What a Young Wife Ought to Know

by Emma F. Angell Drake

Above all choose a Christian physician. The counsel of the Great Physician is never more needed than in birth travail, and it is comforting to feel that the human friend upon whom you depend, knows this power and helpfulness and can direct you to Him.

In the choice of a nurse as great care and consideration are needed. Do not depend upon the selection made by a friend; no one can choose for you. You alone are the one concerned, and you alone are capable of making the choice. It is well to ask your physician to recommend a nurse, or more than one, and then ask for an interview, and mark well every point, before you make your choice. Remember you are to have her about you almost constantly for two or more weeks, and unless she is pleasing to you in the outset, depend upon it, she will almost inevitably become displeasing to you before her term of service is over.

She must be very cleanly in her person, and guilty of no idiosyncrasies in dress or manner; of gentle voice, quiet and subdued, clean of speech, and self-conscious enough to know her ability and prove it. She must have a strong individuality, and an authority second to none save the physician’s. She must not wear squeaky shoes, or wear rustling dresses, or bright colors, or jewelry or fancy trimmings of any sort. Quietness, unobtrusiveness, ladylikeness, and simplicity should characterize all her dress and manner and habits.

She need not be pretty, but she must have the attractiveness of a good face, and a kindly eye. The prettier, the more cultured and attractive, the more versatile, the better, for she has a critical trio, or perhaps quartet to please, and must stand between her patient and all annoyances, between her patient and all pleasures and desires that might be harmful. She is to be the care-taker of mother and baby, and the court of appeal, of husband, mother and all other relatives. If she is vacillating and weak she can claim the respect of none of these. If she be loud and imperious in her authority, lacking the quiet dignity upon which real power is based, she will have little influence with either her patient or the family.

Further the physician and nurse must be in sympathy, or they cannot work together. The physician is the authority, and the nurse like Eve to Adam, an help meet for him. She is to have no authority independent of the physician, save in an emergency, when she must sometimes act without waiting to consult him. Again the nurse must know what to do and how to do it, without asking questions. She must see and do with a quiet easy air of generalship, that will make her patient wonder when so much gets done, and how it could be done with so little noise or friction.

The nurse must be an excellent, attractive and inviting cook. She must serve everything in a pleasing way, and not so great a quantity but that her patient will wish there were more.

Finally she must not be a talker; she can read to you, converse with you, but never gossip. The more she knows of books and people the pleasanter her companionship.

Such doctors and such nurses, do you say, are hard to find? No, there are many of them, but I fear the search for them is not always made with wise discrimination. When such are sought for and demanded, they will come to the front.

I fear we have too often sought for what we thought was ability, but which rightly interpreted meant reputation, and too seldom for real worth. Ian MacLaren’s doctor of Drumtochty was not a man of wide or great reputation, but of unlimited painstaking and faithfulness. So are many of what the world calls common men. Not that this true greatness does not ever go with a wide reputation, but that it can as well be found with the common painstaking, less gifted practitioner, and we should not forget it.