Hospital Stories

Hospital Stories – Other Lives

Catherine Heinemeyer was commissioned by York Hospital’s Arts Team to spend a week gathering the ‘backstories’ of its staff.  From porters to consultants, chaplains to administrators, she met and interviewed eleven very different hospital workers.  The purpose: to create a book which would show patients in waiting rooms the human beings behind the uniforms, and the great diversity of types of people needed to make the hospital tick.

Some of the best stories concerned their early years and growing up – playing on bomb sites after the war, experiences of entire summers spent in the hospital Children’s Ward with asthma.  Early working lives and professional training yielded many memories as well.  “I will never lose the image of this poor young nurse on her first day taking apart the entire plumbing system of someone’s private room to find their false teeth, or the doctor who as a child was thrown into his relatives’ pond to learn to swim,” says Catherine. “And several staff had extensive memories of pranks and practical jokes that used to be played around the hospital.”

Another rich seam was staff’s outside interests, whether riding around on Harley Davidsons or playing the ukulele.  Yet while the focus of the project was the ‘other lives’ of the hospital workers, an increasingly clear picture of the hospital emerged: as a place held up and sustained by a vast reserve of goodwill.

All being well, the book will be ‘launched’ later this year and available in a waiting room near you!