The Hospital for Rhetorical Diseases
The title comes from an idea in a novel by Doris Lessing ('The Sentimental Agents of the Volyen Empire'), where the Hospital is a place where agents are cured of infections by diseases such as 'galloping rhetoric' a condition which causes the unfortunate victim to lapse into Churchillian tones and phrases at the drop of a teacup. Moving, noble, elegiac, unhelpful, vainglorious and corrupting - Lessing knows good rhetoric when she hears it (don't we all?), but has a very healthy scepticism about both the method and the motives of those who deploy it.
In the novel, the Hospital is a device about deflating the overblown. The idea of the need for a Hospital for Rhetorical Diseases is at once both darkly funny and particularly resonant. Not least for times when politicians discuss science as if debating especially well will change the hard realities of the processes of physics and biology. Lessing wants us to be distrustful of rhetoric, and of those who seek to gain support by moving our emotions in preference to engaging our critical faculties.
These images are from a photographic project, based around found graffiti and some montage, at a real closed hospital, which seemed like an ideal location for Lessing's imaginary clinic for we sorry victims of emotion over good sense.
Beware - the following sequence of images was chosen with some calculation.
