TWO KINDS OF APPRECIATION.
Looking down the long vista of memory, to the many faces turned to me
from beds of pain, I find few to which I can attach a name, and one I
seem never to have looked upon but once. It is a long, sallow face,
surmounted by bushy, yellow hair; it has a clear, oval outline, and
straight nose, brown eyes and a down of young manhood on the wasted,
trembling lips; I knew it then, as the face of a fever patient, but not
one to whom I had rendered any special service, and felt surprised when
the trembling lips said, in a pitiful, pleading way.
"We boys has been a talkin' about you!"
"Have you, my dear--and what have you boys been saying about me?"
"We've jist been a sayin' that good many ladies has been kind to us, but
none uv 'em ever loved us but you!"
"Well, my dear, I do not know how it is with the other ladies, but I am
sure I do love you very, very dearly! You do not know half how much I
love you."
"Oh, yes, we do! yes, we do! we know 'at you don't take care uv us
'cause it's your juty! you jist do it 'cause you love to!"
"That is it exactly--just because I love to, and because I want you to
get well and go to your mothers."
"Yes! but the boys says you don't care about 'em when they get well."
"They do not need to have me care for them when they are well."
"Oh, yes, they do! yes, they do! an' if that's the way you're a goin' to
serve me, I'll stay sick a long time."
When hospital stores came to me so fast that there was great trouble in
getting them wisely distributed, Campbell lent me an ambulance to go
around, see where they were needed, and supply as many as I could. I had
a letter from an old Pittsburg neighbor, asking me to see his brother in
Douglas Hospital, and went in an ambulance well supplied with jellies
and fruit.
Douglas Hospital was an institution of which the city was proud. It had
much finer buildings than any other in the city, occupied the finest
residence block in the city, and had a wide reputation for grandeur and
beauty and superb management. I found the halls and rooms quite as
elegant as I had any reason to expect, but was surprised to find that
elegance undisturbed by the presence of sick or wounded men. In one back
room a wounded officer looked lonely, and they said there were other
rooms used for sick soldiers, but all I saw were parlors, reception
rooms, offices and sleeping apartments for surgeons, and the Lady
Abbess, with her attendant Sisters of Mercy or Charity.
After we had strolled through several sumptuous apartments, we were
taken out into the adjoining square, where there were large barracks as
white as lime and brushes could make them, and making a pretty picture
among the trees. Inside, the walls were white as on the outside, and the
pictures already up, as well as those just being put up, were bright as
bright could be. Indeed. I do not know how pictures could have been
greener or bluer or yellower or redder, and when the show-off man called
my attention to them, as calculated to make the place cheerful; I
recognized their merit, but suggested that some paper blinds might be
desirable to keep the sun from shining into the faces of the men who lay
on the cots.
The roof or walls did not seem well calculated to keep out wind or rain,
but paper blinds would ward off sunshine. From the condition of the
floor, it was evident that the demon of the scrubbing brush, which has
possession of all model institutions, had full sway in Douglas barracks.
Pine boards could not well have been made whiter. No laundry man need
have feared to own to the doing up of the bed linen and counterpanes,
and science had not discovered any mode of making a bed look more like a
packing box, than those in that model hospital.
What an impertinence a sick or wounded man was, in one of those nice,
square beds. He was almost certain to muss and toss it, and this must
have been a crowning calamity.
After the showman had shown all he cared to have me see. I sat talking
with the man I had come to visit, and he said, in a whisper:
"Are there lice in all the hospitals?"
"Lice? Why, certainly not." "Well, there are plenty of them here, and
they tell us they cannot be helped--that they have them in all the
hospitals. Look here!"
He turned down the nice counterpane, and there, in the blanket, the
disgusting creatures swarmed. I was shocked, and half rose, in the
impulse to make an outcry, but he warned me not to let any one know he
had told me, or it would be bad for him. I asked why he did not tell the
surgeon.
"He knows all about them, and says they cannot be helped."
"You have Sisters of Charity here; tell them."
"Oh, they never do anything in the ward but walk around and talk nice,
and pray with men who are going to die. They must know about them."
I walked around alone, and the show-man did not seem to like it, but I
talked with the men in the cots, put my hand under the cover, found feet
encrusted with the exudations of fever, until they were hard and dry as
a bit of kindling wood; hair full of dust from the battle-field, and not
one man who had been washed since being carried away from it; while
there were vermin in every bed.
The ward-master objected to my leaving a jar of jelly with my friend. It
would spoil the good order of the ward, and all delicacies were to be
given into the care of the Sisters. I found one of them who was quite
willing to take charge of anything I wished to leave, but was powerless
in the matter of vermin. It was the ward master's business to attend to
that. It was the business of the Sisters to look after the clothing when
it came from the laundry, put it in order, and give it out when wanted.
My failure to get a bed for the man in the fort by applying to those in
authority, made me feel that it would be useless to try that plan about
the vermin; and, in my perplexity, I turned to my old friend and
confidant, the public. To reach it, I wrote to the _New York Tribune_,
giving a very mild statement of the case.
Two days after Surgeon Baxter came, with a copy of that letter, and told
me he had been ordered to discharge me on account of it. I spoke of the
men who must die if I left, and he was sorry but had no option. Then he
bethought him that maybe I might get the Surgeon-General to permit me to
remain, at least until the cases of my special patients were settled;
otherwise I must leave the hospital that day. He was sorry I had dated
the letter from Campbell, had it not been for this, he could use his
influence to sustain me; but professional etiquette forbade him to
harbor or countenance one who spoke unfavorably of a brother-surgeon. In
other words, by living in a hospital I became one of a ring, bound to
keep hospital secrets, and use only words of commendation in speaking or
writing of anything I saw.
I took a street car and proceeded to the office of the
Surgeon-General--saw the man who held the lives of my patients in his
hands, ate the only piece of humble pie that over crossed my lips, by
apologizing for telling the truth, and got permission to go back to the
men who looked to me for life.
I have felt that I made a great mistake--felt that if I had then and
there made war to the knife, and the knife to the hilt, against the
whole system of fraud and cruelty embodied in the hospital service, I
should have saved many more lives in the end. Even while I talked to the
head of that nest of corruption, and listened to his inane platitudes
about my duty as an inmate of a hospital to report abuses to him, and
"the regular way of proceeding," I did want to hurl the gauntlet of an
irregular defiance into his plausible face, but the pleading eyes in
Campbell held me; I could not let those men die, and die they must if I
must leave them.
Nobody denied the truth of my statements about Douglas Hospital, and I
never learned that any one objected to the facts or their continuance.
It was only their exposure which gave offense.
This letter made me an object of dread. Folks never knew what I might
see or say next; and there soon arose another trouble about my living in
Campbell; for Miss Dix objected, claimed that it was an infringement on
her authority. Then again, there were others who could not see why there
should be but one female nurse in Campbell. Dr. Baxter, by admitting me,
had abandoned his ground, acknowledged that men alone could not manage a
first-class hospital; and having discovered his mistake, was bound to
rectify it by admitting a corps of lady nurses. He was bombarded by Miss
Dix's official power, pestered by the persistant appeals of volunteers;
sneered and scoffed at and worried, until he fell back on his old
position, and promptly dismissed me so soon as my patients were out of
danger. He was always courteous to me as a visiter, and has my lasting
gratitude and respect for breaking his rules and bearing the persecution
he did, that I might do the work I did, and could not have done without
his effective and generous co-operation.
The proportion of thigh stumps saved, was the test of a hospital's
success; and the summer I was in Campbell, we saved nineteen out of
twenty; next summer Chaplain Gaylord told me they lost nineteen in
twenty, and added: "Piemia has literally swept our wards."