VII
Choice of a sanatorium by people of limited means is, unfortunately,
very restricted. Though my relatives believed the one in which I was
placed was at least fairly well conducted, events proved otherwise.
From a modest beginning made not many years previously, it had enjoyed
a mushroom growth. About two hundred and fifty patients were harbored
in a dozen or more small frame buildings, suggestive of a mill
settlement. Outside the limits of a city and in a state where there was
lax official supervision, owing in part to faulty laws, the owner of
this little settlement of woe had erected a nest of veritable
fire-traps in which helpless sick people were forced to risk their
lives. This was a necessary procedure if the owner was to grind out an
exorbitant income on his investment.
The same spirit of economy and commercialism pervaded the entire
institution. Its worst manifestation was in the employment of the
meanest type of attendant—men willing to work for the paltry wage of
eighteen dollars a month. Very seldom did competent attendants consent
to work there, and then usually because of a scarcity of profitable
employment elsewhere. Providentially for me, such an attendant came
upon the scene. This young man, so long as he remained in the good
graces of the owner-superintendent, was admittedly one of the best
attendants he had ever had. Yet aside from a five-dollar bill which a
relative had sent me at Christmas and which I had refused to accept
because of my belief that it, like my relatives, was counterfeit—aside
from that bill, which was turned over to the attendant by my brother,
he received no additional pecuniary rewards. His chief reward lay in
his consciousness of the fact that he was protecting me against
injustices which surely would have been visited upon me had he quitted
his position and left me to the mercies of the owner and his ignorant
assistants. To-day, with deep appreciation, I contrast the treatment I
received at his hands with that which I suffered during the three weeks
preceding his appearance on the scene. During that period, no fewer
than seven attendants contributed to my misery. Though some of them
were perhaps decent enough fellows outside a sickroom, not one had the
right to minister to a patient in my condition.
The two who were first put in charge of me did not strike me with their
fists or even threaten to do so; but their unconscious lack of
consideration for my comfort and peace of mind was torture. They were
typical eighteen-dollar-a-month attendants. Another of the same sort,
on one occasion, cursed me with a degree of brutality which I prefer
not to recall, much less record. And a few days later the climax was
appropriately capped when still another attendant perpetrated an
outrage which a sane man would have resented to the point of homicide.
He was a man of the coarsest type. His hands would have done credit to
a longshoreman—fingers knotted and nearly twice the normal size.
Because I refused to obey a peremptory command, and this at a time when
I habitually refused even on pain of imagined torture to obey or to
speak, this brute not only cursed me with abandon, he deliberately spat
upon me. I was a mental incompetent, but like many others in a similar
position I was both by antecedents and by training a gentleman. Vitriol
could not have seared my flesh more deeply than the venom of this human
viper stung my soul! Yet, as I was rendered speechless by delusions, I
could offer not so much as a word of protest. I trust that it is not
now too late, however, to protest in behalf of the thousands of
outraged patients in private and state hospitals whose mute submission
to such indignities has never been recorded.
Of the readiness of an unscrupulous owner to employ inferior
attendants, I shall offer a striking illustration. The capable
attendant who acted as my protector at this sanatorium has given me an
affidavit embodying certain facts which, of course, I could not have
known at the time of their occurrence. The gist of this sworn statement
is as follows: One day a man—seemingly a tramp—approached the main
building of the sanatorium and inquired for the owner. He soon found
him, talked with him a few minutes, and an hour or so later he was
sitting at the bedside of an old and infirm man. This aged patient had
recently been committed to the institution by relatives who had labored
under the common delusion that the payment of a considerable sum of
money each week would insure kindly treatment. When this
tramp-attendant first appeared, all his visible worldly possessions
were contained in a small bundle which he carried under his arm. So
filthy were his person and his clothes that he received a compulsory
bath and another suit before being assigned to duty. He then began to
earn his four dollars and fifty cents a week by sitting several hours a
day in the room with the aged man, sick unto death. My informant soon
engaged him in conversation. What did he learn? First, that the uncouth
stranger had never before so much as crossed the threshold of a
hospital. His last job had been as a member of a section-gang on a
railroad. From the roadbed of a railway to the bedside of a man about
to die was indeed a change which might have taxed the adaptability of a
more versatile being. But coarse as he was, this unkempt novice did not
abuse his charge—except in so far as his inability to interpret or
anticipate wants contributed to the sick man's distress. My own
attendant, realizing that the patient was suffering for the want of
skilled attention, spent a part of his time in this unhappy room, which
was but across the hall from my own. The end soon came.
My attendant, who had had training as a nurse, detected the
unmistakable signs of impending death. He forthwith informed the owner
of the sanatorium that the patient was in a dying condition, and urged
him (a doctor) to go at once to the bedside. The doctor refused to
comply with the request on the plea that he was at the time "too busy."
When at last he did visit the room, the patient was dead. Then came the
supervisor, who took charge of the body. As it was being carried from
the room the supervisor, the "handy man" of the owner, said: "There
goes the best paying patient the institution had; the doctor" (meaning
the owner) "was getting eighty-five dollars a week out of him." Of this
sum not more than twenty dollars at most, at the time this happened,
could be considered as "cost of maintenance." The remaining sixty-five
dollars went into the pocket of the owner. Had the man lived for one
year, the owner might have pocketed (so far as this one case was
concerned) the neat but wicked profit of thirty-three hundred and
eighty dollars. And what would the patient have received? The same
privilege of living in neglect and dying neglected.
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