As the Christian church was the first to give healing to the needy, so it has carried this ministry wherever in the world its banners have been set up.
Throughout this land, from Alaska to the Gulf, may be found hospitals established by the Christian church—the greater number the product of Home Missions.
The Home Mission nurse, or deaconess-nurse, is an important factor in connection with nearly every mission station.
In lumber sections, in mining camps, on Alaskan river boats, in far back mountain settlements, in the patios of Porto Rico and our island possessions, with the Negroes of the South, the Orientals of the Pacific coast, the backward peoples, the Mexicans and Indians, the depressed of our great cities, at the gates of the nation—wherever the cry of human need in our land has been met by Home Missions, there these ministers of healing have carried their blessed service.
If the nurse, or deaconess, is to fulfill her mission to the sick, she must have training. There must be deaconess homes and hospital's for this, where also the sick poor who can rarely be properly cared for in their dark, crowded, unsanitary homes may find help. In answer to this double need, deaconess hospitals have been established.
"The deaconess nurse goes into the homes of the poor, bringing the skilled touch of the nurse and the loving heart of Christian womanhood to the service of the neediest. Contagion has no terrors for her; Filth, vermin, and dangerously unsanitary conditions are matters of every-day occurrence. No service so quickly opens the heart to good influences as that which comes in hours of deepest need and helplessness, to lead the heart through human tenderness to the Source of all goodness and love. Whole families have been won to Christ through the services of a Christian nurse.
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"Babies first! The wee folk, doomed to the ill's to which tenement life is heir, must have safe food; a luxury unattainable, or it would be if the House did not have a dispensary from which over a thousand bottles of milk, modified by the doctor's prescription for each individual case, are given out each month.
"It is worth while to visit the Medical Mission at 36 Hull Street, Boston. There will be found a dental clinic, opened in the spring of 1912, and the school nurses send the children there to get acquainted with the pleasures of the dental chair, and, most important of all, to learn how to care for their teeth. Then there are the orthopedic, and the regular surgical and medical clinics.
"Soon after lunch I went with a nurse to make call's on a few of the out-patients. We read of dark stairways, but I had no conception of such dark and crooked ways. Why the children do not have broken limbs all the time I cannot imagine.