D.H. Lawrence’s final days were marked by medical scepticism
As the NHS enters its annual winter crisis, we are encouraged to think carefully before ringing 111, 999 or going to A&E. Quite when to relinquish our bodies to the experts and accept all the accompanying anxieties of waiting for test results or treatment can be a problem, as it certainly was for English novelist D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930).
In March 1929, he was in Paris arranging for the publication of a cheap, popular edition of his novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) while his wife Frieda was visiting her mother in Baden-Baden, Germany (although also no doubt spending a day or two in Italy with her lover).
Their friends, the author Aldous Huxley and his wife Maria, were staying in a Paris suburb. They were so appalled by Lawrence’s emaciated appearance that they persuaded him to see a doctor they knew who was up to date with all the latest treatments for tuberculosis. He arranged for an X-ray, but Lawrence failed to keep the appointment.
According to the Huxleys, this was because he had been buoyed by Frieda’s return. The two of them did, in fact, soon set off on a long-planned trip to Spain and then Mallorca. During their travels, Lawrence bluntly and unpoetically summed up his feelings about his failure to keep the appointment in a poem he called The Scientific Doctor.
When I went to the scientific doctor
I realised what a lust there was in him to wreak his so-called science on me
and reduce me to a level of a thing.
So I said: Good morning! and left him.
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The Huxleys thought Frieda was criminally irresponsible for not urging her husband to seek medical help.
He was, however, always ready to take patent medicines, including one named “Umckaloaba” that came from the “Consumption Cure Company”. That trade name would not be allowed today since, before the introduction of streptomycin after the second world war, there was nothing that could be called a “cure” for tuberculosis – and therefore some justification for Lawrence’s suspicion of scientific doctors.
All they could offer, apart from procedures in which one lung was either collapsed to give it time to recover, or surgically removed, was a period in a sanatorium. There, patients were obliged to abandon all their usual occupations and spend most of the day digesting the frequent meals on offer (how frequent and how abundant these were is admirably described in Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel The Magic Mountain).
The idea was that patients could thereby build up sufficient strength for a spontaneous remission of their illness.
Until his very last weeks, Lawrence, who had suffered from all kinds of “chest problems” from his earliest years, avoided the threat of a sanatorium regime. He convinced himself that the periodic haemorrhages he suffered from 1924, and the cough which showed no signs of getting better, were both symptoms associated with his bronchial tubes rather than his lungs.
The commercial success of Lady Chatterley’s Lover meant that for the first time in an almost incessantly industrious writing life, he had plenty of money for a private sanatorium. But he refused to accept that he was an “invalid”, or contemplate going to a place where he would be asked to give up his writing and keep company with people who were as sick as he was, or even sicker.
After leaving Paris in 1929, Lawrence lived on for almost another year, travelling a good deal and writing more or less continuously. He only finally agreed to enter a French sanatorium, ominously called Ad Astra (To the Stars), in February 1930, but then insisted on leaving it for a rented villa in the same town of Vence at the end of that month.
It was in this villa that he died on March 2. Whether he would have lived longer had he heeded whatever advice “the scientific doctor” would have been likely to have given him after looking at his X-ray is impossible to say.
He made a choice which all of us have to do from time to time – although fortunately with more sanguine expectations about possible remedies for our troubles than tuberculosis sufferers could have in 1929.
David Ellis's short book on D.H. Lawrence, in Reaktion’s Critical Lives series, will shortly be published, as will his longer D. H. Lawrence book, Then and Now: An A to Z of Lawrence Studies. https://reaktionbooks.co.uk/work/d-h-lawrence