SOME BOOKS OF THE WEEK.
[Notice in this column does not necessarily preclude subsequent recie.m] Miss Julia Stimson was what in the American Army is called " Chief Nurse," and what we should call " Matron," of a British hospital in France. In her letters to her family (Finding Themselves, Macmillan and Co., New York, 8s. net) she expresses views which will probably surprise almost as much as they will please her English readers. We are apt to disparage our powers—especially our powers of producing tolerable institutions —yet she has nothing but admiration for the organisation of our hospitals, and for the spirit shown by British medical per- sonnels from chief surgeons down to V.A.D.'s. She tells some interesting stories. Those which express her admiration for the spirit of the men will not surprise even this modest nation :— " A nurse stopped at the office to leave the notices of two new Dangerously Ill' cases. As she handed me the slip she said, ' Of the sixty-four new stretcher cases we got in last night, all have bandaged eyes. They are the worst gassed men I have ever seen. I've done nothing but irrigate eyes all the morning. One man discovered that he could see a little when I got his lids opened and his eyes washed out, and he burst out ' Oh, sister, I can see, and I am not going to be blind after all, am I ? ' Then I realized what an agony of fear there must be in the minds of those sixty-four motionless men, not one of whom had even whimpered—so since then I've been saying to each one that he was sure to see after a while, for you know if they live they nearly all do get back their sight, and probably not more than those two D.I.'s will die. But think what they have been suffering ! ' Another nurse was giving a bath to a man who had just been brought in on a stretcher. " Oh, but you are the dirtiest man I ever saw,' she laughed at him ; abso- lately the very dirtiest.' Oh, sister, don't say that,' he said. How could I help it ? I haven't had a bath nor a change of underclothes for twenty-two days.'—Quick came the answer, If that's the case, I call you clean.' "
The account of the hospital work at Rouen during the March Retreat is very striking. Miss Stimson seems to have been one of the rare matrons who thoroughly sympathized with greenhorn probationers. Her account of the quite young and inexperienced nurses who were sent down " into this awful hospital," where the overflowing wounded were lying in stretchers between the beds, is most charming.
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