The Theater of Healing — War and Peace

On news of Natasha's illness the countess, still weak, brings Petya and the household to Moscow. They leave Marya Dmitrievna's house for their own. The illness is so serious that the broken engagement and blame recede. Natasha cannot eat or sleep, grows thinner, coughs, and the doctors make the family feel she is in danger. They can think of nothing but how to help her. Doctors come singly and in consultation, talk in French, German, and Latin, blame one another, and prescribe medicines for every listed disease. None of them can know the peculiar grief she suffers, because every living person has a novel combination of maladies unknown to the books. Their business is to cure, they are paid for it, and they see that they are useful.

Their use is not the mostly harmful powders in small doses. They satisfy the need for hope, sympathy, and that something should be done, as a child runs to have a bump kissed. Natasha must take pills in boiled water at intervals of precisely two hours from a pretty box bought on the Arbat for a ruble and seventy kopeks. Sonya, the count, and the countess would not know how to look if there were no pills by the clock, warm drinks, and chicken cutlets. The count bears the illness knowing it costs a thousand rubles and that he would not grudge thousands more, or take her abroad, and that Metivier and Feller missed the symptoms while Frise and Mudrov diagnosed them better. The countess scolds doses and takes comfort from the foreign word pneumonia. Sonya has not undressed for three nights and still wakes to give the slightly harmful gilt-box pills. Even Natasha finds it pleasant that so many sacrifices are made, and pleasant to show by disregarding orders that she does not believe in treatment.

The doctor jokes at the bedside, then in another room shakes his head, says the malady is chiefly mental, and pockets a gold coin the countess slips him. The family stays in the stifling town that summer of 1812 instead of the country. Madame Schoss collects bottles. Youth still prevails. Grief is overlaid by daily life, fades into the past, and Natasha begins to recover physically.