“It’s very amusing, dear, to learn to write and make up prescriptions so easily,—I shall be up to the doctors in future you see! I have just been making one up for myself under the doctor’s directions, to my great amusement,— ... and precious nasty it is!
It’s a great comfort to be of some sort of use to these people who are so frightfully overworked just now.... Besides being apothecary, I’m general secretary,—write all the business letters (which the doctor hates) and post up the hospital records of cases, etc.; and besides this I requested to be and got appointed what I call ‘chaplain’ with discretionary powers. The only people who visit in the hospital (besides friends at visiting hours) are the Lady Managers, each of whom has a month on duty, and besides that Mr. Barnard comes and holds a short service and preaches every Sunday afternoon. So I thought that the patients would like some reading, etc., sometimes, and Dr. Sewall gave me leave to do all I liked.... You can’t think how pleased they were all of them, and how heartily they asked me to come again, which I shall do pretty often.”
A week later (Nov. 24th) she writes again:
“At present I am so exceedingly content in my quaint pleasant quarters in the midst of so new a working world, that I hardly feel the need of anything beyond; and I do greatly want quiet and rest to ‘recuperate’ as the new word goes. I can’t tell you when I have found so much chance of rest of mind and quiet interest in things wholly unconnected with the old pain,—not for years, I am sure, and I have ready to hand just as much work as I feel able for, and yet no strain on me to do it if I am not able. I can’t tell you the pleasure it gives one simply to see Dr. Sewall in her hospital and especially among her poor patients. She is such a true Healer;—so infinitely compassionate and sympathetic, with blue eyes sometimes quite full of sorrow for the people’s pain, yet such strong firm hand and will to remedy even through pain. I say a dozen times a day,—‘Were I not a teacher, I would be a doctor’—if I could.
(Nov. 27th.) This hospital life is simply charming. So busy, so simple, so quaint and so interesting! I am entering more and more fully into it daily, and finding more and more nooks which I can fill ... sometimes giving mechanical aid in operations where they want an extra hand, etc.
Darling, one very unexpected result is coming out of this new life which I embraced simply for its rest and comfort,—I find myself getting desperately in love with medicine as a science and as an art, to an extent I could not have believed possible. I always associated so much that is repulsive and nasty with it in my mind, but I find that one really loses all sense of that in close contact,—that the beauty of nature’s arrangements and of art’s contrivances absorb one’s mind from everything less pleasant, and I find myself saying to myself a dozen times a day that, did I not feel my life devoted to another object, I would be a doctor straightway. As it is, I mean to use all the time I have in gaining all I can, by observation (for which one so rarely has such a chance) even more than by study, though I find myself devouring all sorts of medical works too, and am quite amazed to find how far even in this little time I am able to understand to a certain extent all sorts of things going on around me, and how very interesting they all become in the new light.... Of course one has access to an enormous medical library here, and the junior doctors are all as ready to help or show me all I want as possible. I in my turn do all I can to take extra work which I can do off their hands. Today the hospital note-book was handed over to me, and I went round with the physicians taking down directions for food, medicines, etc., and then making up the latter and taking them to the wards: all of which was very little for me to do, and very interesting, but a great deal saved for the over-worked junior doctor of the wards. I am really a great deal stronger and healthier than I have been for a long time.”
“Nov. 27th. We get up at 6.30 a.m.,—breakfast at 7, then go round the wards with the doctors, then I make up the hospital medicines and see what drugs need to be ordered into the dispensary. The Dispensary opens at 9, or two days in the week at 10, and on Mondays and Thursdays (Dr. Sewall’s days) I am there all the morning, making up prescriptions as fast as she writes them (two of us generally have our hands full, but sometimes I am alone), and very often we have not got through our work when the dinner-bell rings at 1 p.m. Dr. Sewall always has an enormous number of patients—from 60 to 70, and if I go down into the Dispensary waiting-room I get seized on so eagerly,—‘Is Dr. Sewall here herself?’ as she is occasionally obliged to be absent part of the time.
I think anyone who passed a couple of mornings in this dispensary would go away pretty well convinced of the enormous advantage of women doctors; and one sees daily how the poor women feel it by the crowds that come on the four days in the week when the lady physicians are in charge, and the handful that comes on the two days when a man presides.... They say that they have cases again and again of long-standing diseases which the women have borne rather than go to a man with their troubles,—and I don’t wonder at it.”
15th.[15th.]I have just begun to have a little Sunday service in the wards where there was none before. Dr. Sewall is very good in letting me make such plans if I like, and comes herself to the service. Of course we have a very mixed multitude, but I think we manage to worship our ‘Father in Heaven’ and look forward to the ‘One fold’ some day, when neither ‘Jerusalem nor this mountain’ shall be the vital thing.”
“(Dec. 19th.) My chaplain’s work has rather fallen into abeyance now from the crush of other things,—the only thing I do regularly being the Sunday service, writing a weekly sermon for which, by the bye, is not to be omitted in one’s list of work. It’s all but impossible to find any printed ones one could read,—one needs to be so absolutely non-doctrinal and non-combative; and besides the doctors and people will come to hear mine when they’d think twice about anything else.