The Language of Kindness by Christie Watson - review: how nursing is much more than medicine

The question about The Language of Kindness, a story about nursing, is how long you last before you start to well up. I am a crybaby, but I held out until I came across Tommy, who “is nine years old and paralysed from the neck down after a road traffic accident in which he broke his neck and his pelvis”.

He has his 10th birthday on the ward and the nurses decorate his bed with tinsel left over from Christmas. One nurse, Tracy, brings in flowers from her garden and puts them in a plastic cup on top of the ventilator; they have to be taken down for health and safety reasons. And then his dad turns up with a pile of presents. His mother says: “He wanted a bike. I always promised him he’d get one on his 10th birthday ... and only if he was good”. That was it; off I went; boo hoo.

But there are so many stories here: all with a name and a narrative, and, sometimes, a tragedy. There’s the lady in a red coat who has a funny turn in reception; it turns out she’s been left all alone after her husband, Stan, dies. But when Christie, our nurse, holds her hand and makes her warm, she unwinds and tells her about making a wedding dress out of parachute silk in the war. Or Katie, who is eight months old but who has cigarette burns all over her little body. Or Mandy, a prostitute who has had nine children taken into care, who shares her drink and drugs with her babies before they are born and loves being pregnant. There’s the man in the cancer ward who gets her to read out the racing results; she ends up crying because he reminds her of her father who has just died of cancer.

Christie Watson is a prize-winning novelist now; she’s given up nursing. So this is a book about nursing written by a novelist: a highly intelligent writer bringing all her narrative skills to bear on a profession in which she spent 20 years. The accounts of individual cases are chequered with the etymologies of medicines, a brief disquisition on the nature of the heart, references to the history of medicine from ancient Alexandria to medieval Britain, reflections on sickness and health and nursing by Montaigne or Aristotle or, again and again, Florence Nightingale.

She is a bracing presence in this book. Crisply, she puts things in perspective by insisting, say, that the greater part of nursing is cleanliness, or some other practical reflection. Turns out she still makes sense. But what emerges time and again is that nursing is about so much more than medicine. It’s about engaging with another person in ways that go beyond administering medical care, though she’s emphatic about the practicalities of helping people go to the loo and cleaning them up. It’s things like making eye contact with a little boy who can’t be touched; resuscitating a man so he can die with his hand in his wife’s; singing to a premature baby who then dies.

A nurse and her patient are linked for ever, she says. She does not pretend that all nurses are angels — she observes of one colleague that she wouldn’t trust her with a hamster. But an awful lot of them are quite extraordinary.

Christie Watson is a wonderful writer. But I can’t help thinking that she was an even better nurse.

The Language of Kindness by Christie Watson (Chatto, £14.99), buy it here.