Argentina from a British Point of View, and Notes on Argentine Life
History
Argentina from a British Point of View, and Notes on Argentine Life
Argentina -- Description and travel; Argentina -- Economic conditions; Argentina -- Social life and customs
You know that I had the good fortune, shortly after my arrival, to find
employment with the Santa Fé Land Company, and immediately on my falling
ill, the Manager of the estancia sent me to bed, and reduced me to a
milk diet. Two days later he himself took me down to the Buenos Aires
British Hospital, and it is to this fact, and to the sensible treatment
which I received in camp, that I in great measure owe my quick recovery.
The journey to Buenos Aires was made as comfortable as possible. Even
so, however, I must have been slightly delirious, for I remember
thinking that everybody in the train was wearing a pink shirt without
either coat or waistcoat. This must surely have been a delusion.
I reached the hospital on a Sunday morning, and was promptly carried
upstairs to a private ward. Though my temperature was now as much as 104
deg., and my faculties were naturally not at their quickest, I could not
help noticing the cheery look of the ward. There were flowers on the
tables, the patients were obviously well cared for, everything was
scrupulously clean, and the British nurses looked both efficient and
attractive. The scrupulous cleanliness, together with the latest and
most approved methods of treatment, were indeed a feature of the
hospital in all its aspects.
It was a short time afterwards that one of the doctors, after carefully
diagnosing my case, ordered me to the medical ward, where there would be
greater facilities for giving me a course of baths. In the medical ward
my treatment was as kind and as careful as formerly, but my new
surroundings had for the moment a rather depressing effect. I was just
able to realise that the cases around me were more serious than in the
private ward, and that both doctors and nurses were more grave and
intent on their work. I was soon, however, to become delirious again,
and for the next few days was more or less oblivious to my environment.
After a short time I became more alive to what was happening around me.
We typhoid patients had four cold baths daily, and those patients who in
their normal existence were unaccustomed to one warm bath a week were
somewhat inclined to rebel. This was amusing. My sense of humour was
reviving. The company here was certainly more mixed than in the private
ward--consisting as it did of every class and of every nationality, from
Montenegrin to Turk, but it was not on that account any the less
entertaining. Two or three berths away a brawny Scot of monster
dimensions, who was convalescent after an acute attack of rheumatism,
would every night before getting into bed say, with a certain naïvete,
and without any sense of proportion, that he was going to his "little
nest." And yet people accuse Scotsmen of a lack of imagination. On
either side of me lay a typhoid patient--each delirious. The one on my
right hand imagined he was at home drinking beer in Plymouth, and the
one on my left, an Italian workman, would persistently call for his
boots.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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