The Daily News. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 5. THE NURSE.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 177, 5 November 1910, Page 4

The Daily News. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 5. THE NURSE.

A halo of romance surrounds the hospital nurse—outside the hospital. Inside the hospital she is necessarily reI garded as a cog in a system. Whatever emoluments the average hospital nurse may obtain, her life is infinitely harder than that of an overworked domestic servant, and knowing this young women gladly undertake the duties. It would be impossible to obtain the services of women who ordinarily adopt domestic work as a livelihood to undertake the j duties of a nursing probationer, and it may be taken for granted that the generality of women who enter the nursing profession do so because they have the necessary qualities to perform work that is frequently revolting. Nearly all discharged hospital patients who have any understanding at all leave the institution with a firm conviction that nurses are angels of light, and the nurse who has by her skill and attention induced this belief hgs been of as great use as the medical men in winning a patient back to health. When all is said and done, nurses are not angels, and don't want to be. They are content to get a/long as mere human beings, with plenty to eat, adequate payment for their work, and with conditions that do not necessarily make hospital patients of tliem. The complaints made by nurses of the Dunedin hospital are really but an echo of complaints that have been made in other hospitals and which presumably might be made almost anywhere within the Dominion. Sickness among nurses is extremely common in almost any large hospital. Necessarily the work is excessively arduous, and all nurses have not the same physical capacity, but the attraction of the life, despite its strain, is undoubted, and there is never a lack of recruits, however small the wages may be. If nurses were as difficult to obtain as general servants, the authorities would soon be induced into the belief that ss, or 7s 6d, or even the magnificent remuneration of 10s a week was insufficient wages for a week of incessant toil necessitating a constant physical and mental strain. The ordinary person who looks upon a nurse as a dapper young lady beautifully attired in a cool-looking uniform might be disposed to alter his estimate if he followed a probationer around for a day or two. He would, for instance, "shy" at, undertaking to make an operating theatre that had just been left by the surgeons spick-and-span for a few pence—probationer's wages. He would perhaps not care to perform those offices in a ward that are requisite and necessary, and he would hesitate even for the offer of sixpence a night to sit in the passage way between wards sewing shrouds for the dead and listening to •the babblings of patients in all conditions of pain. It is a tribute to the instinct of so many fine women that none of the horrors of a hospital can deter them from taking service in one, but it is no tribute to any authority to permit nurses to be badly fed, badly paid, overworked, or badly housed. When the average laborer believes he is being imposed on he makeß a noise. In every community of workers of whatever kind poor or inadequate feeding is the best possible material with which to start a revolt. The public should be vitally interested in nurses. It is only necessary to point out to the public what would happen to its sick relatives if the dissatisfied hospital nurses of the country suddenly decided to quit work. There would be a cry from the North Cape to the Bluff at their inhumanity. Medical superintendents and doctors generally are so familiar with sickness that however humane they may be—and no doctor can succeed who is not honestly sympathetic—that their senses may be blunted to the conditions that exist for their subordinates. Ona has to look rather to a board than to a medical superintendent for redress foi nurses, and it is highly probable that a very small proportion of the men of any board know what a nurse's life is like. It is suggested that the non-medical men who are given the business control of hospitals should be made familiar with the work done by personal examination of it. It is likely that if some of the pompous persons usually to be found as chairmen of city hospital boards were to be taken in hand by a medical superintendent and introduced to the actualities of hospitals they would meet their boards afterwards with, a letter knowledge. The complaints of these Dunedin nurses have ventilated another littleknown fact—that sanatoria for consumptives do not finish their own "cases." It is alleged that patients that must necessarily die are transferred for the purpose to the general hospitals. It was stated not long ago that only cases that in theopinion of medical authorities were curable were admitted to sanatoria, so that it seems apparently to be a species of vanity, for the sanatoria to get rid of incurable cases at the expense of the general hospitals. If it ean be proved that by drafting these cases from sanatoria to hospitals nurses and hospital patients have contracted lung-troubles, it seems necessary that the drafting practice should be stopped. Experience has shown that no hardships will prevent women from entering into one of the most necessary professions, and it is solely on that account that the treatment given to these women is not above reproach. It is probable that nothing will be done in permanent amelioration of any adverse conditions unless the authorities are stirred to it by the public. Half a dozen screaming men unionists can force the authorities to assume their thinking caps, and perhaps if the nurses are Insistent enough they may be heard with as much readiness as if they were shearers, carpenters, bricklayers or gen-

eral laborers. We would be glad to see ! a chairman of a city hospital board introduced to a fi'tyhv, swearing "drunk" who has sustained hurt and has been bundled into a cab and despatched to the hospital to be dealt with solely by a gentle girl, deprived of his filthy garments by her, washed, attended to and [put to bed. One such common illustraI tion would alter his view point. Why I should not the appetite of such a girl revolt from half-cold, badly-cooked food?