Chapter 3 Summary

This essay reverses the position of the last previous ones. In this essay, George Orwell has lost his princely position as Imperial oppressor and has become a victim of the Parisian hospital system. It is an excruciating commentary on a kind of welfare and medical system that, even for its time, was positively medieval and without comfort or compassion for its patience.

In Hospital X, as he calls it, located in Paris, a temperature-ridden Orwell, suffering from serious pneumonia, endures a lengthy questioning followed by a tepid bath. He is given ill-fitting bed clothes and sent outside, in the cold February air- to another building, where he lays down in a bed, surrounded by squalor and suffering.

There, he watches a strange procedure of using cups, turned into vacuums by inserting a flame in each cup before forcing them onto the skin of...