Boston Mercy Hospital

Boston Mercy Hospital is the Boston workplace where Jenny Fields’s practical, unsentimental nursing meets the human costs of war. Its wards shape her views of sex, injury, and care; most consequentially, it is where she tends the severely brain-injured Technical Sergeant Garp, whose dependence on her becomes central to the story of T. S. Garp’s origins.

Setting and Jenny’s Work

In 1942, Jenny is a twenty-two-year-old nurse who has left college and completed nursing school at the head of her class. At Boston Mercy Hospital, she values the work’s immediate usefulness and the independence it gives her. Its simple uniform and comfortable shoes suit her brisk pace, and the night desk leaves time for reading. The hospital’s patients—soldiers and working men among them—seem less pretentious to her than the college men she has known. As the war makes soldiers ubiquitous, however, their self-importance recalls what she dislikes in college boys, and she stops having anything to do with men.

The institution also gives Jenny a close view of the bodily consequences of sex. In the early years of the war, before penicillin was widely available to the Army, Boston Mercy treated soldiers with sulfa drugs and arsenical medication. Jenny assists with local treatments as well, forming a stark impression of the medical costs that can follow sexual activity. This experience helps explain why the prospect of motherhood appeals to her while sex with men does not: she wants a child, but wants as little involvement with men as possible.

From Obstetrics to Intensive Care

Jenny’s wish to have a child is not a passing whim, but her colleagues misread it. Believing that she is too emotionally affected by babies and mothers, hospital staff transfer her away from obstetrics and into intensive care. Jenny resents their assumption that she lacks self-control. She knows she has time and regards pregnancy as part of a plan, not an emergency.

Intensive care expands the scale of what she sees. The ward receives patients from service hospitals, including older people, victims of industrial and automobile accidents, injured children, and, above all, soldiers. Jenny distinguishes among the kinds of wartime injury and tries to classify them, treating the patterns of harm as something to observe and understand. The hospital thus gives her both the practical work she values and a sustained encounter with vulnerability that cannot be reduced to ordinary accident or individual choice.

Technical Sergeant Garp

When Technical Sergeant Garp arrives at Boston Mercy Hospital, Jenny cannot easily place him among her categories. His injuries include burns sustained after a fire aboard his transport ship, along with severe brain damage and fragments in his head that cannot safely be removed. His papers describe him as an orphan and document his condition, but the person Jenny meets is also a small, dependent man whose one-word vocabulary is simply “Garp.”

His bandaged hands leave him without an activity that had been a source of pleasure, and he becomes distressed when trying to touch himself through the gauze. Jenny sits with him, rubs his back, and talks in a lively voice rather than using the droning manner she associates with nurses who are trying to put patients to sleep. She understands him as bored and in need of distraction, not merely as a medical case. Radio programs sometimes upset him or increase his distress; one unexpectedly brings him pleasure, though Jenny cannot find it again. She also tries to teach him a new word, then gives up and speaks to him while feeding him, responding to the limited ways he can communicate.

The care is intimate but grounded in everyday attention: Jenny notices what calms or unsettles him, stays with him during his distress, and makes companionship part of his treatment. His continuing deterioration remains a real possibility, and the hospital’s medical knowledge cannot offer certainty about how much damage the fragments will cause. Boston Mercy is therefore both a place of nursing and a place where the limits of nursing are visible.

A Hospital That Shapes the Story

Jenny’s experience at Boston Mercy helps define her lasting identity. In the account of her life, nursing is not confined to a uniform or hospital ward: she continues to care for people beyond her formal career, first through her relationship with Garp and later by supporting women who seek her advice. Her practical attention to people who cannot help themselves connects the nurse at Boston Mercy with the public figure she becomes.

The hospital’s significance also lies in the collision it stages between institutional classification and individual need. Jenny sorts injuries into categories, yet Garp resists any single label: he is at once a war casualty, a patient with uncertain prospects, and a person who needs attention, amusement, and company. Her response to him is not to deny his condition but to meet him within it. In that sense, Boston Mercy is more than a setting for the beginnings of the Garp family; it establishes the novel’s durable association between bodily vulnerability and the labor of care.