One evening in northern California, a distinguished American physician, Faith Fitzgerald, sat in a hospital ward, writing up a patient’s notes. Nearby, at the ward telephones, the duty nurses were growing increasingly distraught as they tried to get hold of the intern on call. Eventually admitting defeat, they asked Dr Fitzgerald if she would see the patient they were worried about – a 75-year-old woman who had had a surgical operation and had been sent back, still groggy, to the ward from the anaesthesia recovery room.
Within hours, according to her nurse, she started to babble incoherently when alone, though she appeared to be fully oriented when the nurse spoke to her directly. The nurse feared that she was ‘sundowning’ – doctorspeak for the confusion and agitation that sometimes afflicts elderly patients in the early evening – and wanted to give her a tranquilliser.
Dr Fitzgerald agreed to see her and, as they approached the patient’s room, could hear ‘rhythmic speech, unintelligible but punctuated by modulations of intensity ranging from prayerful quietude to vigorous exhortations’.
‘There,’ said the nurse. ‘See what I mean?’
Through the door they saw the woman lying on the bed and declaiming at the ceiling. Then, as they watched, Dr Fitzgerald began to recognise words: Hrothgar, Herot, Beo, Grendel.
She walked into the room.
‘Hello,’ said the patient brightly.
‘Hello back,’ said Dr Fitzgerald. ‘You’re doing Beowulf?’
The patient smiled. ‘Yes,’ she said.
She’d been an English professor at a small university, where she had specialised in Old English literature. As a result, she was on familiar terms with the epic tale of Beowulf and his companions in their battle with the monstrous Grendel and Grendel’s Dam.
Before her operation, she had decided to recite the poem in Old English when she recovered. As she explained, ‘I thought it would be a way I would know whether or not I had all my brain left after anaesthesia.’
That evening, a sensible patient had met a literate doctor: a happy conjunction that should occur more often.