Thoughts on Convalescence

In Praise of New Methods of Nursing Which Almost Make a Pleasure Out of Pain

A. B. WALKLEY

FASHIONS change, even in sick-nursing, one of the oldest of human institutions. There was the age of repression, not to say violence, of which the memorable figures are Sairey Gamf and Betsey Prig. Sairey held that the ideal method of bringing unconscious patients "to" was biting thumbs and bending the fingers backwards. Betsey favoured the more drastic plan of holding them (especially when lunatics) as close as possible to a hot .fire. As the best aid for her own comfort the nurse was recommended to withdraw the pillow from under the patient's head. Dickens always maintained that Sairey and Betsey were fair specimens of hospital nurses a hundred years ago— otherwise we should be driven to the highly questionable conclusion that Dickens's historical sense equalled his sense of fun. It suffices for my point to assume that Sairey and Betsey were true in frincifle. The principle they stood for being, as I have said, contradiction, and general oppression of their sick charges.

Well, fashions change. What was then a mere field of adventure for a few hardy pioneers has now become an elaborately organized profession. Ah, organization, of course, the American reader will say, we all know what miracles that will accomplish. But let pause. Not in organization, I submit, is the explanation of modern nursing and its success to be found, but in quite another process—one of the secrets, Macaulay used to say, of the Church of Rome—the recognition, namely, and assignment of an official status to elementary and ineradicable human instincts. Is not the patting of pillows and cushions the ruling passion, if not the darling sin, of every woman born, blonde or brunette, gentle or simple?

NURSE no longer grabs the pillow beneath the patient's head to put it under her own; she gives it several vigorous thumps, a left upper-cut, followed by one of Carpentier's deadly right hooks, till the pillow is presumably punished enough; then she gently strokes and smooths it, caressing it fondly as though it were a Persian kitten; but lo! how cool and silky is that same pillow which you had thought as high, in places, as Mont Blanc or the Dent du Midi and as eruptive as Popocatepetl. You have enjoyed one of the most voluptuous sensations that modern nursing can give you.

Another which, if not exactly a volufte, is almost as delicious, is the complacent consciousness of unerring judgment and impeccable taste which you derive from the fact that, whatever you say, Nurse invariably agrees with you. You breathe an atmosphere of General Acquiescence which is, truth to tell, a little enervating. It appears to you that you must be a wiser, more judicious, altogether more intellectual person than you had thought. And you do your best to live up to this new character. Thus, when Nurse appears, you hastily drop the "detective" story you have in secret been devouring, lest she should assume your literary taste to be on a level with hers. It would be useless to explain to her that there are detective stories and detective stories, and that the sort she likes is not your sort at all. For you are cock-sure you know her favourite sort. It is the sort which makes the crime of less importance than the heroine, whose charms are catalogued with minute particularity in Chapter 1. What an odd idea some of these writers seem to have of the tender passion! They make an inventory of a woman's attractions and seem to think men will proceed to adore her, as per schedule attached. Thus her eyes (2) have that peculiar seagreen hue which is only seen off the Lizard and the Land's End. Her nose (1) is tip-tilted and chin (ditto) firm but finely chiselled. But the final item in the inventory is always her hair, which, if black, is sure to turn to purple when they have lit the candles on the dinner table (with its gleaming silver and glass and snowwhite napery). But, for choice, it is red, and then, not only the dinner table, but everything within range will be illumined by the golden glory of her hair. And so I put down Nurse for a devotee of the golden glory school. But, it seemed, she couldn't abide those trashy detective stories. What she liked was Scott (there was a whole row of him facing her) and Hardy (as her eye dropped to the shelf below) and, oh yes, really, Henly James. (All was afterwards explained: someone had given her the tip that I was a kind of "literary gent" myself.) With my detective story now safe under the bedclothes, I ventured to congratulate this remarkably well-read Nurse on the catholicity of her taste. Little did I guess that it was all part of a system, the acquiescence of the New Nursing.

IT is difficult for an invalid to keep up false literary pretenses, but I did my best. How 1 toiled through Scott, his interminable prefaces and elaborate notes, his long-winded phrases in the stilted style of a parliamentary draughtsman and his Scottish vernacular! How hard I worked at Hardy's Dorsetshire peasants who talk like Polonius (and sometimes, indeed, like Hamlet), not to mention those nondescript people of his who talk like nothing on earth. As for Henry James—well, he was my friend, and if my frantic efforts to live up to Nurse's alleged taste seemed to turn him into a bitter foe, I remind myself that Henry James and Bcnger's Food do not go together.

At length my penance in the fields of what the French call "the high" literature was over and lo! so was my illness, thanks to the ministrations of my well-read Nurse. She went her ways, and the family saw her to the train. All was then discovered. It seemed she had thrown off the servitude of professional acquiescence with her uniform. For I am credibly informed (by which I mean, my wife told me) that on Nurse's seat, staring them in the face, lay one of those magazines whose covers always flaunt a female head, impossibly pretty and with all charms as per schedule attached. There were the hazel eyes that would turn sea-green in the twilight, then the ivory teeth over the firm but finely chiselled chin. And there, flooding with its radiance the whole compartment, was the golden glory of her hair!