The Hostile Hospital - Cultural References and Literary Allusions

Cultural References and Literary Allusions

• Heimlich Hospital is a reference to Henry Heimlich, an American physician best known for the Heimlich Maneuver.
• In an illustration, one of the Volunteers Fighting Disease plays a guitar with the inscription "This Volunteer fights disease". This is an allusion to Woody Guthrie, who inscribed "This machine kills fascists" on his instrument.
• In an aside the narrator refers to his friend, Mr. Sirin, who is a lepidopterist. "Sirin" was an early pseudonym of Vladimir Nabokov, a famous Russian-American author and noted lepidopterist.
• The patients at Heimlich Hospital present a wealth of allusions to famous literature, characters and authors:

• Emma Bovary, a patient with food poisoning, refers to the character of the same name in Gustave Flaubert's novel, Madame Bovary.
• Jonah Mapple, who suffers from seasickness, is named after Father Mapple, the preacher who sermonizes on the Biblical tale of Jonah trapped in a whale in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick.
• Clarissa Dalloway is an allusion to a character of the same name in Virginia Woolf's novel, Mrs. Dalloway. She suffers from no visible ailment, but stares sadly out the window, which could refer to both Woolf's struggles with depression and her essay, A Room of One's Own.
• Cynthia Vane, a patient with a toothache, is named after a character in Nabokov's short story, The Vane Sisters.
• Charley Anderson comes from John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy.
• Dr. Bernard Rieux, whose ailment is a terrible cough, from Albert Camus's La Peste ("The Plague").
• Two patients share names with actual authors: Haruki Murakami, a Japanese writer and translator whose works include The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and Mikhail Bulgakov, a Russian novelist and playwright.