We have seen how on one occasion she took in a lad who could not afford to risk incurring the infection of scarlet fever. On another occasion, when visiting a patient, she was asked to see a boy of ten, who had unluckily fallen ill while paying a short visit to the house. His hostess did not understand boys, and he was having an uncomfortable time. His plight roused all the boy—and there was plenty of it—in S. J.-B. She carried him off, mothered him, took him for drives when she could, got him well, and apparently made him happy. At all events, when the time came to say Goodbye, he flung his arms round her neck and kissed her!
There are some men who are born with an instinctive knowledge of the right thing to do in unusual circumstances.
Most useful was the comet’s tail in cases where some overworked brain was on the point of a breakdown, where a worry was developing into an idée fixe, and threatening to drive the patient mad. S. J.-B. would carry the patient off, regardless of possible developments more disconcerting even than an outbreak of scarlet fever in her house, tend her, feed her up, make her sleep, sympathize with her, bully her, laugh at her, till the patient was ready to fall into line and laugh at herself. Some of these “cures” were extraordinarily rapid and complete, and there is no record of a single failure.
from a photograph by M. G. T. Emery Walker ph.sc.
Sophia Jex-Blake
She never heard of any over-weighted woman or child without asking herself whether she could lift the burden.
“Dear Carry,”—she writes to her sister about this time—“... I don’t like the idea of our teacher looking ‘pale and anxious’,—do you know if she has any special troubles?—or is likely to be short of money? Has she relations with whom she spends her holidays? or is she at Bettws now?—When do the holidays begin and end? What pay has she now?—Has it been raised lately?—What is her name and nation?
A sad number of questions, but very short replies will suffice.
Your aff. sister,
S. J.-B.”