Diary

Letters

Vol. 30 No. 17 · 11 September 2008

From Simon Skinner

Hilary Mantel’s lament for the NHS amplifies a rising note in popular comment on British hospitals: the incapacity and rudeness of so many nurses (LRB, 14 August). A corollary is appreciation for a new phenomenon, the conscientious and communicative hospital doctor. These views disorientate us, given the long-standing stereotype that nurses are the under-remunerated angels of the ward, while doctors merely sweep through, grunting in Latin and cursing Nye Bevan between rounds of golf. One feature of my own recent experience in hospital gives further cause for alarm to the Daily Mail reader whom Mantel invokes, and perhaps reinforces her intuition that the problem has a wider, cultural basis. The best nurses – the routinely attentive and kindly ones, those with the vocational skill to recognise that not only is a jug of water best placed within your sight and reach, but that you might well need help to drink from it – were, with few exceptions, foreign. Perhaps the progressive soul might be consoled that some of those parked in hospital corridors will be disabused of their casual racism by the frequent superiority of these nurses.

Simon Skinner
Oxford