IT is difficult for healthy people to imagine that hospital could

actually be enjoyable, but there are several conditions in which it was

once tolerable. Pregnant

ladies with high blood pressure were a notable example. Apart from

worries about how their families were coping,

being ''observed'' was the only genuine rest that some of them ever

had. Young men with healing fractures were usually well enough to flirt

with their nurses, and a remarkable number married them. In the days of

isolation hospitals, the only thing wrong with most convalescent

patients was that they were still contagious.

These days, unfortunately, hospitals have become such dangerous places

that the sick have to be returned as soon as possible to the safety of

their own homes, where at least they are immune to their own germs. When

modern patients find themselves kept in hospital more than a few days,

the uneasy conviction grows that they must be really ill. The exception,

of course, is the malingerer, or

sufferer from Munchausen's Syndrome. These enjoy life in hospital so

much that mysterious new symptoms regularly

occur just before Christmas, when they will not only enjoy warmth,

companionship, and good food, but the inner comfort of knowing that

nothing is really wrong.

Alas, in these stringent times the modest pleasures of even

malingerers are under threat. At the Royal Gwent Hospital in South

Wales, a charge is to be made for bedside television sets. Those who are

unable to shuffle along in their dressing gowns to the communal lounge

will in

future be charged #3 a day -- an impost which the management say will

be used to fund other ward improvements, such as telephones. It is a

cunning system, for it will undoubtedly help doctors to sort out the

impostors. Anyone who has been genuinely ill in hospital knows that he

or she would willingly pay #3 a day to have the television switched off.