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
A steady stream of patients is carried into the X-ray room and from
there either directly to the operating room or back to their tents. The
plates are developed almost immediately and are examined while wet and
stuck up in improvised holders on the windows of the operating room.
They all showed foreign bodies and often bubbles, indicating the dreaded
infection by the “gas bacillus,” which causes such dreadful gas
gangrene. All these cases have to be opened up and the necrotic tissue
cleaned out. Then we began in the operating room. Miss Taylor was on
duty in the office, so I was free to help in the operating room. The
supervisors were each on their side of the hospital, and the nurses were
all getting the poor creatures as comfortable as possible. One patient
who was too far gone from bloodlessness to stand operation was made as
comfortable as possible and the minister sent for; they were all given
tea and partially bathed. This was about 4:30 P.M. Then we began in the
operating room, taking out foreign bodies and incising and draining. I
scrubbed up and helped, not so much because they needed me but because I
wanted to be in it. We kept three tables going all the time. The medical
students gave ether and even some of the medical men were helping. Out
in the little hall there were always three or four patients on
stretchers on the floor. My friend, Dr. (Sgt.) Voorsanger, the Rabbi,
was in charge of the records and stretcher bearers and worked like a
Trojan. We took pieces of shell out of necks, hips, knees, skulls,
ankles, shoulders, and out of the spine of my poor paralyzed man. Some
of the men took the ether badly and screamed and fought and cursed; some
thought they were in the battle and called out to their comrades “There
go the 61st, after them, after them.” But most of them took it pretty
quietly and just went off to sleep.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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