Morana

“Probably, in all hospitals in the USSR it smelled the same: tobacco and chlorine in the toilets, medicines and carbolic acid in the procedure rooms, various cleaning agents in the corridors… But in the wards where the patients lay, everything was individual. Somewhere reigned the scent of freshly picked flowers and fruits, and somewhere it stank in all shades of millet porridge and boiled fish—often diluted with the same tobacco and the smell of unwashed bodies. And what’s strange: all the patients used exclusively the hospital slippers, yet that specific stench of old sweat and stale underwear still didn’t want to disappear… Of course, besides everything else, it strongly smelled of illness and the same medicines; meat pies and newspapers, urine in bedpans, and penetrating chlorine mixed with carbolic acid. Moreover, women’s and men’s wards were equal in this respect: only the children’s wards slightly stood out from the general lineup. Because even professionally cynical doctors were still, first and foremost, people—and tried to make the sick children feel, if only a little, a bit better…”