The Hanover Scene
AT the moment of writing, the population of Dick Hall's House is at low ebb, with a mere half dozen upper respiratories, four gastros, and two or three orthopedics. The College, located in the foothills of the White Mountains, with a salubrious climate and an outdoor tradition, seems to be unusually healthy as an imminent houseparty weekend sends the blood coursing more hotly through young veins.
In a community of nearly three thousand youths with nobody to tell them to put on their overshoes, there is bound to be some incidence of illness, but we have observed that, in the competition for sheet space, although there often isn't a spare bed or compress in the infirmary the day before Christmas vacation, miraculous recoveries are geared to the cessation of classes - just as grave physical complications may develop at the time of final exams.
This fall in Hanover, as elsewhere in the nation, upper-respiratory ailments were popular. Perhaps it was Asian flu (or, as an Oriental colleague denominated it, English flu), but in any event enough to hospitalize at one time or another some 800 undergraduates. The Health Service laid early plans for auxiliary infirmary space, and when the total of customers reached fifty, in mid-October, they moved into the old Commons in College Hall with an emergency nursing and Red Cross staff. The peak load on any one day was 126 cases, but by October 25, just in time for the Harvard peerade, College Hall was restored to its normal uses and the community rested on an even therapeutic keel.
As in any climate with winters as vicious as ours, sniffles proliferate from time to time, and as in any locale with contact and winter sports an alluring feature, Hanover is an orthopedist's paradise. But in 1936 Dart-mouth instituted its Health Service - a model for other institutions - and included medical and surgical care and hospitalization as a part of the undergraduates' birthright. The College and, indeed, the whole North Country are extremely fortunate in having in Hanover a splendid hospital and clinic, where expert diagnosis and care are readily available. And in addition, and connection, there is the College infirmary, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ed Hall, offering the pleasantest of all possible hospital surroundings, RN's, telephones, radio, TV, movies, free ice cream from the Green Key on Sunday nights, and the best toenail cutting one's heart could desire.
Things were not always thus. When Dartmouth was an army encampment in 1918, the Spanish influenza hit hard and often in the "barracks" at the Alumni Gymnasium. Before that, and after, until Dick's House was built in 1927, contagious cases that were deemed worth saving were immured in the "Pest House," a wooden structure between Hellgate and the Heating Plant. A second-year Medic, in return for his room rent, brought the denizens cold oatmeal and a doughnut down from Commons in the morning and, if he remembered, cold chipped beef or slumgullion at night. Otherwise, there was no contact with the outside world except to open the window and yell over to the Heating Plant to turn on the steam. There was, however, the Pest House Journal, a series of blank books (now treasured in the College Archives) in which each inmate was required to record his sacred, profane, poetic, or pictorial fancies before he was finally awarded a certificate, signed by Bush Kingsford, granting him the degree of Ph.G., and all the rights, immunities and liberties appertaining thereunto.
Life is easier today for the undergraduate who happens to fall. foul of any of the ills that beset mankind; but in our day we played it cozy and, since we didn't have to dodge either traffic or the slalom, we devoted our attention to dodging the besetting.
[EDITORIAL NOTE: A collection of HanoverScene columns from the ALUMNI MAGAZINE was published in book form by Dartmouth Publications on December 1.]
