If symptoms
persist.. .
I ENCOUNTER so much suffering every day that, in the immortal words of a prisoner of my acquaintance, 'my head's been cabbaged'. I try to think of important matters of state, foreign affairs, philosophical problems etc., but in the end everything is driven out by the petty misery which engulfs our wards day after day.
Take last Tuesday, for example. It was a perfectly ordinary day, though all the social workers (I was told when I tried to reach one by telephone) were late into work because of the weather. Funny how the doctors and nurses remained unaf- fected by the meteorological conditions: but I don't want to carp. Anyway, in beds next to each other were two married women, one aged 30, the other 18. It was touching to see the husband of the older woman by her bed- side, whispering in her ear and rubbing some cream gently into her skin. Can anything come between a man and a woman in love?
Later I asked the lady about the pink- ish cream her husband had rubbed into her skin. He had done it, she said, to dis- guise the bruises he had inflicted on her the day before. He was ashamed of them and didn't want people to notice them.
'He can't help it, doctor. He has these tempers and he doesn't know what he's doing. His mind goes blank. He's always sorry afterwards.'
'Suppose, for the sake of argument,' I said, 'that you were in the street, and there was a policeman nearby. Would he beat you then?'
'No,' she said.
'Then he can help it.'
'But he doesn't mean to do it, doctor.'
'He not only means it, he enjoys it. To lose one's temper from a position of strength is a great joy.'
When the time came for her discharge, she said, 'I'll be all right, doctor. He's apologised.'
The married girl of 18 in the next bed had taken an overdose. There were burns on her hands where her husband had held them on the hot plate of a cooker. He had beaten her up two days before and she had fled to her mother's house. She and her mother had come to this country from India two years before. Neither spoke English. A marriage had been arranged with a man of Indian ori- gin living in this country. On her wed- ding night, her husband had discovered that she was not a virgin and, with the encouragement of his father, had beaten her unconscious. He had continued to beat her at intervals in the year following the wedding.
When she fled to her mother's, her husband threatened to kill her if she ever returned to him. There is no doubt that he meant it. But her mother, fearing the public shame brought on the family name by her daughter's desertion of her husband, insisted that she should return to him, even if it meant death. And she, the mother, threatened to commit sui- cide herself if her daughter disobeyed her. By all accounts, this was no idle threat. What should she do? Submit to murder by her husband? Be the occasion of her mother's suicide? I leave foreign policy to the moral giants of Parliament and to pub bores: but what do I do for my patients?
Theodore Dalrymple
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