"On August 5, I had the honor to lay before the commissioners eight requests on behalf of the inmates of the island, as follows:—
1. More occupation for the able-bodied.
2. More comfortable chairs for the aged women, who are obliged to rise at 5:30 A.M., and are not allowed to lie down without permission.
3. More benches out of doors for the benefit of the inmates.
4. A separate room for the dying (it having been urged by both the physician and superintendent that the cries of dying patients often disturbed a whole ward for several nights).
5. More privacy for women in bathing (and it will, perhaps, shock your readers, as it did the writer, that one of the commissioners affirmed and repeated that he did not consider this necessary).
6. Another nurse at Long Island, where Miss O'Brian has charge of fifty-two sick women and where there is no bath-room.
7. Another nurse at the Main Institution Building on Rainsford Island, where the laundry-matron has charge of forty-two sick women in addition to her other duties, and with no assistance except what is given her by inmates.
8. A new matron for the hospital. My reason for making this last request is that I believe the present matron to be inefficient. She has had no previous hospital training to fit her for her duties, and certainly the hospital and its patients, when I last saw them, bore evidences of neglect. The beds were not clean, and the patients showed a lack of personal cleanliness and care. When I first visited the hospital the floors were dirty and the closets were unwashed, but there has been an improvement in those respects. I was present when dinner was served to thirty patients in one ward—or, indeed, to seventy inmates of the hospital—and the matron took no charge of the food, which was put before the patients in a most uninviting manner—a great contrast to the neat wooden trays which are in use at Tewksbury. Moreover, I discerned a want of interest in the patients, to which the matron herself bore testimony when she said that she never washed a wound, and was engaged as a matron—not as a nurse.
"These, then, were the grounds upon which I asked for the appointment of another nurse or matron, and fortunately one has applied for the position entirely without my knowledge or solicitation. One of the commissioners doubted whether a trained hospital emergency nurse could be found to go to the islands; but this offer seems to set that question at rest, and it is to be hoped her application may be considered favorably.