Page 54: Excerpt from A Nickel and a Prayer
School for Nurses. There were eighty applicants on the list ahead of me; but because of Mrs. Hunt’s interest in me, I was accepted for training within a month after filing my application.
Students in any well conducted hospital of the present day would be amazed at the strenuous manual labor exacted from the nurses at the Cannon Street Hospital. There were few servants. We nurses did most of the cooking and cleaning for the entire establishment. In time we became expert barbers; haircutting and shaving of the men patients devolved upon us in the absence of orderlies.
There was no attempt to induct the young woman gradually into the more distasteful and repellent aspects of hospital work. My first afternoon in the hospital was spent in observing an appendectomy--a distressing and hopeless case, since the appendix had ruptured and gangrene had set in. At eleven o’clock that night I was called out of bed to prepare the dead man for burial. Together with three other nurses, I carried the corpse, swung in a sheet, down the stairs to the morgue. But I had my mother’s exuberant vitality and love of life; no experience, however gruesome, could discourage me.
The methods of instruction were as direct and practical as those of the Squeers School. I had a thorough lesson in anatomy at an autopsy on the body of a Negro worker who had broken his neck in the phosphate mines. In autopsies the nurses assisted, using
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Hunter, Jane Edna. A Nickel and a Prayer. 2nd edition. Nashville: Elli Kani Publishing Co., 1941.
School for Nurses. There were eighty applicants on the list ahead of me; but because of Mrs. Hunt’s interest in me, I was accepted for training within a month after filing my application.
Students in any well conducted hospital of the present day would be amazed at the strenuous manual labor exacted from the nurses at the Cannon Street Hospital. There were few servants. We nurses did most of the cooking and cleaning for the entire establishment. In time we became expert barbers; haircutting and shaving of the men patients devolved upon us in the absence of orderlies.
There was no attempt to induct the young woman gradually into the more distasteful and repellent aspects of hospital work. My first afternoon in the hospital was spent in observing an appendectomy--a distressing and hopeless case, since the appendix had ruptured and gangrene had set in. At eleven o’clock that night I was called out of bed to prepare the dead man for burial. Together with three other nurses, I carried the corpse, swung in a sheet, down the stairs to the morgue. But I had my mother’s exuberant vitality and love of life; no experience, however gruesome, could discourage me.
The methods of instruction were as direct and practical as those of the Squeers School. I had a thorough lesson in anatomy at an autopsy on the body of a Negro worker who had broken his neck in the phosphate mines. In autopsies the nurses assisted, using
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Hunter, Jane Edna. A Nickel and a Prayer. 2nd edition. Nashville: Elli Kani Publishing Co., 1941.
© 2009 Jane Edna Hunter Project
