Hospital nocturne

Abstract

After the last visitors have gone, once the curtain has fallen on the daily health-care kermis, leaving the ill alone with their illness, and when lights go off one by one and night staff take over, hospitals plunge into the night. It is now that they take on an air of ships that have gone to sea. For caravels or galleons, yachts or barges, now begins the nocturnal journey into the heart of darkness. Joseph Conrad remarked that “one ship is very much like another, and the sea is always the same”. So are hospitals, at night. Vessels sailing from unknown havens, cruising to unknown destinations, steered by invisible coxswains (doctors on board are solitary gondoliers, singing perhaps, probably pushing their oar, certainly not steering the tub).