Yesterday was theatre day for our ward; and as Sister had had to retire to bed with a sick-headache, I had the honour of taking our cases up to the theatre. I was rather nervous, as it was the first time I had been up alone for our senior surgeon, and he had one bad case—an excision of knee. But the other three cases were not very bad ones, and we got along all right.

For the last three months we have been having a very interesting course of lectures on physiology, and the girl who shares my room and I spend all our spare minutes in reading up the subject. She is clever, but has not read much physiology before, so I have been able to help her a bit; and I should not be surprised if she does better in the exam. than I do. We are both of us looked upon as quite juniors amongst the lady pupils; but I don't fancy the seniors are taking much trouble, beyond just writing out their notes of the lectures, so I hope we shall do pretty decently. It is not easy to get much time to read when you have a heavy ward to wrestle with; but I am sure it helps you in exams. if you can manage to read rather more than you are absolutely obliged to about what the lecturer is trying to stuff into you in a condensed form.

I have been here six months now, and may get sent off for my holiday any day; but there has been some delay on account of Sister not being very well. She does not seem to want me to leave, as I shall probably not get sent back to this ward afterwards; but it has been very hot of late, and I shall be glad of a rest.

XIV

General Hospital, London,
December 1894.

After my last letter to you I was bundled off for my holiday. I was glad enough to get it, but I missed the last two physiology lectures. This was rather a bore, as the exam. was the day after I got back; so I had no chance of borrowing any one's notes of those lectures, as I was supposed to do. However, I came out third, and my stable companion was first amongst the lady pupils—not so bad for two juniors; and we heard that four or five of the seniors had a little interview with the Matron in her office, and were advised to work rather harder before the next exam.

Now we are having lectures on dispensing, and they are the most interesting lectures I have struck yet. We go down to the dispensary, and the head-dispenser makes us mess about, and make up prescriptions, and make pills, powders, &c. We fire off questions at each other at odd moments, when we meet—and also in bed at night—as to the various doses of different drugs, and what they are prescribed for, and the antidotes for different poisons, &c.

I was sent to a very nice women's medical ward on my return from my holiday, and had some interesting work there. The Sister was very nice to me (she has been here for years, and many of the lady pupils don't like her, but she is a first-rate nurse), and she gave me very good cases. One of my first cases was a little girl of ten with typhoid fever. She was very ill for some weeks, and then such a poor little wasted skeleton of a child! It was very nice feeding her up, when once it was safe to do so; and her great big eyes used to follow me about the ward, wondering what the next feed was going to be.