Sheila Hale example essay topic
'Vermeer,' he cried. After that, improvements came slowly, though Hale still captivated listeners through a combination of mime and impressive vocal style, despite the fact that most of his words were nonsense. The machinery of his mind may have been crippled, but Hale's intellect and charm pulled him through until his death in 1999, seven years after the stroke. It is an endearing tale, though Sheila Hale's book is far more than a mere monograph to a remarkable academic. Beneath the sketches and anecdotes lies a resolute, angry book in which the author lambasts the health service that so badly let down her husband. She says of the ward, a place that smelled of 'urine and stale cigarettes' into which Hale was dumped after his stroke: 'It was the closest place to hell I'd ever been to in all my privileged, overprotected, trusting life.
' Fo this, the author seems to put most of the blame on doctors, though, in truth, the shambles of Britain's hospitals has much more to do with political indifference than medical failure. Sheila Hale is nevertheless to be congratulated for writing this timely, charged reminder about the general disgrace of our hospitals, and about the particular shame of our neglect of a condition that afflicts one in four over the age of 55. She also gives the reader a moving insight into the redemption of a great man and war hero. The effect is provocative - and uplifting.