Life inside a hospital, as a Spanish writer saw it in the early 1900s
Manuel Ciges Aparicio’s Del Hospital looks at hospital life and human suffering, within a cycle of socially critical writing drawn from his own life.
The story
The subtitle, El libro de la vida doliente, means roughly “the book of the suffering life”, and that is its subject. Manuel Ciges Aparicio wrote Del Hospital as one of a cycle of books drawn from his own experience, each of them critical of the society he lived in.
Where more conventional books of the day looked elsewhere, this one stays with the people a hospital holds: the ill, the frail, those who depend on an institution and seldom appear in literature at all. It counts as a step in the making of modern Spanish social realism, writing that set out to show ordinary lives as they were.
The title page carries no date. This printing is generally linked to the first publication of 1906 and is recorded as the first printing, though the impression has still to be confirmed. Printed by Bernardo Rodríguez, it has been bound in later cream cloth with the original red publisher’s wrappers kept, and the text runs to page 336, where it ends on the word FIN. The leaves have not been checked one by one.
Details
- Date
- c. 1906 (title page undated; verify impression)
- Edition
- First printing
- Binding
- cloth: later cream cloth, original red publisher's wrappers retained
- Condition
- Light wear to later cream cloth; expected page toning/spotting. Text reaches p.336 FIN, original wrapper and printer leaf present; full page-by-page collation not performed. No Wagner binding.