Notes from a Dead House (Vintage Classics) by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Author:Fyodor Dostoevsky [Dostoevsky, Fyodor]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780307959607
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

I

The Hospital

Soon after the holidays, I fell ill and was sent to our military hospital. It stood apart, about a quarter mile from the fortress. It was a long one-story building, painted yellow. In the summer, when repair work was done, an extraordinary amount of ochre was expended on it. In the vast courtyard of the hospital there were offices, houses for the medical authorities, and other utility buildings. In the main building there were only wards. There were many wards, but for the prisoners there were only two in all, always very crowded, especially in summer, so that the beds often had to be pushed together. Our wards were filled with all sorts of “unfortunates.” Our people went there, various sorts of military men on trial went there, held under various sorts of guard—already sentenced, awaiting sentence, and in transit; some were from the correctional company—a strange institution, to which delinquent or unreliable soldiers were sent from the battalions to have their behavior corrected, and from which, after two years or more, they usually came out such scoundrels as are rarely to be met with. Sick prisoners usually reported their sickness to the sergeant in the morning. They were entered into a book at once, and with that book the sick man was sent under convoy to the battalion infirmary. There a doctor made a preliminary examination of all the sick from all the military units billeted in the fortress, and those found to be actually sick were sent to the hospital. I was noted down in the book, and between one and two o’clock, when everybody had already gone from the prison to their afternoon work, I went to the hospital. A sick prisoner usually took with him as much money as he could, some bread, because he could not expect his ration in the hospital that day, a tiny pipe and a pouch of tobacco, a flint and steel. These last items were carefully hidden in a boot. I entered the grounds of the hospital not without a certain curiosity about this new variation, as yet unknown to me, on our prison life.

The day was warm, overcast, and sad—one of those days when such institutions as a hospital acquire an especially business-like, dreary, and sour look. The convoy and I went into the anteroom, where two copper bathtubs stood and where two patients from those on trial were already waiting, also under convoy. A medical attendant came in, looked us over lazily and with authority, and went still more lazily to report to the doctor on duty. The latter soon appeared; he examined us, treated us very kindly, and issued each of us a “chart of ills” on which our name was inscribed. The further description of the illness, the medications prescribed, the dosages, and so on, were left to the intern who was in charge of the prisoners’ wards. I had already heard earlier that the prisoners could not praise their doctors too highly. “They’re better than fathers!” was their reply to my questions, as I was leaving for the hospital.

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