The Woman in Bed No. 19

Giuseppina Mettlica. 63, was a scrupulously neat widow who lived alone in a Milan attic. Though her dress might be patched, elderly women neighbors 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.

Big as it is, 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.

The Charts. The convalescent volunteers found their job complicated when, that same day, another woman of 63 was put in the bed next to Giuseppina's with the same diagnosis and temperature. It looked, too, as though Anna Bianca Battachi was to get just the same medicines. To make sure, the volunteers took down both charts from the patients' beds, compared them minutely. Then they put one card back at the head of each bed.

The woman tagged as Anna Battachi got worse, was moved into bed No. 19 in the ward. The one tagged as Giuseppina Mettlica was moved into bed No. 33. The hospital called Anna Battachi's brother Anselmo to visit his failing sister. He sat for hours beside bed No. 19. The patient was in an oxygen mask, 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 in bed No. 19.

Better Than Most. When Saturday came. Giuseppina Mettlica's working neighbors were free to visit her. Astorria Alessi was led to bed No. 33, where Giuseppina's chart hung. But the woman looked different. Besides, protested Astorria. "my friend came in a pink underskirt." At mention of this garment, one of the volunteers recalled: "The patient who died in bed No. 19 was buried in a pink underskirt." Now at last the volunteers understood why the woman in bed No. 33 had muttered protests when they called her Giuseppina. She was in fact Anna Bianca Battachi: the two women's charts had been switched while the prescriptions were compared.

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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