As the NHS enters its annual winter crisis, we are encouraged to think carefully before ringing 111, 999 or going to A&E. Quite when to relinquish our bodies to the experts and accept all the accompanying anxieties of waiting for test results or treatment can be a problem, as it certainly was for English novelist D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930).
In March 1929, he was in Paris arranging for the publication of a cheap, popular edition of his novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) while his wife Frieda was visiting her mother in Baden-Baden, Germany (although also no doubt spending a day or two in Italy with her lover).
Their friends, the author Aldous Huxley and his wife Maria, were staying in a Paris suburb. They were so appalled by Lawrence’s emaciated appearance that they persuaded him to see a doctor they knew who was up to date with all the latest treatments for tuberculosis. He arranged for an X-ray, but Lawrence failed to keep the appointment.
