Blog posts

‘Yours gratefully…’: the Frimley Sanatorium correspondence

Frimley Sanatorium, established in 1905, was the country outpost of the Brompton Hospital for Consumption and Diseases of the Chest. Its purpose was to provide a healthy environment for patients who were deemed capable of making a good recovery from TB. After a few years it was realised that follow-up records were vital for understanding the impact of the changing treatment regimes at Frimley. It fell to the Lady Almoner at the Brompton Hospital to persuade patients to keep in touch with the hospital after they were discharged.

Miss Lily Constance Marx, appointed in 1920, took this duty very seriously. She maintained contact with hundreds of patients through the course of her long career.

Patients queue to thank GP Richard Hughes

This is a lovely story of how patients queued for hours to thank Dr Richard Hughes on his retirement. An ‘event’ such as retirement provides a focal point for gratitude – it seems a shame that many doctors receive a show of appreciation only at the end of their careers. One of the characteristics of the way we express gratitude, in Western societies at least, is that it often signifies the ‘closure’ of a particular transaction. (The word ‘transaction’ here seems freighted with economic meaning, rather unfortunately, but the rhetoric of gratitude is saturated with economic metaphors.) This closing shapes the framing of the act of gratitude as a ‘reward’ for past service: in terminis res, as it were, rather than in medias res.

Introducing the Rhetoric of Gratitude project

The National Health Service (NHS) in the UK has come in for increasing criticism over the past few years, both from within and without the system. Newspaper reports tell of neglected patients and money-grubbing GPs, and concerns about a target-driven culture, privitasation and staffing levels create an impression of a system at breaking point. Yet, the NHS is a cherished institution about which many feel passionately defensive. One of the drivers of morale in a beleaguered NHS is the gratitude that patients express in a myriad of ways, almost all of which are informal. Whereas there are numerous systems in place for making a complaint, the ways in which people say ‘thank you’ are often ‘under the wire’ and rarely receive formal recognition.