During Cornelia’s illness, the family doctor had remarked that Mary was a good little nurse. Mary knew that the Pittsburgh Homeopathic Hospital had recently established one of the few schools of nursing in the whole United States. A nickel for the streetcar would take her there. Training as a nurse might be a step toward becoming a doctor. At least it wouldn’t hurt to go and ask.
When Mary broached the notion to her mother, Cornelia threw a fit. Girls of good family did not become nurses. Waiting on the sick was almost worse than being a domestic servant. Was this what an underappreciated mother had worked and scraped and hoped and prayed and made all those pretty dresses for?
Mary had never been the most docile of daughters. She argued back. Arguing was not Cornelia’s forte. She had no gift of words like her daughter. She went into one of her silent sulks.
Mary could handle a sulk. She let down a tuck in her new flowered dimity, pinned up her hair for the first time in her life, sneaked a dusting of her mother’s face powder, donned her white summer bonnet with the rose on the side, picked up her ruffled parasol, and tripped off to get a second opinion.
Her old friend the family doctor was not in his office. He’d gone off for the summer and left someone else in charge. This doctor was a much younger man, even younger than Mary took him to be. His gold pince-nez had lenses of plain glass; its sole function, had Mary but known, was to make him look more grown up. Ditto the small mustache, black like his hair and his eyes. His complexion was dark, and dark was the look he bent upon this sweet young thing in her ruffles and roses once she’d told him what she’d come for.
So Miss Roberts thought nursing was romantic, did she? She pictured it as nothing tougher than smoothing pillows and stroking fevered foreheads, did she not?
No, she did not, Mary averred stoutly. She’d had nursing experience, she knew what tending a sickbed was like. She was not afraid of hard work, she could do whatever needed to be done. What was an inexperienced young doctor do with so intransigent a young lady?
This one reacted much as Mary’s Latin teacher had done. Perhaps it was her zeal for learning that caught his fancy, more likely it was the rose on her hat and the winsome face under the brim. Since she was so stubborn, he’d take her around the hospital where, he confessed, he’d only just finished his internship, and give her a taste of what nursing was really like. He knew every rathole in the place, he added by way of reassurance. He set an appointment for the following day and finally got around to telling her his name. He was Dr. Rinehart, Stanley Marshall Rinehart. Rather a euphonious name, Mary thought. Her dream was beginning to show a slight, very slight, sign of becoming a reality. Partly thrilled, partly scared, she picked up her parasol and went home to supper.
While they were washing the dishes together, Mary told her mother what she’d done that afternoon. Cornelia broke down and cried. Gone were her dreams, her hopes, her plans, all vanished like soap bubbles from the dishpan. Mary tried to show a proper degree of sympathy, but she kept her appointment with Dr. Rinehart.
The hospital seemed an alien place, dreary and mysterious; Mary was disconcerted by queer smells and strange, echoing sounds. In My Story, she described even the nurses as figures of mystery, moving so briskly and so quietly in their crisp uniforms and odd little caps. An ambulance arrived, a stretcher was carried in. On it lay something covered in a gray blanket. Was this a real person? Was it alive? Was it dead? No matter, it was awesome. It was intriguing. It was something she wanted to be part of.
At this time, Mary had no concept of a nursing career as a commitment to human service. That would come later. For the moment, she was seeing the hospital as an adventure, a new experience, a means of solving her present dilemma about getting on with her life. She asked Dr. Rinehart where she could apply as a student nurse, and he showed her.
Miss Marguerite Wright, superintendent of nurses, was a figure of majesty. Mary described the great lady as she was to see her so many times in the exhausting days to come: her white hair dressed high in the pompadour style that was then just coming into fashion, her black taffeta dress rustling along the ward floors as she made her morning rounds with her always-present assistant trotting dutifully behind her. She must have had a closetful of those dresses, always the same, always in perfect order. The new probationer would learn to quail at the mere swish of a taffeta skirt.
Today, however, sitting behind the desk in her private office, Miss Wright was all affability. She did cast a dubious eye at the ruffled parasol and that skittish little rose on Mary’s hat.
“Miss Roberts,” she asked, “how old are you?”
Good question. Mary paused to reflect. Well, it was almost July and she was going to be seventeen in August, so why be nitpicky? “Seventeen,” she replied.
“And when is your next birthday?”
“August twelfth,” said Mary, thereby docking a year out of her life, as far as the hospital records were concerned. When she entered the hospital as a probationer six days after that equivocal birthday, her age went down on the books as eighteen.
Student nurses were not supposed to wear uniforms until after they had got safely through their three-month probation period. Mary was told to bring whatever simple, washable dresses she had, with some aprons to wear over them. Cornelia, resigned by now to the ruinous course that her wayward daughter had set for herself, whipped up a couple of dark blue cotton frocks, gathered very full in front to create the illusion of a grown-up bosom. She cut out a number of aprons from the finest handkerchief linen and sewed them all by hand. If Mary was determined to take the downward path, at least she’d be properly dressed for the descent.
Late on the afternoon of August 18, 1893, Tom Roberts escorted his elder daughter to the gloomy, dark red brick building where she was committed to staying for the next two years, provided she survived her probation. Whatever might have been in the father’s mind, he didn’t confide it to Mary. He just handed her bagful of hand-sewn aprons to the doorman and went away.
The doorman was affable enough, but he had his own job to do. He showed Mary into a waiting room, set her bag on the floor beside her, and left her alone. She’d put on a rosebud-patterned blue foulard silk dress and a broad blue hat to boost her morale for the occasion. It felt odd to be sitting here by herself, dressed like a fashion plate, smelling the iodoform that hung so heavily in the air. Why didn’t somebody come? All at once a wave of terror swept over her, her hands began to shake. Mary was to wonder later why she hadn’t thought to pick up her bag and flee.
A millennium or two later, or so it seemed to the quaking neophyte, the assistant supervisor came in. This was a brisk little woman wearing the skirt of her immaculate uniform an inch or two off the floor to reveal tiny shoes with ridiculously high heels. Mary would learn to resent those heels. How could this ancient crone of thirty or more click along so briskly hour after hour, day after day, when Mary’s own young feet were always so sore and swollen? Sometime later, the assistant would move to the Philippines and marry an army officer. On this fateful occasion, she merely showed the new girl to a tiny, high-ceilinged bedroom and left her there to settle in.
The room held a narrow iron bed, a bureau, a small table, a rocking chair, and a straight chair. Its small closet contained a laundry bag. The single window looked down on a paved courtyard that was bounded on three sides by the hospital wings. On the open side, at one corner, was the stable that housed the ambulance and the horses that drew it. Mary would get used to hearing the furious clang of the bell and the pounding of the horses’ hooves at any time of the night or day—they were the bane of every off-duty nurse trying to get some sleep.
Suppertime turned out to be outrageously early, five o’clock for the first seating, five-thirty for the second. Dawdling was not encouraged. Mary ate a meal that must have been a letdown after a lifetime of Cornelia Roberts’s cuisine and went back to her room because she didn’t know what else to do.
Pittsburgh can be scorching in August, and Mary h
ad left her door open for a breath of air. At seven o’clock, she began to see the night-shift nurses passing by on their way to the wards. Rubber heels had yet to be invented, so some had the heels of their shoes tied up in bandages to silence their tread. All of them looked dragged out. They could not have got much sleep on a hot summer day with the windows open and traffic noises ricocheting up off the pavement. These nurses would be on duty for the next twelve hours with a short relief for a midnight supper, provided they could grab enough time to eat it.
At a quarter past seven, Mary heard new sounds welling up from the nurses’ parlor on the floor below. This, she would learn, was evening prayer. Nobody had explained that she was expected to attend regularly. When she dutifully showed up the next evening, she was startled to see the other nurses kneeling in front of their chairs. As a Presbyterian, she’d always stood up to pray; now here she was in a hotbed of Episcopalians. What would Grandmother Roberts say, had she but known that her granddaughter was kneeling in public?
This first night, after the sound of hymn singing had died, Mary heard a firm step in the corridor and a brisk voice demanding to see the new probationer. It was Her Majesty the superintendent, head high, shoulders back, black taffeta train swirling about her feet. Mary found out later from the other nurses that Miss Wright had come from a fine family and been among the first graduates from the training school at Bellevue Hospital in New York.
Mary also learned that Miss Wright was an absolute autocrat. She made her rounds of the hospital twice a day, always with her high-heeled acolyte clicking along behind, then she went back to her office and issued her orders, which had better not be disobeyed or slackly followed up. When Miss Wright was not on the floor, the assistant served as her eyes, ears, and mouth; another lesson Mary soon absorbed was to watch her step when the assistant was around.
Tonight, Miss Wright had been downstairs reading the evening prayers and was about to check the diet slips for the following day with the nurses in charge. Her visit to Mary didn’t last long. She just wanted Miss Roberts to know that she would have two hours off each day, not counting sleep time, and a half-day once a week. The following morning at seven o’clock, she would report to Ward E.
Mary didn’t get much sleep that night. The bed was harder and narrower than she was used to. At one point, the patrol wagon drove into the yard, clanging frantically. She’d drop off for a while, then start up in a panic, light the gas, and look at her watch to make sure she hadn’t overslept. The watch was really her mother’s, a nice gold one that must have been bought in a more affluent time. It had a second hand that the new probationer would be needing to count pulses, if she ever got the chance.
All Mary’s worry about oversleeping had been a waste of time. At six o’clock in the morning the night watchman, a little old Welshman named Davis Davis, came pounding on doors, shouting out the time. He’d been on duty all night long, working his slow elevator up and down, ferrying the emergency cases and the tired doctors who would have to cope with them. Once Davis had got the day shift stirring, he could eat his breakfast and go to bed. Mary put on one of her new cotton dresses and tied over it a gauzy apron that would soon meet a sad fate in the hospital laundry. She ate what little she could choke down of a hurried breakfast and crept to the door of Ward E. She gazed timidly at the patients, and they gazed dully back at her.
She’d been assigned to the women’s typhoid ward. That was a slight relief. After Olive’s long illness, Mary did know something about typhoid. This was the season for it, when rivers that had flooded in the spring were running low under the blazing suns of a hot summer, concentrating their pollutants to peak performance. Nobody was blaming the rivers, of course. Even Miss Wright and the doctors still considered typhoid fever an act of Providence.
Mary counted fifteen tall iron beds, each with a little stand beside it, each with a card hooked to its bottom rail telling the patient’s name, sex, age, occupation, religion, and next of kin. There was one splash of color in the middle of the room, a round table with a red cloth on it. Wherever they could be fitted in, small cots had been set up to hold those patients for whom there were no other beds; every one of them was occupied.
The sight was almost overwhelming: twenty-odd sick patients, some of them even more skeletal than Olive had been by the end of her ordeal, some raving with fever, some, mercifully, showing signs of recovery. Each patient had to be bathed every day, some of them every few hours. Beds had to be kept spotless, long hair combed and braided, mouths cleaned of fever sores, temperatures taken, medicines and nourishment given, all this by only two nurses and one badly frightened probationer.
As it turned out, Mary didn’t even get to braid a pigtail. Novices like her were assigned the most menial jobs, including tasks that even the night soil man of her early youth would have gagged at. She wept sometimes, but she kept on working. At the end of her ten-hour stretch, the head nurse patted her arm and told her she’d done well.
That evening Mary knelt among the nurses. Their aprons were stained, their caps askew, their faces pale with fatigue. She was one of them now, she was committed. She would work as hard as they did, and she would be as good as the best.
CHAPTER 7
Nurse Roberts Wins Her Cap—and Sets It
That first day on the wards might have been made a little tougher for the new probationer than it needed to be. Mary didn’t yet realize that she’d entered the hospital under an even greater handicap than her lack of years and experience. Her reconnaissance visit had not gone unnoticed. Her airy summer frock, her chic chapeau, her flirty parasol, and the fact that she’d been squired around the wards by none other than S.M., younger half-brother of the Olympian C. C. Rinehart who was the hospital’s head, had stamped her as a society girl come to patronize the hoi polloi. Cornelia’s gold watch and those hand-embroidered linen aprons had clinched the mistaken impression.
However, the delicate aprons did not long survive the hospital laundry, and Mary worked hard enough to convince the rest that she was not just a debutante looking for a new thrill. She was efficient at changing the sputum cups, carrying out the soiled linen, sweeping the floors and washing the coal dust off the windowsills. She did run into trouble the first time she attempted to slide a bedpan under a patient, but the woman was fortunately conscious enough to explain that Mary was doing it the wrong way around. Soon she would be promoted to combing the nits and lice out of patients’ heads, a much-needed task in those days when any woman lacking a mane of long hair was likely to be either a fever victim or a prostitute.
Late in the afternoon of Mary’s second day on the wards, Miss Wright had a new thrill ready for her. Miss Roberts and another probationer whom she hadn’t met before were assigned to clean the operating room. The other girl’s greeting to Mary was “I hope I don’t get sick.”
The operating room was actually an amphitheater on the top floor, with seats in a semicircle above a tiled well that contained the operating table, glass-topped instrument tables, and glass-fronted white cabinets to contain the instruments when they were not in use. Clearly the trend toward modernization was beginning here; although the wards were still lighted with gas, the operating room was illuminated by a big electric dome light over the table. Though some of the older surgeons still considered the new fad for antisepsis a bundle of horsefeathers, everything was kept scrupulously clean.
There were sterilizers for the instruments, towels, and dressings. The younger surgeons wore white coats over their clothes, they scrubbed their hands for a long time and douched them in antiseptic before approaching the operating table. They even talked hopefully of rubber gloves and face masks. An older surgeon might forget to put on his white coat, wash his hands casually if at all, not unload his cud of chewing tobacco in one of the pails beside the table until just before he started to operate, not even bother to tie a strip of gauze around his bushy beard before he picked up his scalpel and leaned over the patient. Strangely enough, a fair number of his victims
would survive regardless.
The Pittsburgh Homeopathic did many amputations, most of these resulting from accidents at the steel mill or from the railroads and cable cars. Anesthesia was by this time common practice, and chloroform saved lives by reducing the pain and shock of the operation. Once the limbs were off, the stumps were sprinkled with iodoform. What seems to have bothered Mary most was not the blood or the sound of bones being sawed, but the all-pervading smell of antiseptic that got into her clothes and hair and never went away.
However skillful the surgery, operating was a messy business. It was done then by the now long-obsolete wet method. Glass bottles filled with antiseptic solution hung above the table with rubber tubes descending from them to irrigate the wound and keep washing away the gore so that the surgeon could see what he was doing. To clamp off a blood vessel, he must watch to find out just where the blood was spurting from. Heavy black rubber sheets were spread to catch the assorted liquids and direct them into pails set on the floor beside the table.
By the end of the day the operating room looked like an abattoir. On that first day, Mary was told to carry out a bucket. She didn’t notice at first that there was a human foot in it. She disposed of the foot and went back, then she and her sister probationer started washing blood off those rubber sheets with a strong carbolic acid solution. The other girl became queasy and had to stand by the open window. She claimed it was the chloroform that upset her. Mary kept on washing.
She survived her three-month probation. By now she’d got the feel of the hospital, she’d become accustomed to the arduous routine, she was ready to stay the course. From here on, however, there seems to have been no further thought about going to medical school. Perhaps it was glory enough to realize that she, Mary Ella Roberts, student nurse, was now on an equal footing with all but one of her coworkers.
Had She But Known Page 6