“‘Nurses,’ you say! Farm-laborers, accountants, barbers, drunken druggists!”
“But I got rid of that good-for-nothing pharmacist at once! And the others—the twelve good ones—they learned what to do. They learned how to give the simple remedies. They learned how to do the other things enough to give me a report—how to take temperatures, how to give the baths at the right degree for the right time, how to take the pulse.”
“How could they learn all that?” you ask, amazed.
“I taught them,” says Dr. Girard-Mangin, slightly surprised, in the simplest, most matter-of-fact tone.
You look past her, out there to that hand-to-hand struggle with death which was carried on by the one indomitable will and the one well-trained mind, strong enough not only to animate this woman’s body before you, but those other bodies and ignorant, indocile minds.
“They did it very well, too,” she assures you, and you do not doubt her.
That woman could teach anybody to do anything.
You come back to details. “But how could you get enough water and heat it for so many baths, on just those rough, small, heating-stoves?”
“Well, we were at it all the time, practically, day and night. We cut the tops off those big gasoline-cans the automobilists use, and stood one on every stove up and down the barracks. There wasn’t a moment when water wasn’t being heated, or used, or carried away.”
“What could you do about intestinal hemorrhages?” you ask. “You must have had many, with such advanced cases. Your farm-hand nurses couldn’t——”