Home Sick In Rome

drawing by Suzanne Dunaway

After moving to Rome it didn’t take me long to figure out that my friends’ grandparents had all been either peasants or aristocrats, and that for the latter classes a doctor was expected, if illness struck, to come when called. Like in the 19th century, when they used the back entrance – the doctor was a tradesman, like a carpenter only cheaper. Read some short stories by Chekhov, whose day job was General Practitioner, and you’ll get the idea.

Once in the ‘90s, over dinner at an oak table on the high-ceiling piano nobile of a baroque palace, under an oil portrait of my hostess’s granddad, a new acquaintance tossed a spanner in the works of a previously pleasant conversation: “Do you make house calls?” Which led to twenty minutes of shifting uneasily in my seat while my highborn tablemates complained about how difficult it is nowadays to find a doctor willing to come to your place when you have a sore throat.

When Italians are ill their rest is sacrosanct. I’ve seen many a workplace dynamo relish the theatrics of the sick role, unashamed to hide under the covers safe from the menace of outdoor air. It’s easier, of course, when you have a right to six months of paid sick leave…

drawing by Suzanne Dunaway

I hear house calls have been making a small comeback in the States. They never went out here, though as the years have passed and I have reached do-not-disturb maturity fewer patients expect me to make one personally. One benefit is that setting up an elaborate sickroom in the home is a breeze. Laboratories are happy to send around a technician to draw blood, you can enlist your aunt or your portiere to give injections, some young doc will be willing to come and hang an intravenous drip if one is needed, and a radiologist will trot in with marvelous briefcases that open out into x-ray machines – in pre-digital days, they’d hang up the films over the bathtub to dry.

*****

Mobile phone readers: to subscribe, scroll way down.