The text which follows is an extract from an essay about a hospital for the poor in France in the 1930s. In the year 1929 I spent several weeks in the Hôpital X, in the fifteenth arrondissement¹ of Paris. The clerks put me through the usual interrogation at the reception desk, and I was kept answering questions for some twenty minutes before they would let me in. If you ever had to fill in forms in a foreign country you will know the kind of questions I mean. For some days past my temperature had been above a hundred degrees, and by the end of the interview I had some difficulty in standing on my feet. Behind me stood a resigned little group of patients carrying a few personal belongings, all waiting to be grilled. After the questioning came the bath a compulsory routine for all newcomers apparently - just as in prison. 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 dressing-gown no slippers, they had none big enough for me, they said – and led out into the open air. This was a night in February and I was suffering from pneumonia. The ward we were going to was some distance away and it seemed that to get to it you had to cross the hospital grounds. Someone stumbled in front of me with a lantern. The gravel path was frosty underfoot, and the wind whipped the nightshirt round my bare legs. When we got into the ward, I immediately noticed the foul smell. It was a long, badly lit room, full of murmuring voices and three rows of beds that were surprisingly close together. As I lay down, I saw on a bed opposite me a small, round-shouldered man sitting half naked while a doctor and a student performed some strange operation on him. First the doctor produced from his black bag a dozen small glasses, then the student burned a match inside each glass to exhaust the air, then the glass was placed on to the man's back or chest and the vacuum drew up a huge yellow blister. Only after some moments did I realize what they were doing to him. It was something called cupping, a treatment which you can read about in old medical text-books but which till then I had vaguely thought of as one of those things they do to horses. The cold air outside had probably lowered my temperature, and I watched this horrible treatment with detachment and even a certain amount of amusement. The next moment, however, the doctor and the student came across to my bed, pulled me upright and without speaking began applying the same set of glasses, which had not been sterilized in any way. A few feeble protests that I uttered got no more response than if I had been an animal. I was very much stunned by the impersonal way in which the two men started on me. I had never been in the public ward of a hospital before, and it was my first experience of doctors who handle you without speaking to you or even in fact taking any notice of you at all. They only put on six glasses in my case, and each glass drew about a spoonful of dark-coloured blood. As I lay down again, humiliated, disgusted and frightened by the thing that had been done to me, I reflected that now at least they would leave me alone. But I was wrong. There was another treatment coming: the mustard poultice,2 seemingly a matter of routine like the hot bath. Two unkempt looking nurses had already got the poultice ready, and they lashed it round my chest as tight as a strait-jacket while some men who were wandering about the ward in shirt and trousers began to collect round my bed with half-sympathetic grins. I learned later that watching a patient have a mustard poultice was a favourite pastime in the ward. These things are normally applied for a quarter of an hour and certainly they are funny enough if you don't happen to be the person inside. For the first five minutes the pain is severe, but you believe you can bear it. During the second five minutes this belief evaporates, but the poultice is tied at the back and you can't get it off. This is the period the onlookers enjoy most. During the last five minutes, a feeling of numbness takes over. After the poultice had been removed a waterproof pillow packed with ice was forced beneath my head and I was left alone. I did not sleep, and to the best of my knowledge this was the only night of my life - I mean the only night spent in bed - in which I have not slept at all, not even a minute. ¹ arrondissement: district ² mustard poultice: a type of very hot bandage that is applied to the body