Undergraduate Page
SANATORIUM STUDENTS
By DEREK LINDSAY (Corpus Christi College, Oxford)
IN all there were seven of us—six men and one woman. Of the six men four had spent periods of between two and five years as members of the Forces. That which we had in common was the country of our birth, the present method of our education—we were all members of British universities—and the nature of our disease: tuberculosis.
The immediate impact of the discovery that one is suffering from a serious disease is never inconsiderable ; when, however, it occurs during one's last year at a university—when, in fact, one is within six months of graduating—and when one has already passed five years in the Army, the very baldness of the information is shattering. The compensatory machinery of self-adaptation, so often employed during the past decade, was, after its initial shaking, just beginning to function once again, and I was endeavouring busily to adjust myself to another break in the period of my education, which, under normal circumstances, should have been successfully concluded some six years earlier, when I received from the President of my college a letter containing information about an offer being made under the auspices of Don Suisse of treatment in Switzerland for students suffering from tuberculosis. To understand fully the significance of this gesture, it is necessary to reflect on the implications to the student of the unexpected diagnosis of T.B. In the first place, the greater part of the first year of treatment will be spent in bed. Certainly much time can be passed in active study—the student's residence in a sanatorium will not be measured out in a stultifying succession of detective novels, as is so often the case with the average patient ; in contrast to this, however, is the fact that a student suddenly uprooted from academic surroundings and the company of chosen friends will experience a mental isolation which is quite beyond the conception of the ordinary invalid. Above all, when the individual capacity for prolonged application to study is lessened by disease, the need for congenial and stimulating companionship increases accordingly.
The number of vacancies offered by Don Suisse was strictly limited, for the same offer was being made at the same time to members of different universities in various other countries. Never- theless, successful application was made on my behalf. On Decem- ber 19th, 1947, our small party of seven students arrived at its Swiss destination. The sanatorium in which we were quartered was both comfortable and well equipped ; we slept two in a room of reasonable proportions. The balconies commanded a magnificent view across the Valley of the Rhone, the horizon being bounded to the east by Les Diablerets and to the west by the serene and imperturbable heights of the Dent du Midi (precisely the same view which must have met the eyes of James Elroy Flecker when, some thirty years earlier, he commenced his ill-destined sojourn at the next sanatorium to ours). We had been preceded by a group of half a dozen Polish students ; there followed us, in rapid succession, representatives from the universities of France, Italy, Finland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Greece. By the beginning of the New Year everyone had assembled. Before very long at least the simulacrum of a university routine was established. Multilingual committees were formed ; gramophone concerts, lectures and discussions were organised. It is doubtful whether there was one student who did not devote the greater part of his available strength to either the pursuit of his own particular subject or to the acquisition of a new language.
The cordiality which existed on all sides was remarkable, the more so when it is realised that a large proportion of the students had been active participants on opposing sides during the course of the war which had only just finished. No national antipathies were expressed, and I doubt if many were felt ; with the exception of one ex-member of the Wehrmacht, who still expressed violently Fascist views, nobody discussed politics. The predominant impres- sion was of a very active desire to forget past follies for which one
had not been responsible in an endeavour to achieve in the present a measure of co-operation and mutual understanding. At last even the Fascist became sweet-tempered and, in the company of a Swiss nurse, an Italian nurse, a Swiss secretary, a Czech medical student and a Swiss priest, generously volunteered a direct transfusion of his Axis blood into my Allied veins at a time when my situation was critical.
Whilst common interests, common hopes and common fears tended to emphasise far more the similarities than the dissimilarities which existed amongst us, certain national traits in manners became observ- able during the course of the early weeks. I am not qualified to judge what in the eyes of the others must have appeared to be the most curious of English characteristics, unless it was that of excessive tea-drinking, coupled with an insular, and thus perplexing, sense of humour. For the rest, however, one was continually startled by the French mania for shaking hands both first thing in the morning, last thing at night and upon every chance encounter in a corridor ; by the appetite of the Italians for macaroni which was such that, not content with eating it at lunch and dinner, they also cooked it in between whiles in their rooms, and by the male Hungarians who— exaggeratedly polite and tending to click their heels whenever occasion presented itself—wore hair-nets in bed at night and even retained them well into the following morning. An extremely pleasant Pole with whom I shared a room received from his home regular con- signments of sausages, for which, in company with his compatriots, he possessed a very marked inclination. The sausages were of all sizes and thicknesses, and often bore the marks of incisions made by suspicious customs officials, who doubtless considered each one of them in the light of some subtle form of container. Each sausage on receipt was lovingly tended by my friend. During the day the whole collection would be put out on the balcony to air ; at night, to avoid the rigours of the Swiss nocturnal climate, each sausage was individually suspended in the interior of our wardrobe, their place of concealment being only too easily revealed by the savoury odour which clung both to them and to everything with which they came into contact.
Treatment for tuberculosis is drastic ; alas, our multifarious activities possessed a background little comparable with that of the placid atmosphere of an international summer school, which, in all other respects, we seemed most to resemble. The case-histories of many of the students comprised the record of a struggle of several years against the most treacherous of diseases, and often a series of painful and pro- tracted operations. Life was continually under a shadow, and from time to time death struck suddenly. One remembers the young Englishman who had an haemoptysis whilst whistling the theme of a Mozart concerto to a Polish student, and who died shortly after- wards. One remembers the Czech medical student who, so opti- mistic the morning of his operation, was to die the same evening, and the baskets of great, ripe cherries sent the next day by his young widow to all of us—a last and infinitely touching gesture.
Excellent medical attention and a good climate accomplished some very definite results. Many students were enabled to return to their countries with a far better prospect of regaining their health than had existed hitherto. In a more abstract sense much also had been achieved. It would be trite to over-emphasise the significance of newly-found sympathies between persons of different races and out- look, or to draw the facile conclusion that good relations and tolerance between similar sections of different communities must tend in time to gain wider currency ; unhappily this is not the case. But at least as far as each member of Don Suisse is concerned, any future reference to " the Finns," " the Italians " or " the English " will conjure up an idea which is formulated in terms of persons actually encountered, rather than the cold, arbitrary and featureless concept of a foreigner, formed and shaped as it usually is from the melting-pot of hearsay and national prejudice. This new comprehension, and the varied experiences which gave rise to it, in a world where means of access to many countries becomes ever more difficult, serves to make rich in memory and positive in out- come a period which, under less favourable circumstances, could so easily have been both tedious and sterile.
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