is good. Very relevant essays about humanity and politics. Orwell is a brilliant author. I can relate to him in so many level, even the writing itself has been done in 40's era, it still reflecting the situation now. This one book is needed to read by people especially in political chaos era like today.
July 5, 2022
An interesting and unpleasant recollection of Orwell's stay in a Paris hospital in 1929. Worth reading because it reminds us about perspective, about that we live in a comfortable world (at least those who read my review).
December 7, 2017
Je pisse
June 9, 2022
But, oh, he can write....
"I myself, with an exceptionally fine specimen of a bronchial rattle, sometimes had as many as a dozen students queuing up to listen to my chest. It was a queer feeling — queer, I mean, because of their intense interest in learning their job, together with a seeming lack of any perception that the patients were human beings. It is strange to relate, but sometimes as some young student stepped forward to take his turn at manipulating you he would be actually tremulous with excitement, like a boy who has at last got his hands on some expensive piece of machinery."
A fine little essay.
Having recently read about the hospital scenes in : , it is hard not to compare. Here the Doctors care about the patients but.... Well, I don't know what place, I would try to avoid the hardest.
"I myself, with an exceptionally fine specimen of a bronchial rattle, sometimes had as many as a dozen students queuing up to listen to my chest. It was a queer feeling — queer, I mean, because of their intense interest in learning their job, together with a seeming lack of any perception that the patients were human beings. It is strange to relate, but sometimes as some young student stepped forward to take his turn at manipulating you he would be actually tremulous with excitement, like a boy who has at last got his hands on some expensive piece of machinery."
A fine little essay.
Having recently read about the hospital scenes in : , it is hard not to compare. Here the Doctors care about the patients but.... Well, I don't know what place, I would try to avoid the hardest.
October 7, 2022
文章开头的描述一度让我以为是监狱经历，仔细读下去才意识到是记录一次住院治疗的过程。在他那时已然觉得不消毒、没有麻醉的体验是多么的久远，只存在于前人的文字里。联想起之前探访Eastern State Penitentiary和Old Joliet Prison，甚至Frank Lloyd Wright's Burnham Block，historical cures for TB在当今科研成果的对比下只显得可笑。写下这些文字的时候，这个星球依然在对抗Covid和Monkeypox，不知多久以后的未来能够研究出算是靠谱的对策，更不知那个时候的人类又要面对什么样的挑战。
回到文章本身，当那样艰苦的医疗环境被视为理所应当，确实不得不感叹阶级不同导致的视角和观点的差异。读时更多关注于当事人的遗憾，现在却也意识到有很多人需要独自面对死亡，临终甚至去世后去就都无人问津的情况也不算少见。This business of people just dying like animals, for instance, with nobody standing by, nobody interested, the death not even noticed till the morning — this happened more than once.
回到文章本身，当那样艰苦的医疗环境被视为理所应当，确实不得不感叹阶级不同导致的视角和观点的差异。读时更多关注于当事人的遗憾，现在却也意识到有很多人需要独自面对死亡，临终甚至去世后去就都无人问津的情况也不算少见。This business of people just dying like animals, for instance, with nobody standing by, nobody interested, the death not even noticed till the morning — this happened more than once.
March 23, 2023
Orwell hakk?nda ara ara bir k?tüleme kampanyas? ba?lar. Bu kitab? okudu?um d?nemde de ‘k?tü yazar’ ve ‘ajan’ oldu?unu yazanlar oldu. Hakk?nda yaz? yazan ve sosyal medyada bu yaz?larla ilgili yorum yapanlar?n büyük ?o?unlu?u ‘okumad?klar?n?’, hatta baz?lar? ‘gurur duyarak, okumad?klar?n?’ s?ylüyorlard?. Okumad??? bir yazarla ilgili k?tüleyen bir yaz? yazan?; yaz?daki ‘k?tülemeyi’ yine yazar?n eserlerini okumad?klar? i?in destekleyenleri anlamak mümkün de?il. Bu davran?? bi?imi Orwell’?n hem despot otoriteleri hedefe koydu?u romanlar?nda hem de edebiyat ve ele?tiri konular?ndaki makalelerinde anlatt?klar?n? do?ruluyor.
Bu kitapta, kitapla ayn? adl? makalesini herkese tavsiye ederim. Paris’te hastanedeki g?zlemleri ürkütücü. Genel olarak sa?l?k sistemi ile ilgili analizleri, kapitalizmin yoksullara vadetti?i ‘kobay olarak ?lmeyi’ basit?e anlat?yor.
Bu kitapta, kitapla ayn? adl? makalesini herkese tavsiye ederim. Paris’te hastanedeki g?zlemleri ürkütücü. Genel olarak sa?l?k sistemi ile ilgili analizleri, kapitalizmin yoksullara vadetti?i ‘kobay olarak ?lmeyi’ basit?e anlat?yor.
June 7, 2022
I love Orwell's work, he sings the uncomfortable truths. This is just one of them. 'How the poor die' describes the author's experience at a poorly maintained public hospital. The types of people admitted there and their ailments and the kind of treatment they receive from the hospital staff, especially the doctors and nurses are recounted in this essay. It narrates how the poor with terminal illnesses are treated as specimens for study with zero consideration of them being human beings. Somehow money alleviates the misery caused by a disease.
Although at present the hospital staffs are more considerate and the situation in public hospitals has changed a lot, being poor and caught by a terminal illness is a cruel combination of misfortune even now.
Although at present the hospital staffs are more considerate and the situation in public hospitals has changed a lot, being poor and caught by a terminal illness is a cruel combination of misfortune even now.
December 9, 2022
"it’s better to die violently and not too old. People talk about the horrors of war, but what weapon has man invented that even approaches in cruelty some of the commoner diseases? ‘Natural’ death, almost by definition, means something slow, smelly and painful."
And it is a great thing to die in your own bed, though it is better still to die in your boots. However great the kindness and the efficiency, in every hospital death there will be some cruel, squalid detail, something perhaps too small to be told but leaving terribly painful memories behind, arising out of the haste, the crowding, the impersonality of a place where every day people are dying among strangers
And it is a great thing to die in your own bed, though it is better still to die in your boots. However great the kindness and the efficiency, in every hospital death there will be some cruel, squalid detail, something perhaps too small to be told but leaving terribly painful memories behind, arising out of the haste, the crowding, the impersonality of a place where every day people are dying among strangers
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