![]() ![]() This was a night in February and I was suffering from pneumonia. My clothes were taken away from me, and after I had sat shivering for some minutes in five inches of warm water I was given a linen nightshirt and a short blue flannel dressing-gown - no slippers, they had none big enough for me, they said - and led out into the open air. ![]() At my back a resigned little knot of patients, carrying bundles done up in coloured handkerchiefs, waited their turn to be questioned.Īfter the questioning came the bath - a compulsory routine for all newcomers, apparently, just as in prison or the workhouse. For some days past I had been unequal to translating Reaumur into Fahrenheit, but I know that my temperature was round about 103, and by the end of the interview I had some difficulty in standing on my feet. If you have ever had to fill up forms in a Latin country you will know the kind of questions I mean. The clerks put me through the usual third-degree at the reception desk, and indeed I was kept answering questions for some twenty minutes before they would let me in. In the year 1929 I spent several weeks in the Hôpital X, in the fifteenth arrondissement of Paris. ![]()
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