Mystery and Excellence on The Human Body - Natasa's Illness

Leo Tolstoy

Natashas Illness

Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 in an aristocratic Russian  family. He wrote between 1863 and 1877 his two great  masterpieces. War and Peace and Anna Karenina. War  and Peace is an immense panorama of Russian life in the  early nineteenth century, including Napoleon's 1812 invasion of Russia. The two major characters, Andrey and  Pierre exemplify the major moral conflicts of the book: between romantic self-realisation and service to others.  The inner tensions Tolstoy dramatized so powerfully in  these two books began to overwhelm him personally. He  underwent a shattering psychological crisis which culminated in 1879. Tolstoy emerged from his agonized quest  for the purpose of life with the simple answer that it was  "to do good". He renounced organized religion, government and private property in favour of a faith in the individual's divinely given power to discern the good, a conviction derived from his perception of the simple faith of  the peasants and from his study of Christ's words.

Most of Tolstoy's writing during the last 30 years of his  life was devoted to advance these ideas. Tolstoy also  attempted to bring his own daily life into conformity with  his philosophical views. He gave up smoking and drinking, became a vegetarian, dressed in peasant clothes and  engaged in manual labours. He died in 1910, at the age of  82.

The brief extract from War and Peace given below is an  example of the remarkable psychological insight of Tolstoy.  It also conveys a certain amount of scepticism about medical authority.

On receiving news of Natasha's illness, the countess, though not quite well yet and still weak, went to Moscow with Petya and the rest of the household, and the whole family moved from Marya Dmitrievna's house to their own and settled down in town.

Natasha's illness was so serious that, fortunately for her and for her parents, the consideration of all that had caused the illness, her conduct and the breaking off of her engagement, receded into the background. She was so ill that it was impossible for them to consider in how far she was to blame for what had happened. She could not eat or sleep, grew visibly thinner, coughed, and, as the doctors made them feel, was in danger. They could not think of anything but how to help her. Doctors came to see her singly and in consultation, talked much in French, German, and Latin, blamed one another, and prescribed a great variety of medicines for all the diseases known to them, but the simple idea never occurred to any of them that they could not know the disease Natasha was suffering from, as no disease suffered by a live man can be known, for every living person has his own peculiarities and always has his own peculiar, personal, novel, complicated disease, unknown to medicine — not a disease of the lungs, liver, skin, heart, nerves, and so on mentioned in medical books, but a disease consisting of one of the innumerable combinations of the maladies of those organs. This simple thought could not occur to the doctors (as it cannot occur to a wizard that he is unable to work his charms) because the business of their lives was to cure, and they received money for it and had spent the best years of their lives on that business. But, above all, that thought was kept out of their minds by the fact that they saw they were really useful, as in fact they were to the whole Rostov family. Their usefulness did not depend on making the patient swallow sub stances for the most part harmful (the harm was scarcely perceptible, as they were given in small doses), but they were useful, necessary, and indispensable because they satisfied a mental need of the invalid and of those who loved her — and that is why there are, and always will be, pseudo-healers, wise women, homeopaths, and allopaths. They satisfied that eternal human need for hope of relief, for sympathy, and that something should be done, which is felt by those who are suffering. They satisfied the need seen in its most elementary form in a child, when it wants to have a place rubbed that has been hurt. A child knocks itself and runs at once to the arms of its mother or nurse to have the

aching spot rubbed or kissed, and it feels better when this is done. The  child cannot believe that the strongest and wisest of its people have no  remedy for its pain, and the hope of relief and the expression of its  mother's sympathy while she rubs the bump comforts it. The doctors  were of use to Natasha because they kissed and rubbed her bump,  assuring her that it would soon pass if only the coachman went to the  chemist's in the Arbat and got a powder and some pills in a pretty box  for a rubble and seventy kopeks, and if she took those powders in boiled  water at intervals of precisely two hours, neither more nor less.

What would Sonya and the count and countess have done, how  would they have looked, if nothing had been done, if there had not been  those pills to give by the clock, the warm drinks, the chicken cutlets, and  all the other details of life ordered by the doctors, the carrying out of  which supplied an occupation and consolation to the family circle? How  would the count have borne his dearly loved daughter's illness had he  not known that it was costing him a thousand rubbles, and that he would  not grudge thousands more to benefit her, or had he not known that if  her illness continued he would not grudge yet other thousands and  would take her abroad for consultations there, and had he not been able  to explain the details of how Metivier and Feller had not understood the  symptoms, but Frise had, and Mudrov had diagnosed them even better?  What would the countess have done had she not been able sometimes to  scold the invalid for not strictly obeying the doctor's orders?

"You'll never get well like that," she would say, forgetting her grief  in her vexation, "if you won't obey the doctor and take your medicine  at the right time! You mustn't trifle with it, you know, or it may turn to  pneumonia," she would go on, deriving much comfort from the utterance of that foreign word, incomprehensible to others as well as to her self..

What would Sonya have done without the glad consciousness that  she had not undressed during the first three nights, in order to be ready  to carry out all the doctor's injunctions with precision, and that she  still kept awake at night so as not to miss the proper time when the  slightly harmful pills in the little gilt be,, had to be administered? Even  to Natasha herself it was pleasant to see that so many sacrifices were  being made for her sake, and to know that she had to take medicine at  certain hours, though she declared that no medicine would cure her and  that it was all nonsense. And it was even pleasant to be able to show,

The symptoms of Natasha's illness were that she ate little, slept little, coughed, and was always low-spirited. The doctors said that she  could not get on without medical treatment, so they kept her in the stilling atmosphere of the town, and the Rostovs did not move to the  country that summer of 1812.

In spite of the many pills she swallowed and the drops and powders  out of the little bottles and boxes of which Madame Schoss who was  fond of such things made a large collection, and in spite of being  deprived of the country life to which she was accustomed, youth prevailed. Natasha's grief began to be overlaid by the impressions of daily  life, it ceased to press so painfully on her heart, it gradually faded into  the past, and she began to recover physically.

Extracts from Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace