The up-patients were already at work when the girls arrived, sweeping, polishing brass, getting the linen in order and helping other more miserable up-patients into their wheelchairs. The latter were trundled out into the solarium where they sat all day and chewed tobacco and gossiped of wine, women and war and occasionally of God. Sometimes you could hear the cracked voice of an old sailor trying to sing a barroom song or the booming voice of the old German who was almost ossified, singing a hymn.
June’s first task was to pour out the medicine for a hundred patients, a task demanding concentration and a steady hand. When she first started pouring, she continued pouring in her dreams every night, until she was able to associate every patient with the medicine which he took. For instance, whenever she saw Sullivan, her brain immediately flashed:
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Arom. Spt. Am. Dr. 1
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Donov. Sol. M. 10
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Pot. Iod. Gr. 15
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Stokes M. Dr. 1
There were almost as many medicines for each patient, and the entire dose was handed out in one glass regardless of chemical combinations. The convalescent patients greeted June hilariously as she came bringing them what they called their cocktails and bracers.
It took two hours to pour and chart the medicines. All the while June stood at the glass medicine cabinet in the center of the ward, Philip, a handsome elderly man in the bed opposite to her, leisurely selected and picked (with apparently great discrimination) a large bouquet of flowers from the air, each one of which he sniffed with enjoyment before adding it to the bunch in his hand. This he presented to June with a courteous, grave smile, when she brought him his medicine, and she thanked him with equal gravity and ceremony and arranged them in an imaginary vase on her medicine tray. One time she noticed him pulling with a great deal of effort at what must have been a goldenrod, it was so hard to separate it from its stalk.
“If you try to break it, instead of tearing at it,” said the man in the next bed kindly, “maybe you’ll get it off.”
There was another patient, a laundryman, with a red haggard face and burning eyes, who took off his bedclothes, one by one and fed them into an ironing machine. Even his nightshirt was sacrificed in the stress of his delusion, and wearily, again and again, June clothed him, and bound him down in the bed with restraining sheets which he loosened in fifteen minutes with his restless, strong, sick fingers.
Adele sat and sniffed into a handkerchief at the open window while June, crouched on the bed in the corner where she couldn’t see how tantalizing the spring evening was, was trying vainly to memorize the symptoms of atropine poisoning.
“It seems to me that all the heart medicines have the same poisoning symptoms,” she complained. “Now, mercury is easy to remember. If your patients salivate, then you know they’ve got the first symptom. Then their gums begin to swell and turn purple and then their teeth fall out. When I first went on ward seventy-two, I had just learned those symptoms, so I went around to all the patients who were taking mercury in one form or another and looked at their mouths. And would you believe it, every one of them complained of wanting to spit all the time! Those interns had forgotten all about prescribing mercury and had left it on the medicine chart and the damn-fool nurse who was in the ward before me kept right on giving the medicine. I kicked to the head nurse—or rather I reported the matter respectfully, for she’s an old devil—and she told me to go right on giving the medicine till the doctor came on the ward again. ‘Doctor’s orders must be obeyed.’ And the doctor might not be on the ward again for a week!”
The ward was like a ship, she concluded, where the doctor was captain, the superintendent first mate, the head nurse, second mate and the nurses just ordinary seamen. They had to obey orders, nothing else. And if they used their brains, and deduced that a patient was about to die of strychnine poisoning unless the dose was stopped, they had to go on giving the dose until word came from higher-up to stop it. Discipline was a great thing. For any woman holding an executive position who was about to have a nervous prostration, a course of training in a hospital would surely cure her. If it didn’t kill her. June felt that she would like to scream every now and then and throw medicine bottles at the head nurses. But she felt too the relief of being told what to do and knowing that she had to do it.
Suddenly she looked up from the book she was vainly trying to concentrate her mind upon and noticed Adele with her handkerchief. “What is the matter? Have you got a cold or are you crying?”
Adele admitted that she was crying and continued sniffing. June’s sympathy made it worse.
“Oh, I like hospital work and I wouldn’t stop it for anything,” she wept, “but every now and then you see something that actually breaks your heart and you don’t see how you can stand it any longer. You know Mary—the one I told you about with consumption and who had just had a baby a month ago? Well, she’s dead.”
June knew that it wasn’t at the death itself that her sister was crying, for they had talked of it and expected it every day for the past week. It sounded callous but there was a sort of excitement in seeing how long you could keep a person who was lingering with a fatal disease alive.
“She died at quarter
