The Tragedy and Comedy of War Hospitals. By Sister X.
(John Murray. 6s. net.)—" This in army nursing, you know ; it is quite different from civilian"; so. spoke the Reserve Sister to Sister X, when she was introduced to the College Hospital at Maritzburg ; and she said it not without a twinkle in her eye. Here was the comedy ; it was comic, as wholly inadequate and even impossible arrangements are ludicrous. But the tragedy was not far off. It came to the front the very next day. A number of patients were to be sent on to Durban. One of them was suffering from peritonitis, and his temperature was 1010. Sister X remonstrated, first to the orderly—the orderlies washed the patients and made their beds; in fact, were the real nurses— and then to the ward-master. He resented her interference at first, but then became more sympathetic. Still, he could do nothing ; neither could the Sister Superintendent, nor even the civilian doctor. The man had to go; it would have been kinder to put a pistol to his ear at once. And this is a fair specimen of the Sister's experiences. So on p. 27 we read of a man in very high fever compelled to make his bed ; on p.31 of the horrors of pay-day, when most of the orderlies got drunk ; on p. 83 of a ward with "no linen, no pillows, except flat straw bolsters," fever patients "lying panting and saturated with per- spiration, loaded with blankets, their poor mouths all clogged together, and the flies swarming round them in thousands." And the country was spending millions, allowing contractors to grow rich on the purchase and sale of superfluous stores, sending rivers of port wine, enough to flood the home market for months afterward, and yet the commonest provision was wanting. It really seems as if to give the name of military to office, or hospital, or anything else was to strike the whole thing with paralysis.
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