Lecture: Auditing Quality (1961)

So you can actually get somebody who gets terribly anxious for hospital treatment because he’s never had any treatment in a hospital, you got the idea? He’s kept going to hospitals but they never treated anything. And he just gets into a total anxiety, you know. He wants treatment, he can’t have treatment, and – and there it goes. And he’ll get into a terrific wingding. So it makes quite a problem. And it goes over into auditing. And auditing would almost inevitably have its roots in circa twentieth century maltreatment, instead of treatment, you see. Punishment instead of treatment.

They do some remarkable things of one kind or another. I myself have run into a few head-on. Had some sinusitis one time so they started pulling teeth, that was a great one. Had nothing to do with it, either. Became obvious even to the medicos a short time later, you know.

I was in a hospital one time and my stomach wall wouldn’t heal. Been messed up. And so they kept feeding me custard. And after about the 465th custard, I just had some kind of an inkling – I was coming around a little bit.

Actually, what was wrong with me was I was utterly exhausted. I’d just been in combat theater after combat theater, you see, with no rest, no nothing between. And it sort of came to me that this was not the sort of a diet that I myself would select of my own free choice.

So I used to slide out with a good-looking nurse, and – beg your pardon, she was a WAVE. And she knew where there was a wonderful Chinese noodle parlor. And so after I’d eat my custard, she would come in and we would go out the back gate and we’d go down and I’d have several egg foo yungs. And you know, soothing things like sweet and sour pork, you know, and so forth. I started to feel better, started to get back on my feet again. And it was those custards – I kept telling the doctors, you see – those custards were absolutely marvelous, particularly when served in Chinese restaurants under some other name. You weren’t supposed to eat anything else, you see.

So then finally, finally, through the connivance of a couple of hospital corpsmen and several pals in the Marine, why, I got the wrong meal ticket issued to me, and there was a special diet table where they fed people nothing but steak! So I do know where all the steaks went that the civilians didn’t get, because they were all served at that table. Huge piles of steaks would come in, you see, and I’d demolish four or five of these steaks and feel much better.

The medicos never found out about this. And I finally got restored to duty, “Certified for continental limits of the United States only. To stay where a proper diet and ration and adequate rest are assured.” And of course, the next piece of paper back of that says, “Ordered to the Fifth Amphibious Force,” you see.

And next hospital, just same sort of nonsense going on in all directions. I walked in the front door under protest and they said, “Go to bed.” And I said, “Why?” And I said, “I feel perfectly all right, and beside I have a date tonight in Monterey.”

And they said, “Well, Monterey is much too far away, and you’re going to bed.” And the nurses around there – these girls got turned down for the women’s teams on the Olympics, you know, they’re really husky – and so I went to bed and, by damn, they put me there for two weeks. There was nothing wrong with me. I was just supposed to report to the hospital. Two weeks I spend in bed. Of course, you know me, I wasn’t two weeks in bed, but that was what the orders said. Their windows open from the bottom and the top.

But after a while, you get – the dim notion starts to penetrate, you see, that there’s no treatment available. You just get this dim notion. It somehow or other enters from – like a ray of light, through the upper windows of the cathedral. And it goes into your medulla oblongata and it goes splank! And you’d say, “There is no treatment being offered in any direction for anything. What do you know!” So you start checking around and find out this is true. Of course, immediately it’s a “can’t-have” on treatment of various kinds whatsoever.¹

Notes