Nurses look the happiest women in the world — Their lives and their privileges — True story of a nurse.
If I were a woman of robust health, rich or poor, and I had no fascination for men, and matrimony had no fascination for me, I would become a nurse. The great, the only problem to solve in life, after all, is happiness, and the only possible way to be happy is to feel that you are wanted and you cause happiness in others; in a word, that somebody is glad and grateful that you are alive. I know I should find a great deal of happiness in nursing. I have had to deal with nurses in France during nine months in a military hospital after the Commune, when a compatriot of mine, an insurgent, of whom I never had the pleasure of making the personal acquaintance, shot me in the arm, and also in Great Britain, during a severe illness which I contracted in the North of Scotland, far away from home.
Nurses look all cheerful and happy, and the beauty of their faces, in England, is enhanced, I must say, by a pleasing, very becoming semi-nunlike attire, that gives them a peculiar charm which you find in no other women. There is engraven on their faces that joy of living which Heaven seems to stamp upon the faces of women who devote themselves to the well-being and happiness of their fellow-creatures and to the assuaging of their pains and sufferings. Yes, nurses all look beautiful, and if I were a woman, theirs is the kind of beauty which I should like to possess.
I remember seeing one by the death-bed of a little girl whom she had tenderly nursed, standing at the bedside, motionless, beautiful in her impassive grace, and looking like one of those angels that painters delight in representing at the bedside of children whose souls they have come to bear to the abode of the seraphim.
Another thing that would induce me to embrace that profession—or vocation I ought rather to call it—is the absolute freedom that nurses enjoy. Their very dress inspires respect in all alike, high and low. They can go wherever they like with their uniform on—into a first tier box at the opera or into the lowest slums of the city. Everybody will stand back to let them pass; all will throw at them a glance of sympathy and admiration. The upper tens treat the nurse like the lady that she is, the submerged ones like the angel that brings them a ray of sunshine. The nurse may be ever so beautiful, the worst roué in the street will not only never think of following her, much less annoying her by his loathsome assiduities, but he will allow her to pass unnoticed in perfect freedom and security, and will not unlikely leave the pavement to make room for her. I believe that the pickpocket in an omnibus would hesitate to help himself to her purse, even if that light companion of hers made itself conspicuous to him by its proximity and easiness of access. If he should yield to the temptation and be caught, he would run the risk of being lynched.
I have heard it said that many women become nurses, hospital nurses especially, with a keen eye on matrimony. It is a fact that a good many nurses marry doctors they have come in contact with, hospital students they have worked with, and even sometimes patients they have nursed during a protracted and painful illness. The wounded officer and his nurse have been the hero and the heroine of many plays and novels; but very few women undertake to lead a life of seclusion and slavery, of abnegation and devotion, a life which entails work day and night, and even danger of contracting infectious disease, with a view to matrimony.
On the other hand, I dare say that a fair number of women have become nurses after the sad ending of some love-affair, in order to divert their thoughts from the death of a beloved sweetheart or the unfaithfulness of a light-hearted lover.
At all events, if the mother-in-law, the stepmother, the widow, the old maid, the strong-minded woman, the ruling wife, the woman's-righter, the woman this and the woman that, have supplied themes for the entertainment and the gaiety of nations, the humourist has invariably left the nurse alone.
I was just now mentioning the fact that many women became nurses in order to bestow on their suffering fellow-creatures the love which the death of a dear lover prevented them from bestowing on a man.