Summary:

A Natural History of the Dead is a story in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. It is divided, by subject and style, into two parts, the first part of which reads like non-fiction and the second a short story, or the nidus of one.

The first section (4.5 pages) is a fairly grisly accounting of the title and describes different modes of dying and the dead, especially in war time, especially regarding WWI.The second section (2 pages) involves a medical unit with a field physician and several soldiers, none of them officers as high as the physician. They are discussing a terminally injured soldier who is dying of a devastating injury to the head. The physician does not want to waste any effort or, worse, his limited supply of morphine on a lost cause. Eventually there is verbal and even physical violence over this dispute.

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From a fishing trip the local doctor is summoned to an Indian village to assist a woman in labor. With him are his young son and an older male relative. The physician assesses the situation in the closed, pungent hut and determines that his only option is section--with a pen knife and fishing leader as his instruments, and no anesthesia for the Indian woman. The doctor arrogantly, but only briefly, celebrates his success as a surgeon only to discover that the woman's husband, apparently unable to tolerate his wife's pain and the racism of the white visitors, has silently slit his own throat. The child, who has observed the entire proceedings asks, "Is dying hard, Daddy?"

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Schatz, a 9-year-old American boy who lived in France, develops a fever of 102 degrees. A doctor diagnoses the flu and prescribes some medication. Over the next day or so, the boy’s father is surprised at how depressed and fatalistic his son is. At one point the boy asks, "About how long will it be fore I die?" The father is flabbergasted and assures the boy that he isn’t seriously ill. However, it turns out that Schatz had heard his school friends say that you couldn’t survive a fever of 44 degrees. Obviously, he was bound to die from 102. His relieved father explains to Schatz the misunderstanding--the French use Centigrade while Americans use Fahrenheit. The boy relaxes. He is not going to die.

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Harry is a writer on safari in Africa with his wife, Helen. They are temporarily stranded when their truck breaks down from a burned-out bearing. While photographing a herd of waterbuck, Harry's knee is scratched by a thorn. Gangrene develops in his right leg. Harry attributes the problem to his failure to apply iodine to the wound.

The rotting leg has an awful stench but Harry denies any pain or horror. He is just angry and extremely fatigued. He resents his wife (and maybe even her wealth) and is verbally cruel to her. While he rests, she shoots a ram. Harry reminisces about the people and places in his past. He has multiple flashbacks and contemplates all the writing he had one day hoped to do about the many experiences he has accumulated in his life but realizes nothing more will be accomplished. He senses the heavy presence of death.

When a rescue plane finally arrives, Harry is transported over the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa. But wait. It seems Harry was only dreaming. There is no rescue plane yet. Helen discovers that her husband has died in his sleep. Outside their tent, a hyena makes a strange noise that resembles the sound of a human being crying.

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The narrator of this story, a wounded American soldier, is recuperating from his injury in Milan, Italy. He receives treatments delivered by machines each afternoon at the hospital. His doctor seems overly optimistic. "You are a fortunate young man," he tells the narrator, promising the soldier that his injured knee and leg will recover well enough for him to play football again.

The physician's prognosis for another patient, an Italian major receiving treatment for a shriveled hand, is also dubious. The officer was once a renowned fencer and is now angry and bitter. His invalid condition and the recent death of his young wife from pneumonia have sapped his will. He professes no faith in the machines treating his hand injury and does not believe in bravery.

Injury fosters camaraderie and the narrator socializes with four other young men undergoing treatment at the hospital. The narrator admits his injury was not the result of heroic action but merely an accident. The medals he received were undeserved. Life may be a series of random events but some people have it worse than others. The only certainty in the lives of these characters is the fact that "the war was always there."

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An American man and "a girl" sit drinking beer in a bar by a train station in northern Spain making self-consciously ironic, brittle small talk. The woman comments that the hills look like white elephants (hence the story's title). Eventually, the two discuss an operation, which the man earnestly reassures her is "awfully simple . . . not really an operation at all . . . all perfectly natural" (726).

The woman is unconvinced, questioning "what will we do afterward," but says she will have the operation because "I don't care about me" (727). A few moments later, however, she avers that they "could" have everything and go anywhere, suddenly as earnest as he had been earlier. When the man agrees that they "can" do these things, however, the woman now says no, they can't, her change in verb tense suggesting that the possible lives they once could have pursued (and produced) are even now, before any firm decision has been spoken, irrevocably out of reach. When the man says that he will go along with whatever she wants, the woman asks him to "please please please please please please please stop talking" or she will scream. The train arrives during this impasse, and once the bags are loaded, the woman, smiling brightly, insists she feels fine.

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One of Hemingway's war and love stories, this novel takes place in Italy during World War I and is tied closely to the author's own experience as an American Ambulance Driver for the Italian Army. The story opens during a lull in the action and the reader meets a group of men who work with the wounded during battle. In the course of waiting for action, the protagonist, Henry, meets and courts an English nurse stationed in Italy.

The core of the tale is the evolution of the love of these two in the face of increasing military involvement, including an engagement in which Henry is wounded and after his return to the front, an Italian retreat from which he barely escapes with his life. Ultimately, he and Catherine, his English love, defect and enter Switzerland to await the birth of their child. Baby and mother both die and Henry is left alone, his future left by the author unplotted.

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Two physicians sit in the Emergency Room of a Kansas City hospital on Christmas Day. The narrator's references to the incompetence or past errors of each is slipped quietly into the text as the story unfolds.

The doctors are telling the narrator of their most interesting encounter of this holiday season: a distraught adolescent, in a religious frenzy, had come in requesting castration for his "awful lust." The two docs managed to blunder the encounter so sufficiently that the boy left, only to return a few hours later bleeding dangerously from his penile self-amputation. The self-centered conversation returns to verbal ego-play between the two physicians, without a hint that either has considered the magnitude of the medical malfeasance against the boy.

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This is another of Hemingway's dense vignettes, filled with nuance but spare in style. The anecdote revolves around the difference between a clean, bright cafe and a dark, not-so-clean, bar as a place for lonely men to spend the long, sleepless nights. Two waiters discuss a lingering patron in a cafe who overstays his welcome as the night wears on. The old man gets quietly drunk each night; just last week he tried to kill himself, but was rescued.

Tonight he tries to pass the night in a clean, well-lighted place. The young waiter, impatient, to get home to his wife, does not comprehend the importance of this place to this old man's survival. The older waiter, who does understand, walks into the night himself, unable to find his own clean, well-lighted place in which to pass a lonely and sleepless night.

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