Merrie Old England seems to be the World HQ of the ghost story as a literary form, but it also seems to be one place where ghosts hang out, for some reason. You would think they’d pick someplace maybe warmer, like San Diego or Rome. But no, loyalists that they are, they stay in the misty, murky, rainy British Isles. Just in time for Halloween, three new books on ghosts are out. Jonathan Barnes, in The Thunderer, aka The London Times reviews them and comments on the works. Each goes at the matter of ‘ghostiness’ from a different perspective. One is a history of the ghost story as a genre in literature, and the British have certainly excelled there. Another is a kind of sociological-economic-psychological analysis of “ghost seeing” as a phenomenon and the last a gathering of about one hundred testimonies of ghostly experiences, drawn from the long, long parade of candidates. Well, you pays your money, as the saying goes:

Ghosts

In October, 1915 a German firing squad executed an Englishwoman, a nurse, named Edith Cavell. The charge on which she was convicted was that of treason. How she could be guilty of treason when she was not German was a little difficult to explain, but the authorities didn’t bother. The German army had over run most of Belgium in the first weeks of the 1914-18 war, and Edith Cavell was the nurse in charge of a school for nurses set up there on the Nightingale model. The once rapid advance of German troops had stalled and the bloody stalemate of the rest of the war was unfolding. People who were swept up in events had to reconcile themselves to harsh rules about conduct in a war zone. Nurse Cavell got into trouble because she aided Allied, mostly English, soldiers who had been separated from their units to get across the Dutch border into neutral territory. Technically speaking this was a no-no, and any occupying regime would have looked at the events rather severely. But, who shoots nurses, especially those famed for caring with equal diligence for wounded or ill soldiers of either side? In one of the most tone-deaf actions of the war, the court-martial found her guilty and she was shot. At once, she was transformed by the efficient British propaganda machine into the poster child of German brutality. Recruiting posters went up, yelling WILL YOU AVENGE NURSE CAVELL? The whole business ignited a fire storm of anti-German feeling, but the Germans, rather clueless and left-footed about propaganda and the media, couldn’t figure out what all the fuss was about. She was definitely working against German interests, in a war zone, while hostitlies were underway. Any number of punishment options were open: imprisonment, house-arrest, exile or even making her work in a German hospital. But they chose to shoot her.
The unfortunate Edith is the subject of a new book which tells her rather sad story from its beginning in a crabbed and miserly vicar’s house to the stake. Becoming a nurse in the 1900s meant undergoing a life of rigor and deprivation that came down to work, work, and more work. No outside life, high demands for technical skill, absurdly intrusive monitoring of personal conduct to prevent “loose” behavior, no little danger of infection from desperately ill patients, and unceasing labor. Nurses today have more personal freedom, but the rest of the job description seems to fit just fine.

Edith CavellBy Diana Souhami (Quercus 394pp £25)

There is a good review and a photo of the rather pleasant looking Nurse Cavell here:

Cavell

Today is the day when the “miracle” antibiotic was discovered in a laboratory at Rutgers University. It was the start of a new era in disease treatment, and the first target was the top scourge itself, tuberculosis. In the Nineteenth century, TB was the great killer, with cholera coming in a close second. Cholera came in waves, but TB, like the poor in the Gospel, was always with you . The composer Chopin and cowboy gun slinger and dentist Doc Holliday were among the millions of victims. TB declined as living condition got better in the crowded cities, but it was always around and dealling with it was a national concern. A whole industry of sanatoria grew up, to provide places of rest in the country, the mountains, the desert, wherever. Rest, good food, sunshine were all thought to help cure, or at least delay, the illness, but there was no effective medical treatment. Until, that is, October 19, 1943. A very, very good scientist named Albert Schatz working in the lab of Dr. Selman A. Wachsman had been working full bore for several months and on that day, it payed off. It was a tremendous boon to humanity, but it led to a very nasty dispute between Wachsman, who took full credit, and Schatz, who felt Wachsman had worked him over and denied his part in the discovery. There was a lot of bad feeling and even a lawsuit, which led to a settlement acknowledging Schatz’s role. TB responded very well to streptomicin and medicine went from a posture of near impotence to one of supreme cockiness, in the conviction that TB and most of the other infectious diseases were under control, or could even be eradicated. But, somebody forgot basic science in all this euphoria, and antibiotics were handed out all over, for everything. Organisms developed immunity, and now, there are many drug-resistant strains of many bugs of medical importance. In some ways we are back to the situation of the 1930s.

TB

Schatz