Discuss how the essay "How the Poor Die," George Orwell, is a critical description, which is full of pathos, of the public ward of a French hospital.

George Orwell writes his first-hand report of his
experience in a French hospital as a distant observer. This can be be said because while
he gives his feelings and reactions ("I lay down again, humiliated, disgusted and
frightened"), he does so without indulging in them. In other words, he reports his
subjective experience without words, phrases and sentences that show the image of his
being "frightened" etc.; he only tells the fact that he was as he
says.

His author's voice is distant from the emotions of
the events, restrained, factual, and--as far as a subjective account can be
so--objective in his statements and observations, which primarily have to do with what
he observes of the other people on the ward, i.e., doctors, nurses, patients, visitors.
Orwell reports his experience while looking outward at that which is around him. Orwell
doesn't report the events while looking inward at his personal experience, except to
note passing emotional changes and reactions to
events.

Theses events that he tells about are of such a
nature and have such detail to them (i.e., the sufferings of other patients, the actions
of the nurses, the behavior of the doctors and medical students) that the reader is
filled with pity, sympathy and sorrow for their suffering and for their penniless state,
which is the reason they are in a public hospital. In other words, Orwell's objective
distanced narrative evokes pathos in readers. Pathos is defined as that which arouses
strong feelings, particularly of pity, sympathy and
sorrow.

Therefore it is truly said that Orwell's essay is a
critical description of the public ward of a French hospital and that his narrative is
full of pathos, which starts small as he is made to walk barefoot across a courtyard in
February with pneumonia and then builds through the details about old men suffering
their unattended deaths in the public ward and ends by stepping away form the scene to
discuss the injustice of poor people dying "among strangers" where "in every hospital
death there will be some cruel, squalid detail...leaving terribly painful memories
behind."