Word: niguarda
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...noted that her underwear was always immaculate-and Giuseppina had a liking for pink underskirts. She was wearing one of these when, just after the Christmas holidays, Neighbor Astorria Alessi found her delirious with fever and pneumonia, arranged to get her into Milan's huge (2,274-bed) Niguarda Hospital...
...Niguarda is not big enough. That first week of January it held 3,570 patients. The medical wards were too crowded for Giuseppina to be squeezed in. The best the hospital officials could do was to put her in one of the beds lining the corridors of the psychiatric ward. A doctor saw her briefly, prescribed four medicines. But the nurses were too busy to care for her, turned the job over to convalescent psychiatric patients...
...unrecognizable, unable to talk. Soon she died. Anna's sister Cesira, hurriedly summoned from Bologna, went to the mortuary and screamed: "This isn't my sister." A male nurse told her confidently: "Faces change after death. That was your sister. We don't make mistakes at Niguarda." The Battachi family got a death certificate for Anna, held a big funeral for the woman...
Last week Anna Bianca Battachi was alive and well again but still officially dead-it would take a court order to nullify the mistaken death certificate. Stung by public indignation over the mixup. Milan's prefecture ordered an inquiry. Overcrowded, understaffed Niguarda Hospital is not typical of Italy's hospitals for the poor-it is actually far better than most...
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