Indianola

Indianola is the town in the state of the novel where the state hospital is located, serving as the site for medical treatment and diagnosis of characters including Melinda Moores and William Wharton, and as the destination for Percy Wetmore's transfer after his breakdown.

Location and Role in the Story

Indianola is the town where the state hospital is situated, a facility that appears repeatedly in the narrative as a place of medical diagnosis, treatment, and institutional transfer. It is first mentioned in connection with Melinda Moores, the warden's wife, who is sent there for tests after developing severe headaches and weakness in her right hand. The doctors at Indianola take X-ray pictures of her brain and discover a tumor the size of a lemon, deep inside where they cannot operate, and they tell her husband Hal Moores that she will be dead by Christmas. The doctors are pleased with their X-ray images, planning to publish them in a medical journal, but they offer no cure. Melinda is sent home with morphine pills to die.

Medical and Institutional Functions

Later in the same period, William Wharton is taken to Indianola General Hospital for tests after his trial, during which he had supposedly suffered epileptic seizures. The doctors find nothing wrong with his brain physiologically, and he is bound for Cold Mountain Penitentiary. The irony that Melinda Moores is in the same hospital at the same time does not escape the guards. Indianola also serves as the destination for Percy Wetmore's transfer after his mental breakdown. Warden Moores tells Paul Edgecombe that Percy has an application in at Briar Ridge, one of two state-run hospitals, for an administration job with better pay. After Percy shoots William Wharton and becomes catatonic, he is sent to Indianola for evaluation, and from there he is eventually moved to Briar Ridge, where he remains silent and blank until the institution burns down in 1944.

Narrative Significance

Indianola functions as a place of failed medical intervention and institutional transfer, contrasting with the miraculous healing that John Coffey performs. The doctors at Indianola can diagnose Melinda's tumor but cannot cure it, while John Coffey, a condemned prisoner, heals her completely in a single night. The town also serves as a waypoint for characters who are being moved from one institution to another, reflecting the bureaucratic machinery of the prison and hospital systems that process people without understanding them.