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By Root 3601 0

occur to a sorcerer that he cannot do sorcery), because their life’s activity consisted in treating patients, because that was what they were paid for, and because they had spent the best days of their lives doing it. But above all this thought could not occur to the doctors because they saw that they were unquestionably useful, and indeed they were useful to all the Rostov household. They were useful not because they made the patient swallow what were for the most part harmful substances (the harm was little felt, because the harmful substances were given in small quantities), but they were useful, necessary, inevitable (for the same reason that there are and always will be imaginary healers, fortune-tellers, homeopaths, and allopaths), because they satisfied the moral need of the sick girl and the people who loved her. They satisfied that eternal human need for the hope of relief, the need for compassion and action, which a human being experiences in a time of suffering. They satisfied that eternal human need—noticeable in a child in its most primitive form—to rub the place that hurts. When a child hurts himself, he runs at once to his mother’s or nanny’s arms, to have the hurt place kissed and rubbed, and he feels better once the hurt place is kissed or rubbed. The child does not believe that those who are stronger and wiser than he have no means to help his pain. And the hope of relief and the show of compassion comfort him, while his mother rubs his bump. The doctors were of use to Natasha because they kissed and rubbed her “boo-boo,” assuring her that it would go away at once if the coachman drove to the Arbat pharmacy and bought one rouble and seventy kopecks’ worth of powders and pills in a pretty box, and if the sick girl made sure to take them with boiled water every two hours, not more or less.

What would Sonya, the count and countess have done, how could they have looked at the weak, wasting Natasha without undertaking anything, if it had not been for this taking of pills at specific times, warm drinks, chicken cutlets, and all the details of life prescribed by the doctors, the observance of which constituted the occupation and comfort of everyone around her? The more strict and complicated the rules, the more comforting it was for everyone. How could the count have borne the illness of his beloved daughter, if he had not known that Natasha’s illness was costing him thousands of roubles and that he would not spare thousands more to be of use to her; if he had not known that, if she did not get better, he would spend thousands more and take her abroad and hold consultations there; if he had had no occasion to talk in detail about how Métivier and Feller had not understood the illness, but Frieze had, and Mudrov had diagnosed it still better? What would the countess have done, if she had not been able to quarrel occasionally with the sick Natasha for not fully observing the doctor’s prescriptions?

“That way you’ll never get well,” she said, forgetting her grief in her vexation, “if you don’t want to listen to the doctor and take your medicine on time! You shouldn’t joke with it, you might get pneumonia,” said the countess, and in the pronouncing of this word, incomprehensible not only for herself, she already found great comfort. What would Sonya have done, if she had not been joyfully aware that in the beginning she had not undressed for three nights, so as to be ready to fulfill all the doctor’s prescriptions precisely, and that now she did not sleep at night, so as not to miss the time for administering the not-too-harmful pills from the little gold box? Even Natasha herself, who said that no medicine could cure her and that it was all stupid—even she was glad to see that so many sacrifices were being made for her, and that she had to take medicine at certain times, and she was even glad that, by neglecting what had been prescribed, she could show that she did not believe in the treatment and did not value her life.

The doctor came every day, felt her pulse, looked at her tongue, and joked with her, paying