In March 1929 he was feeling unwell and spent two weeks in the Hôpital Cochin, rue Faubourg Saint-Jacques, in the 15th arrondissement of Paris.
Peter Davison, editor of Orwell's Collected Works, has suggested a possible history for its composition that places its writing between 1931 and 1936, while Orwell's work revolved around the unemployed, tramps and beggars, and that he reworked it between summer 1940 and spring 1941, submitted it to Horizon, which rejected it possibly because readers would have been unwilling to read about 'how the poor die' at such a time.
The various reception procedures and treatments he receives for pneumonia include bureaucracy, a bath, cupping therapy and a mustard poultice.
All of that accounts for the surviving dread of hospitals among the poor and explains why a sound instinct warns people to keep out of them.
During the last five minutes, I noted a sort of numbness supervenes.As a non-paying patient, in the uniform nightshirt, you were primarily a specimen, a thing I did not resent but could never quite get used to.In the public wards of hospitals you see horrors that you don't seem to meet with among people who manage to die in their own homes, as though certain diseases only attacked people at the lower income levels.
This business of dying like animals, for instance, with nobody interested, the death not even noticed till the morning—this happened more than once.In summer 1946, Orwell decamped to Jura, an island in the west of Scotland.
Tuberculosis was diagnosed, and the request for permission to import streptomycin to treat Orwell went as far as Aneurin Bevan.
In January 1949, in a very weak condition, Orwell was taken to a sanatorium in Gloucestershire, a series of small wooden chalets or huts near Stroud.
Sonia spent most of 20 January with Orwell in his private ward but left in the early evening to have dinner with Lucian Freud and another friend.
[2] Others claim that at the end of the evening having had dinner with her friends, she called the hospital and came back distraught with the news of Orwell's death.