The Plague and I — Betty MacDonald (1948)
I wanted a book to make me laugh out loud, and Pamela Paul, editor of the NY Times Book Review, persistently talked up the smart humor of The Plague and I on her book review podcasts.
In fact, I did laugh out loud a few times, but more than anything I appreciated author Betty MacDonald’s good-natured cynicism and her razor-sharp perception of personalities, all on display in her wry observations of patients, nurses and doctors while convalescing at a tuberculosis sanatorium near Seattle.
Published in 1948, The Plague and I covers the year or so that Betty MacDonald spent in a sanatorium in 1938-39. Although it is a memoir, names and places are changed, presumably because MacDonald is just too decent of a person to cast folks in an unflattering light.
MacDonald has that ability to instantly “get” the essence of a personality, and she does us the favor of naming them by type. On the bus to work (in her pre-sanatorium life), she watches the Silent Hater, always a woman, who usually came home with a rich dessert to make her even more bilious the next morning; the Big Saddo, usually a woman, who always dropped her change on the floor and fought a tearful battle with the conductor; the Non-Sleepers, usually men, who launched into dull stories with strangers about their callous wives; the Pretend-to-be-Cheerfuls, women who laughed only with their mouths and who would tell their bus seatmates in a loud voice that their green coat doesn’t match their sallow skin; and the Sickos, women with voices like whistling teakettles with lots of “trouble” at night. Did I tell you that MacDonald does this with generosity of spirit? She does, actually.
You can now imagine our luck when she describes her many roommates, nurses and doctors at the sanatorium.
There are two types of people that MacDonald finds in droves at the hospital – humorless nurses, trained to suppress empathy, who enjoy filling a hot water bottle with tepid water for the ever-cold MacDonald, and fellow patients who talk only of their innumerable ailments.
She loves her roommates who have pluck. While the wallowing roommates complain to nurses and flirt with the male doctors, the plucky roommates fight underground wars against the sanatorium rules requiring silence and forbidding make-up.
MacDonald doesn’t recount for us many of her personal battles with the nurses, but she is constantly reprimanded, transferred and otherwise put under the eye of the Charge Nurse, so she must have been one of those patients who always had a pithy rejoinder to frowning nurses.
The stakes are set appropriately upon admission to The Pines when the Charge Nurse determines that Betty MacDonald, who had long before divorced a certain Mr. Bard, would henceforth be addressed by all staff as Mrs. Bard.
One morning the Charge Nurse confronts MacDonald with a report from the night nurses that MacDonald is not sleeping well. MacDonald says, with mistaken honesty, that she misses her children and thinks about death. To which the Charge Nurse replies to Mrs. Bard, “We do not allow patients at The Pines to think of unpleasant things. You must have cheerful thoughts or I will report you to the Medical Director.”
So, as MacDonald lay quietly before sleep attempting to muster good cheer, she can’t help but hear the two women in the next cubicle compare ailments. One has a liver that is crowding her tonsils, and the other talks about her organs as though they were little friends. “Old Mr. Gall Bladder is acting up this morning.”
MacDonald and nearly all the other women (they are in separate areas from the men) are curiously passive about the TB treatment. The doctors and nurses make it a point to never discuss a plan or medical status. The patients are, instead, directed to simply lay prone in their beds, to avoid reading and conversation, and to eat full, heavy meals. On certain days, without warning, a nurse will arrive with a wheelchair and take a patient to some location in the complex of buildings, without telling the patient the destination or the purpose. She will be wheeled through some door, and there waiting will be a doctor and medical team ready to operate by deflating a lung or removing a rib or some such other obscure procedure. This fueled MacDonald’s gallows humor.
This book brings smiles and nodding, but not belly-laughs. It is a book of kindness, because MacDonald brings wry understanding even to the humorless nurses. This makes sense, because MacDonald sounds like one of those people you would love to have as a friend. She is funny and wickedly irreverent, while also smart, kind and generous.
Bob Fall 