Page 56: Excerpt from A Nickel and a Prayer
lighter than mine entered, I was displaced. All that really concerned me, however, was my profession; hard and disagreeable work, jealousy, unjust discrimination could not deter me from giving the best in me to the doctors and patients whom I served.
Progressing rapidly, after only six months’ training, I was recalled to the Rutledge home as nurse for one of the children who was ill with scarlet fever. I was “Nurse Hunter,” now, and I worked hard to justify my new dignity and save my little patient, to whom I was devoted. It was my first case away from the hospital, and I felt my whole future might turn on how I handled it.
Our hospital was staffed by colored doctors; but most of the major operations were performed by white surgeons, chief of whom was Dr. T. Grange Simons, the leading surgeon in Charleston. He was said to dislike Negroes; however that may have been, he liked my work as surgical nurse, and gave instructions that I should be assigned to duty for all of his cases. Recognition from a source so important gave me enormous confidence. Only a short time since I had been a field hand, a cotton picker, a laundress; I was now on my way to an accepted place in a trained profession. I studied indefatigably, mastering the names of a hundred instruments, keeping eyes and ears alert at all time to the needs of the operating surgeon, and leaving no stone unturned to master the details of nursing.
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Hunter, Jane Edna. A Nickel and a Prayer. 2nd edition. Nashville: Elli Kani Publishing Co., 1941.
lighter than mine entered, I was displaced. All that really concerned me, however, was my profession; hard and disagreeable work, jealousy, unjust discrimination could not deter me from giving the best in me to the doctors and patients whom I served.
Progressing rapidly, after only six months’ training, I was recalled to the Rutledge home as nurse for one of the children who was ill with scarlet fever. I was “Nurse Hunter,” now, and I worked hard to justify my new dignity and save my little patient, to whom I was devoted. It was my first case away from the hospital, and I felt my whole future might turn on how I handled it.
Our hospital was staffed by colored doctors; but most of the major operations were performed by white surgeons, chief of whom was Dr. T. Grange Simons, the leading surgeon in Charleston. He was said to dislike Negroes; however that may have been, he liked my work as surgical nurse, and gave instructions that I should be assigned to duty for all of his cases. Recognition from a source so important gave me enormous confidence. Only a short time since I had been a field hand, a cotton picker, a laundress; I was now on my way to an accepted place in a trained profession. I studied indefatigably, mastering the names of a hundred instruments, keeping eyes and ears alert at all time to the needs of the operating surgeon, and leaving no stone unturned to master the details of nursing.
(<<<previous) (next>>>)
Hunter, Jane Edna. A Nickel and a Prayer. 2nd edition. Nashville: Elli Kani Publishing Co., 1941.
© 2009 Jane Edna Hunter Project
