The Liberal Arts

Abstract

It seems unlikely that a fall on the ice just as winter was turning to spring would lead to thoughts about the expected race riots during the long hot summer to come, thence to the whole problem of Black Power, and from that burning issue to the campus demand for Student Power. However, this did happen to me during an eight-day confinement in the neurological ward of a New York City hospital. There is no better vantage point, I discovered, from which to appreciate the depth and beauty and transforming power of the contribution which Negroes make in one area to the ongoing life of America's largest city. A private hospital room would have cut me off from the colorful, endless, and apparently tireless parade of nurses' aides, practical nurses, student nurses, registered nurses, and doctors, among whom the colored-to-white ratio is practically the same as that on our planet-three to one. After one's pulse, temperature, and blood pressure have been taken sometimes by white and sometimes by dark hands, he wonders whether perhaps he has stumbled into some Great Good Place where no one seems in the least aware of color differences but only of the job which needs to be done cooperatively. Not only was there no overt reference to color on the part of patients, whose language was otherwise most uninhibited, but neither was there the slightest trace of self-consciousness among those who with such aplomb and good nature carried bedpans, gave baths, changed linen, brought ice water, and distributed cooling fruit juice. These were not like the ministrations of a wholly white crew, which might have bred a kind of strained condescension or the sentimental overcompensation of treating the patients as children. The Negro nurses and aides performed all their functions efficiently and with a kindly touch yet as if their main concern were elsewhere, on the wider business of living. The nurse, although interested in what she was doing, was able to sweep her patients up and out of themselves and into the world beyond the hospital walls-where children asked to be taken for long walks, where one was trying to obtain the best high-schooling for one's eighth-grade sons and daughters, with an eye on four years of college education later. While keeping their eye on the patients' troubles, these nurses enticed the patients into self-forgetfulness. A hospital is always, necessarily, a world apart, but only apart from