Finding Themselves: The Letters of an American Amy Chief Nurse in the British Hospital in France — John Shaqi
Finding Themselves: The Letters of an American Amy Chief Nurse in the British Hospital in FranceStimson, Julia C. (Julia Catherine)
History
Finding Themselves: The Letters of an American Amy Chief Nurse in the British Hospital in France
Stimson, Julia C. (Julia Catherine)
World War, 1914-1918 -- Hospitals; World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
Do you wonder that our emotions are wearing us to a frazzle? It is not
only feminine emotions that are affected, because there are those of our
directors who said they could not go to St. Dunstan’s (the hospital
school for blind soldiers) because they would not be able to sleep for
nights afterwards. It is a mistake not to see such a wonderful place,
however. There never was a more cheerful, hopeful place in the world.
Sir Arthur Pearson, the blind man who runs the place and is its
inspiration, is doing the kind of reconstructing of lives that probably
has no parallel in the world. He is having the men taught not just the
trades and occupations that blind men are taught in other places, but
all sorts of things. We saw men learning anatomy, who after a year’s
most strenuous training will be certificated masseurs. They take the
regular examinations that the sighted people take and get excellent
marks, and always get positions. There were men learning cobbling and
carpentry, and chicken-farming and shorthand and typewriting and
matmaking and weaving and basketry. The whole place was full of
whistling, singing men who were going about their business as though
they were like everybody else in the world instead of in total darkness
forever. There were 500 of these men.
People tell me that English men and women have passed the emotional
stage and have now settled down to work without the waste of riotous
emotions and bursting feelings. It must be so or they would be dead, and
they could not be doing the wonderful “war work” that each one of them
is engaged in. From the highest to the lowest each woman has her work,
her nursing, her preparing vegetables in hospitals (as Mrs. Waldorf
Astor’s sister was doing), her making of supplies, her managing a
hospital in a private house, her organizing “hostels” for nurses,
raising funds, everything that one can conceive of as a job for women is
being done, as never before. Of course the street-sweeping by women is a
kind of war work, and the bus conductoring, and delivering mail and
telegrams, and driving cars and ambulances. The streets are full of
women in uniforms of all sorts, all smart and business-like. Women in
England are coming into their own. What is to happen after the war when
the men come back can well fill the minds of those who are given to
prophesy changes, for a change is taking place here that can never be
undone. In addition to women taking a new place in the working world,
class distinctions are being broken down in a way that is making itself
felt to those who a few years ago could never have dreamt that such a
change was possible. A few days ago Miss Dunlop and I were lunching with
a Lady H. on Carlton House Terrace, overlooking St. James Park. In front
of her house is the famous Crimean monument, flanked on one side by the
beautiful statue of Florence Nightingale and on the other side by a
statue of the father of the husband of our hostess. In the course of the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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