Dora grew up to be a very handsome woman. By the time she was twenty, all her delicacy had disappeared and she was tall and strong. She had very high spirits and was always full of fun and ready to see the funny side of people and things. Her laughter and her happy voice, singing as she went about the house, were the delight of her father, who called her his sunshine. But though she loved her home and her rides and walks on the moors, she did not find there enough occupation for her active nature. Her mother died after a long time of ill-health, during which Dora had been one of her devoted nurses, and now Dora longed for some real work. Her father did not wish her to leave home, but he did not forbid it, and at last when she was twenty-nine, Dora went to be schoolmistress at Woolston, a little village in Buckinghamshire. She lived there alone in a tiny cottage, loving the children who came to her school, and making herself the friend of all the poor and sick in the village. She did not feel, however, that this was her real work; and after three years she decided to join the Sisterhood of the Good Samaritans. She had learnt to know these Sisters in Yorkshire, as they had their chief home at Coatham, which was not very far from her old home. The Sisters had a Convalescent Home under their care, and many of them went out from Coatham to work in other towns.
After she joined the Sisterhood, Sister Dora, as she was now called, had to work very hard. The Sisters did all the work of the house, and Sister Dora cleaned floors and grates, swept and dusted, and for a time acted as cook. She sometimes felt it very hard to have to do all this work. Once when a gentleman whom she knew came into the kitchen where she was peeling potatoes, she pulled her hood over her face so that he might not see her. In after life she found the great advantage of having learnt how to do all the work of a house herself. She thought some of the rules very strict; but still she was very happy there, and the Sisters loved her. She was able also to learn more about nursing, as the Sisters had a Cottage Hospital near Middlesborough, to which she was sent. Sometimes, too, she was sent to nurse private patients, and sometimes to nurse in another Cottage Hospital for accidents at Walsall, which was managed by the Coatham Sisters.
At last Sister Dora settled altogether at Walsall, in charge of the little hospital there. Walsall is a great manufacturing centre, with coal pits, blast furnaces, and many kinds of factories. It had then no large hospital; the little Cottage Hospital was chiefly intended for accidents, and the patients were for the most part men and boys from the pits and workshops. There were also a large number of out-patients, men, women, and children. As most of the cases were accidents, Sister Dora was particularly anxious to become a good surgical nurse, and the chief surgeon at the hospital, when he saw how quick and clever she was, taught her all that he could, so that she could attend to many cases herself without the help of the doctor. The hospital in which she at first nursed was very small and inconvenient, with only fourteen beds, but a few years after Sister Dora settled in Walsall a new hospital was built on the top of the hill on which the town lies. It had twenty-eight beds, conveniently arranged in three wards, so that it was just possible for an active woman like Sister Dora to do all the nursing herself. She had the help of an old servant of her family, who came to live with her and who soon learnt to be a very capable nurse herself. Other women were engaged to sit up at night with the patients, and, later, Sister Dora used to have lady pupils who learnt nursing under her.
It was a very hard life, full of ceaseless work and responsibility, but Sister Dora threw her whole heart into it, and loved her work and the people for whom she worked. Once settled at Walsall, she never wished to leave it. Speaking to a friend about her work, she said, “I generally find that the more I have to do the stronger and happier I feel. It is hard enough sometimes at night, when I have been round to all the patients and left them comfortable and asleep, and am just going to bed myself, to be called down by the bell, or perhaps roused by it just as I am falling asleep. But then I think ‘the Master calleth thee,’ and jump up and go down, to find perhaps some poor drunken man or woman, and it is difficult to recognise the Master in such poor degraded creatures as come to be doctored up.” She had a wonderful power over the men and boys amongst whom she worked. She sympathised deeply with all their pain and trouble, and made them feel as if their troubles were her own, but she tried to make them forget their pain by her bright talk and her laughter and jokes. She would raise their spirits by her delightful fun, till an Irishman said once, “Make you laugh! she’d make you laugh when you were dying.” Whenever she had a spare minute, she would read to them or talk to them or play games with them. She allowed no bad talk or quarrelling in the wards, and tried to mend her patients’ morals as well as their limbs. They each of them knew that they had a real friend in her, and that she prayed for each and cared deeply what became of them. They loved to come and see her after they had left the hospital, and were always sure of a welcome. She tried hard to cure them from their drinking ways, showing them again and again how hard it was to heal the wounds of those who drank; and when they were brought in at night wounded after a drunken brawl, after dressing their wounds with all her usual gentleness, she would ask them why they did not behave like respectable members of society, instead of fighting in the streets and getting her up at unearthly hours of the night to mend their broken heads.
Sister Dora was devoted to children and they loved her, and she knew how to get them to bear patiently the dressing of their wounds. Often when a child was miserable and in pain, she would carry it about with her on one arm as she went through the wards, saying, “Don’t you cry, Sister’s got you,” whilst with her other hand she attended to the patients. Many children suffering from terrible burns used to be brought to the hospital, and she grew so clever in treating them that the surgeons trusted them entirely to her care. Once a child was brought in so badly burnt that it was plain it had only a few hours to live. All pain had ceased, but the child was terrified. Sister Dora gave up all other work in order to comfort her. She sat by the bed for some hours talking to her about Jesus Christ and His love for little children, and about heaven where she would never feel hunger and pain again. The child grew peaceful and happy, and her last words were, “When you come to heaven, Sister, I’ll meet you at the gates with a bunch of flowers.”
Sister Dora felt special sympathy for the men who had been so hurt that it seemed necessary for them to have an arm or leg cut off. She knew well how difficult this made it for them to earn a livelihood, and she devoted all her skill to saving the wounded limb if possible. One night a fine healthy young man was brought in with his arm torn and twisted by a machine. The doctor said that nothing could save it, and that he must cut it off at once. Sister Dora was moved by the despair of the poor man; she looked long at his arm and at himself, and the man cried out, “O Sister! save my arm for me; it’s my right arm.” When she turned to the doctor and asked if she might try to save the arm, he only asked her if she was mad, and said that the man’s life could not be saved unless his arm were taken off at once. But she turned to the patient and said, “Are you willing for me to try to save your arm, my man?” He was willing, but the surgeon was very angry, and refused to help her, saying, “Remember, it’s your arm,” and telling her she must take all the responsibility. Night and day for three weeks she tended him, naturally feeling terribly anxious as to what would happen. She often said afterwards, “How I prayed over that arm.” At the end of that time she asked the surgeon to come and look at her work, and when she unbandaged the arm and showed it to him, straightened and in a healthy, promising condition, he exclaimed, “Why you have saved it, and it will be a useful arm to him for many a long year.” It is not surprising that Sister Dora wept with joy at her success, nor that the man became one of her most devoted admirers. He was nicknamed “Sister’s Arm” in the hospital, and used to come back often to see her after he had left.
Another man himself tells how she had to persuade him to allow his leg to be taken off as the only way of saving his life. He had grown so thin and wasted that she used to carry him upstairs in her arms so that he might join in the prayers she held for the whole hospital. He was eight months in the hospital, and he says, “I learned to love Sister Dora as a mother.” He tells how she used in the afternoons to attend to the out-patients, “dress their wounds, set a broken arm, sew up a cut, or draw teeth, in fact anything that was required of her she would do, and always with the tenderest care and the kindest word to all.” She often amused the men with tales of her doings in the country as a girl, and told them about her riding and fox-hunting, and this man who watched her life in the hospital for eight months says, “those patients who were the most trouble, she seemed the fondest of.” She knew how to get the men to help her by making them wait upon one another; generally there was some boy who had to stay a long while in the hospital, who waited upon her as a devoted slave. After she had been four years at the hospital, to show their gratitude for all she had done, her patients subscribed fifty pounds amongst themselves with which they bought a small carriage and pony for her. She delighted in using it to send convalescents for a drive, and found it a help in taking her to visit sick people in their homes. She seldom took a holiday herself, and once was three years at the hospital without any break, but if she did go away into the country with friends, she enjoyed everything with all her old energy, bathing or skating, taking long walks, when she would lead the way in scaling fences or fording streams. Sometimes she took patients who were convalescent for expeditions into the country or to visit Lichfield Cathedral. The old patients specially loved to revisit the hospital on Sundays, when, after a clergyman had held a short service, Sister Dora used to speak to them herself, and then lead them in the singing of many hymns. She always had a small Bible in her pocket, and studied it whenever she had a spare minute.
In 1875 there was a terrible outbreak of smallpox in Walsall. There was an isolation hospital on the outskirts of the town, but in those days people were not compelled by law to send smallpox patients away, and they refused to go of their own accord, for they said that they would rather die at home. It was very necessary for the welfare of the town that they should be persuaded to go to the hospital and not spread the terrible infection by staying in their own homes. So Sister Dora offered to leave her hospital and go to take charge of the Smallpox Hospital. She knew that the people trusted her, and thought that they would come if she was there. Her offer was gladly accepted; all through the town the news ran, “Sister is going to the Epidemic Hospital.” Her lady pupils were left to take charge of the hospital, and she went off to her lonely work with the surgeon of the hospital to show her the way. It seemed such a lonely and desolate spot that even her courage failed her at the door, and she cried out, “Oh take me back, I cannot endure this dreadful place.” But the surgeon knew her real courage, and only said, “Come in.” It was an admirably planned little hospital, and she was delighted with it. There were twenty-eight beds, and she had not been half-an-hour in the hospital before seven patients arrived, to be followed by many more. Her only regular helper was the porter, an old man, who did all he could for her when he was sober, but used sometimes to go away and get drunk, leaving her alone for the whole night. Two old women came in from the workhouse to help her in washing the clothes and bedding, but much of the scrubbing and cleaning she had to do herself, as well as all the nursing. One of the police who came to see her told her that the people in the town declared they should not mind having the smallpox with “Sister” to nurse them. Some few people were brave enough to visit her in her loneliness, and to bring her books and flowers and news of her patients at the hospital.
One of the old patients, an engine-stoker, went often to see her after his day’s work was done. He had been twice in the hospital under her care, and he said, “I could not tell you all her goodness to me, words would fail me if I tried.” She was full of courage and joy in her work, and wrote to a friend: “You must not fret. I rejoice that He has permitted one so unworthy to work for Him; and oh, if He should think me fit to lay down my life for Him, rejoice, rejoice, at so great a privilege.” Even her sense of fun did not leave her, and she wrote a long letter to her old patients at the Cottage Hospital, calling them all by their nicknames and sending messages to each. She said of a boy who was her special slave: “What shall I say to my beloved Sam. I wish I had my boy here. I send him twenty kisses and hope he has been in church to-day and in time. He must not sulk all the time I am away. I have two blessed babies, who alternately keep up music all day and night, accompanied by an Irishwoman’s tongue, so I am not dull. Have you been singing to-day? You must sing particularly, ‘Safe in the arms of Jesus’ and think of me. Living or dying, I am His. Oh, my children, you all love me for the very little I do for you; but oh, if you would only think what Jesus has done, and is doing for you, your hearts would soon be full of love for Him, and you would all choose Him for your Master.”
Towards the middle of May, the Smallpox Hospital was empty and she hoped soon to leave; but before she was ready to go new patients were brought in, and this happened several times, so that it was not till the middle of August, after six months’ work at the Smallpox Hospital, that she was able to close it.