NURSE PODGER.
A gentleman who in a duel was rather scratched than wounded, sent
for a chirurgeon, who, having opened the wound, charged his man
with all speed to fetch such a salve from such a place in his study.
“Why?” said the gentleman, “is the hurt so dangerous?”
“Oh, yes,” answered the chirurgeon; “if he returns not in poste
haste, the wound will cure itself.”—_Thos. Fuller._
Now being from Paris but recently,
This fine young man would show his skill;
And so they gave him, his hand to try,
A hospital patient extremely ill.
—_Oliver Wendell Holmes._
Mrs. Sarah Podger was receiving-room nurse at St. Bernard’s, and one of
the most important officials of the charity. The receiving-room is
immediately within the main door of the hospital, and when an accident
or other case of emergency is brought in, the patient is taken straight
to this waiting hall. He first encounters Mrs. Podger, who is on the
alert, having been summoned by the bell the gate porter rings when the
case passes his lodge.
Mrs. Podger is at least fifty years old, is short, stout, and
good-tempered. Her face is florid; she is not a convert to Blue
Ribbonism; to use her own expression, she “leaves all that there rot to
the sisters and fine ladies who play at nussin’.” She is of the good
old school, “before all these fads and fooleries was got up;” she
“don’t hold with none of ’em” “and don’t you go for to tell me,” she
used to say, when questioned, “as nussin’ can be properly done on milk
and water. Milk-and-water nussin’ is all very well for them as ain’t
got nothin’ the matter with ’em, but folks as has to be treated at St.
Bernard’s is too serious bad to get on with teetotal notions. Teetotal
is all very well for the mumps; but lor’ bless yer, my dear, how are
yer goin’ to nuss a capital hoperation on tea, leastways not without a
drop of somethin’ in it?”
Mrs. Podger is first of all the obsequious and humble servant of the
house governor, the resident staff, and the doctors attached to the
charity. To these she is a very dragon of virtue and propriety. To them
she protests against all larks on the part of the young students, and
is never seen to smile at them in their presence. The hospital and the
good of the patients is her sole love and desire. Not Jerusalem was
holier to the Jew than St. Bernard’s to Mrs. Podger, when any of these
were in her presence. But her heart was with the boys, and her pockets
in that lavender print gown found its account in keeping well in with
them. “The boys,” as she used to call the students, who were always
lounging about the receiving-room, waiting for somebody to fall off a
scaffold, or get run over, boasted that Podger could teach them more
than all the staff put together. Where was the man who had not learned
his practical surgery at Podger’s hands? Did he shine in his bandaging,
it was Podger who had taught him to make those neat, smooth turns. How
would that “foreign body in the eye,” as was designated the bit of coke
dust in the governor’s organ of vision, have been extracted just now by
the house surgeon of the day, if Podger had not given him that gentle
nudge and that knowing look and told him exactly what to do, and let
him have all the credit of doing it? If Podger liked the students, they
on their part found Podger indispensable to them. Without her the
receiving-room was the house without the mistress—the whole business
went wrong. Now Podger was capital for the students, and well deserved
all her tips and all her drops of gin and whisky; but you would not
have appreciated Podger at her proper value had you tumbled off an
omnibus, and been carried to her place of business, say at five
o’clock, when the staff was dining, or at ten, when the house surgeon
of the week had his little card party in his rooms. Well, yes, it would
have been all right if the friend who went with you had “exhibited,”
say, half an ounce of silver coinage for application to the palm of
Podger’s hand, right or left; otherwise you would have been placed on
that black leather couch in the corner there under the shelf of lint
and tow, and you would have been weary waiting in that receiving-room,
counting the various form of splints hanging round it, and listening to
the groans of other sufferers waiting till dinner was over, or the game
of cribbage finished, for your wounds and bruises to be attended to.
At a card-party, say, in the house surgeon’s room, her manner was much
appreciated. A knock. “Come in!” “Accident sir!” “Oh, bother, Podger,
what a fidget you are!” “Well, sir, it wasn’t me as caused it; there’s
three of ’em, for the matter of that, and they have been here about
half-an-hour, and I thought as you’d like to know.” “Fifteen two, and a
pair’s four, and his nob! Now, Podger, wet your whistle, old girl;
here, have a toothful, and tell them you have called the doctors, and
they are all in the wards over a bad case, but are coming to see them
directly.” “Bless you, sir,” says Podger, having bobbed a curtsey, “I
told ’em that when they came in. Here’s your very good ’ealth,
gentlemen, and long life and plenty of practice for you all.” And she
returns to the receiving-room refreshed in spirit and better able to
contend with the grumbling of the unhappy victims it contained. She
would have dressed their wounds, and sent them all off packing about
their business, but it was against the rules, grave scandals having
arisen from this “unqualified treatment.” Not but that the work would
have been often done quite as well as if the students, to the number of
say eight or nine, had all had “a go” at it, and with infinitely less
discomfort and even agony to the patient; but it was “agin’ the rules,”
as she declared “’cos why? it didn’t seem proper for ‘a nuss’ to set
broken limbs; besides, it pervented the boys from gettin’ ‘the
experience’ they paid for.” She was very anxious they should avail
themselves of every opportunity that arose to improve themselves. No
member of the staff was more interested than she in the pass list of
the College of Surgeons; she felt it as a reproach against her teaching
when any of them failed, and on the eve of a “Pass Exam.” or a “Final
College,” she spared the patients in the receiving-room no agony as
long as any one of the men “going up,” could extract useful information
about fracture, dislocation, or the adjustment of a splint.
“Now, stop that there row, young man; it’s all for your good! The
doctors is a-settin’ of your leg, and if you ’oller like that, you’ll
make ’em nervous. You may thank yer stars there’s ’orspitals for poor
sufferers like yourself to come to, and have so many kind gents to make
yer all right agen.” And the old girl would wink at the boys, give them
all a good chance with the case, and when everybody had quite done, and
had got all their points, the poor suffering wretch was sent into the
wards, there to undergo as many further examinations as the pursuit of
knowledge demanded. Did he scream, she bade him desist; did he
struggle, she called another and a stronger nurse to her assistance;
did he rebel yet, a porter or two came in to reduce him to order.
Chloroform was not often resorted to, it had an element of risk; and
ether was too troublesome to be given unnecessarily. The house surgeons
always prided themselves on an air of nonchalance and dignity; they
were never in a hurry; it was undignified and unprofessional to be
anything but perfectly calm under any circumstances. To speak loftily,
in measured tones, and with studied stand-offishness, was no less
necessary than the binaural stethoscope they never appeared without,
the gold spectacles or eye-glass they usually affected, and the
patronising manner they adopted towards the men with whom they had been
fellow-students, whose larks and escapades they had shared in with
equal relish, but who, not having yet attained the dignity of
membership of the College of Surgeons, and the still greater honour of
house surgeon to St. Bernard’s, were no longer their companions, nor
participants in their enjoyments.
They all comported themselves as became members of the staff of a great
hospital; they would not have been of much use in any of the ordinary
sicknesses that require the aid of the experienced general practitioner
or family doctor, who is so serviceable in our every-day troubles and
infirmities: they paid no attention to colds, measles, and the mumps;
they aspired to greater things, and occupied themselves with eye
diseases, maladies of the brain, or the higher surgery. Attend you in
your attack of the gout? Oh, dear no! any fool of a G.P. (slang for
general practitioner) could do that, or your nurse might manage the
case. But trephine you, resect your knee-joint, or do a gastrotomy upon
you,—they were burning with enthusiasm for nothing less. So they all
told each other they meant to be operating surgeons, speciality men,
consulting physicians; they would all go to live and practise in
Saville Row, or the neighbourhood of Cavendish Square. “Work for
half-crowns like the miserable family doctors in the high-road outside?
Not if they knew it!” They were born to send cases to the _Lancet_, to
read papers at Congresses, to edit the _Journal of Psychopathy_, or
arouse the medical world by their work on “Diseases of the Upper
Eyelid.” Poor beggars; in ten years’ time seven-tenths of them would be
toiling up rotten staircases, or groping in coal mines, visiting
patients at an average of nine-pence-halfpenny a head, or holding
parish appointments, and doing Friendly Societies’ work at half that
rate; while of the other three-tenths, one would be starving in two
gloomy rooms in a West End square, the second might make his fortune by
marrying a rich wife, and the other work his way to distinction late in
life by an ultimate succession to the permanent staff of his own
hospital. Now and then he might be luckier still; he might start a
special Hospital for Diseases of the Upper Eyelid, and so work his way
to eminence and emolument. Of course all these men were supremely
scientific. What was pain (in other people), if science could be
advanced? What was suffering (in patients), if anything could be added
to the sum of our knowledge as to the causes of their suffering? To
cure the disease, to cut short the malady—ah, no, too often that was
to extinguish alike the discomfort and the interesting course of
phenomena that accompanied it. The true patient, the typical client,
was he who—devoured by fever or disfigured by disease—asked for
nothing better than to be well watched by observant medical eyes, while
the “expectant treatment” (_i.e._, the letting the disease severely
alone) did its work. To the objection that a man may die while the
expected cure does not arrive, what more obvious than the answer, “But
see what a brilliant paper for the Journal is the outcome of it all?”
Somehow, Podger vaguely saw all this. Podger recognised that all the
“cases” were but “cases.” She knew that Mr. Graves was getting up
statistics on broken legs, and was well aware that Mr. Brand was hard
at work on a treatise on “Burns and the Cayenne Pepper Treatment.” Now
this was in no way objectionable to Podger; she, indeed, could cure
burns beautifully with her lint and cotton wool, and soothing unguents;
“But, lor bless you! my dear sir,” she would say, “if you likes to
pepper ’em on the chance of making a discovery, I ain’t the nuss as ’ud
stand in your way of your doing something singular to get yerself a
name. So pepper ’em, I say. Thank the Lord it ain’t me nor mine as you
are a-operatin’ on. What makes ’em come to the ’orspital at all, I
says, if they are a-goin’ to find fault with the treatment?” So Podger
co-operated bravely with all the science of the day; she would have
flayed the broken-backed bricklayer alive if the staff had ordered it,
and said it was scientific treatment. She knew very well the chief
object of St. Bernard’s existence, and above all, she knew her place.
Oh, but she was an artful and motherly old woman! the true daughter of
the receiving-room; the inheritor of all its traditions, and the
heiress of a large legacy of hospital tricks. She had such wheedling
ways. “You! only an ignorant carpenter, good enough, perhaps, at
joists, and flooring, and staircases, what was _your_ opinion against
the learned, clever, charitable young surgeon, who wanted to take your
leg off, and all for nothing? Shame on you, sir, to suggest ‘practice,
practice, all for practice, like making me plane up deals when I was a
’prentice.’ Have it off like a brave Englishman, and don’t make a fuss
about a paltry broken leg.” What could a man say under the
circumstances? What Podger said to the house surgeon of the day, who
had bribed her to get him the operation, was: “It’s all right, Mr.
Esmarch; he’s a-goin’ to have it done, so take him while he is in the
humour;” and Mr. Esmarch did; and the theatre bell rang to assemble the
men for the operation, and Mr. Esmarch rushed off to his books to read
up “legs,” and take notes for his first “flap operation.” Oh, Podger
could manage it when she gave her mind to it. Was it not truly an
invaluable Podger?