Natasha’s illness was so serious that, fortunately for her and her parents, all thoughts of what lay behind it, her conduct and the breaking off of her engagement, had faded into the background. She was too ill for anyone to start bothering about how far she was to blame for what had happened; after all, she could neither eat nor sleep, she was growing thinner by the day, she had a bad cough and according to the doctors her life was in danger. The only thing to concentrate on was how to get her well again. Doctors kept rolling up to see Natasha individually and in consultant groups. They rattled away in French, German and Latin, criticized each other and wrote out prescriptions for all sorts of medicine guaranteed to cure every imaginable disease, but not one of them hit on the simple idea that Natasha’s affliction was beyond them, just as all diseases affecting any living person are beyond our comprehension because every living person has his own peculiarities, every complaint is unique, new, complex, unknown to medicine – not a disease of the lungs, kidneys, skin, heart, et cetera, long recorded in the annals of medicine, but a disease that happens to be one possibility from an infinite number of afflictions affecting those organs. An idea as simple as this could never have occurred to the doctors (just as a wizard could never accept the idea that magic is beyond him), because their business in life had always been the curing of disease, that’s what they’d always been paid for, and that’s what they’d spent the best years of their life doing. But the real reason why this idea could never have occurred to the doctors was because they could see that now they were being really useful here, definitely useful to the entire Rostov household. Useful, not because they were making the patient swallow predominantly noxious substances (the harm they were doing was scarcely perceptible because the noxious substances were administered in tiny doses), no, they were useful, necessary, you might say indispensable (in the same way that the world has always been full of mountebanks, miracle-men, homoeopaths and allopaths, and always will be), because they satisfied the psychological yearnings of the patient and those who loved her. They satisfied the eternal human need to go on hoping for relief, the need for sympathy and for someone to do something that is felt by any suffering individual. They satisfied the eternal human need – seen at its simplest in a little child – to be rubbed where it hurts. When a child gets hurt he rushes into the arms of his mother or nurse for them to kiss or rub him where it hurts, and he feels better when the tender spot gets rubbed or kissed. The child cannot believe that these infinitely strong and wise friends of his lack the power to ease his pain. The very hope of relief and the sympathy shown by his mother as she rubs him are a source of comfort. The doctors helped Natasha by kissing and rubbing her poorly place and telling her she would soon be better if the coachman just drove down to the chemist’s on the Arbat and spent one rouble, seventy kopecks on a few powders and some pills in a pretty little box, as long as she took the powders in boiled water at two-hourly intervals on the dot.
What would they have done, Sonya, the count and countess – they couldn’t just stand there watching their feeble Natasha fade away – if they hadn’t been able to minister to her with hourly pills, warm drinks, little cuts of chicken, and all the vital necessities laid down by the doctors that kept them so busy and consoled them one and all? As the rules laid down became ever more strict and complicated, so their consolation grew. How could the count have borne his beloved daughter’s illness without knowing it was costing him a thousand roubles and being ready to find thousands more if it would do her any good; without knowing that, if by any chance she didn’t get better, he would find thousands more again to take her abroad to consult foreign doctors; without being able to tell people in great detail how Métivier and Feller had got it all wrong, but Friez had got it right, and Mudrov had produced an even better diagnosis? What would the countess have done if she hadn’t been able to go to her sick Natasha and tell her off now and then for not following the doctor’s instructions to the letter?
‘How can you expect to get better,’ she would say, fussing with annoyance to hide how worried she was, ‘if you won’t do what the doctor says and take your medicine properly? We can’t have all this silliness, can we? You might get
