hunched-back

Updated: May 6, 2025

At eleven o'clock, absolutely calm, absolutely cool, pure as a girl in his fresh, white operating clothes cleaner, skin, hair, teeth, hands, than any girl who ever walked the face of the earth, in a white tiled room as surgically clean as himself, with three or four small, glistening instruments still boiling, steaming hot and half a dozen breathless assistants almost as immaculate as himself, with his gown, cap and mask adjusted, his gloves finally on, and the faintest possible little grin twitching oddly at the corner of his mouth, he "went in" as they say, to a new born baby's tortured, twisted spine and took out fifty years perhaps of hunched-back pain and shame and morbid passions flourishing banefully in the dark shades of a disordered life.

Eleanor Hallowell Abbott - The White Linen Nurse