Never ever underestimate the impact of small acts of kindness

A hospital patient feels terrified in a sleepless night, when a nurse—or perhaps a porter—comes and holds her hand. That’s the moment that defines her experience of the hospital. The confusion over appointments, the difficulty of understanding what the doctors are saying, and the postoperative wound infection are all forgotten. Another patient’s experience of a traumatic time in hospital centres on a ward assistant bringing him a glass of cold water and sitting with him as he drank it.I’m reminded by the importance of kindness in two books I’ve just been reading.Sebastian Barry’s novel The Secret Scripture tells the story—or rather stories as there are competing versions—of a highly intelligent woman who is a hundred years old and has for some 60 years been incarcerated in an Irish mental hospital that is now set for demolition. The psychiatrist, an uncertain but kind man, is trying to find how the woman…
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