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| Frances with one of "her" babies. |
Nan, through no fault of her own, has been dead for 30-odd
years; I was her night nurse during her final illness, and there was a real
nurse who stayed with her during the day. This was long before I studied
Chinese medicine; I expect Nan's done some twisting and turning in her grave
over some of my choices, but about some things concerning medicine I'm sure
we're still in agreement.
She was a great one for talking to herself; I'd often
be upstairs in her attic reading her old children's books when she got home
from her shift at the hospital in the afternoon, and I'd hear her talking away
downstairs, sometimes quite emphatically, as though having an argument.
Eventually I'd put down my book and go downstairs to find out who she was talking to.
"Myself," was the inevitable answer. "It's
the most intelligent conversation I've had all day."
That, in case you don't know any nurses, was commentary
about the doctors she worked with.
Nan became a nurse not long after nursing began to be
something you could go to school to learn. Back in the day, student nurses lived
in housing on the hospital grounds, had strict rules about what they could do
during the little time off they were allowed, and were forbidden to have beaux
(that's "boyfriends," for those of you who don't speak either
Edwardian-era English or French). Student nurses learned on the job - and they also cleaned the wards, cooked
meals, and did any other work required of them by the head nurse and the
doctors who ruled the hospital like feudal lords. Once a nursing student earned
her license, most did private-duty nursing, in a patient's home, taking care of
not only the patient, but often the housekeeping and laundry and cooking, the
patient's children, and often becoming involved in the family aftermath in
fatal cases.
This is how Nan started her
career, and also how she came to move from Manchester to the New London area.
During this era (early 20th century), there weren't many jobs for hospital
nurses - there weren't all that many hospitals, for one thing, not such a large
a population to become patients, and most medical issues were dealt with at
home, including, to a large extent, birthing and dying. The dying at home part
may be headed back that way in modern times, with the medical world encouraging
in-home hospice arrangements partly because of lack of hospital space or funds
for all but the most seriously ill; both Nan and Dad died at home, with family
care and visits from their doctors and Visiting Nurses. Be that as it may, when
Nan began her career, doctors still saw most their patients during house calls,
and the idea of having your baby in a hospital as a matter of routine was still
barely a generation old.
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| Frances Marshall and a patient, 1950 |
New London's Hospital Day, the town's summer do that was
started to raise funds for the hospital, is in early August, and every year
around that time I get kind of nostalgic. Not only was it the thing we as
children most looked forward to from the moment school let out, even surpassing
in anticipation the Andover Fourth of July festival and fireworks (Hospital Day
parade! midway! book sale! baked goods sale! chicken barbecue! the dunking tub!
one memorable year a circus!), but for Brother (who was the last baby born in
the old hospital) and me it was especially exciting because most years Nan
would be on the hospital's parade float; and any time Nan did something in
public, there was apt to be a joke attached or a funny story that followed it.
Nan was one of the nurses at the old New London Hospital -
not the old, old one which is now Tracy Memorial Library, but the one after
that, which is now condos on Main St. The doctor in charge of the hospital
then, and for many years after it moved to the "new" hospital, was a
surgeon - the locally famed Dr. William Clough. Nan had started out hoping to
be a surgery nurse, but a severe allergy to the operating room gloves sent her
on another path, and she became an obstetrics nurse, eventually running the
obstetrics department. Even now, most people of a certain age in the New London
area were either her babies or her babies' mothers. Nan and Dr. Clough shared a
sense of mischief and became fast friends. During the craze, they even streaked
the "new" hospital's patient wards late one night; the nurses on duty
were too polite to notice. Nan told that the next night she streaked my Grampa
- he didn't notice either, because the Red Sox were down by two that night.
The old New London Hospital wasn't very large - only a
couple of wards (rooms with several, or many, beds in them) and a separate
space for new mothers and their babies.
Medical staff didn't completely specialize then - the surgeon was also a
pediatrician and a general practitioner, the obstetric nurses and surgical
nurses worked in the wards when there were no babies or no surgeries to be
done. All the hospital staff, from cleaning staff to head doctor, knew each
other and socialized together - they were their own best support group, and had
group parties to break the tension of what were, often, heart-rending jobs. And
hospitals were a lot less formal - there were no privacy laws, everyone knew
what was wrong with everyone else, and all the patients and their families
gossiped and laughed and made friends with each other in the wards.
One day, there were no babies in the hospital, so Nan was
working the wards. The ward nurse asked her to go give Mrs. Smith an enema. Nan
entered the woman's ward where there were two patients, one sleeping, the other
reading. She didn't know the patients, and there were no ID bracelets, and not
even any treatment charts hanging on the end of the bed. So she asked the
reading patient, "Are you Mrs. Smith? I'm here to give you your
enema." The reading patient looked over her glasses and nodded her head
towards the sleeping woman, so Nan woke her up and administered the enema.
Turns out, of course, that the sleeping woman wasn't Mrs.
Smith at all; the reading woman was Mrs. Smith, and she didn't want an enema.
The sleeping woman was a very ill patient whom none of the doctors had been
able to diagnose, and all attempted treatments hadn't worked. They were quite
worried about whether she'd recover. Nan didn't find this out until the next
day, when Dr. Clough started calling her "Dr. Marshall." Turns out
what was wrong with the very sick woman
was that she was completely blocked up - and the enema cured her.
Another day when all the nurses were out sick, Nan was the
only one in the hospital, splitting her time between the new baby and its
mother in the obstetrics ward, and the sick patients in the regular ward.
Fortunately, there was only one patient in the regular ward, but still, she had
to do some hustling back and forth. About mid-afternoon, she breathlessly
arrived in the regular ward to administer meds, only to discover that her
patient wasn't there. Where could she have gone? Nan did a quick check - not in
any bathroom, nor the solarium, nor the empty men's ward. Not in a closet, not
under any bed, not downstairs in the kitchen or laundry rooms. Run up to the
attic: not there. Quick scan through windows at the grounds - not there. Yikes!
What to do?
Dr. Clough was out of the hospital on a house call, and he
was the type who would blow his top if he learned they'd lost a patient, but
there was nothing to do but call him. He rushed back to the hospital, and he
and Nan once again searched the entire building from attic to cellar, and then
Dr. Clough went out to search the grounds while Nan took care of the new mother
and baby. The patient was nowhere to be found. They were going to have to call
the sheriff and the patient's family, and they dreaded doing either.
Suddenly the phone rang. "Hellooooooo, Naybah!" it
was Dick Lull, the local pharmacist and husband of the town's second grade
teacher. "Are you missin' somethin'?" he asked.
"Why do you ask?" Dr. Clough, gruffly.
"I believe I have something here that belongs to
you," Dick responded. "She's at the lunch counter, and we're having a
nice chat."
Just then, the next shift nurse arrived. "Take care of
the mother and baby in obstetrics," Nan instructed her. "We'll be
right back." And off she and Dr. Clough went, fast as they could go, to the drugstore at the other end of Main
Street, where they found their missing patient, dressed in nightgown and
slippers, sitting at the lunch counter enjoying a large chocolate ice cream
soda.
"WHAT," Dr. Clough thundered, "WERE YOU
THINKING!!??"
"The food at that hospital is terrible, and I was
hungry," the patient answered, quite calmly. "So I walked down here.
I'll come back when I've finished."
Things have definitely changed.
I asked a retired nurse, a few years back: "So; I've
been watching Grey's Anatomy on
Netflix. You can tell me," I insisted, "back in your day, were things
in the back rooms of the hospital as - uh - steamy
as they are on tv? I need to know."
"You'd be surprised," was all she'd say, with a
twinkle in her eye.
I don't think doctors and nurses get to have as much fun as
they did back in Nan's day. They're time-managed, often unable to spend the
time they should with their patients, sometimes they can't even touch their
patients because some looming insurance company has decided it's not efficient
to do so. Things have changed so rapidly, Nan wouldn't recognize the field,
today. And yet, they still sometimes accidentally cure the mystery cases - and
generally, the food's better. Send them some love; and tell them one of Nan's
stories. They need to laugh, too.
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| Frances Marshall, RN, and Dr. William Clough, 1950 New London Hospital Christmas Party |
Originally published, in shorter form, in the Concord Monitor, July 30, 2016, as "The Good Old Days of Nursing."
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