Adventures of an army nurse in two wars / edited from the diary and correspondence of Mary Phinney, Baroness von Olnhausen, by James Phinney Munroe.

  • Mary Phinney von Olnhausen
Date:
1903
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Adventures of an army nurse in two wars / edited from the diary and correspondence of Mary Phinney, Baroness von Olnhausen, by James Phinney Munroe. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    We eat with all the cooks and kitchen attendants, and to appreciate them you must once see and hear them. Sometimes I think I cannot bear it another hour, that I’ll just leave here; but when I see these miserable nurses and more miserable attend- ants who are here merely for the poor pay, I think it cruel to go, for, if anywhere, I can do some good here; these poor fellows have at least some one to help them. All about the house say I'm so proud, and I always intend to be; but in my ward the sick men do not think so, and the bless- ings and thanks I get from them are all I care for. They, every one, seem as fond of me as if I belonged to them, and I wish you could hear them talk as I sit by their dying beds. Every man except one has died so happy;1 and he, poor fellow, was so afraid he would die that at last he frightened himself into it. He was a young sergeant from Ohio, only nineteen, and it 1 [From the Autobiography.] Some one once wrote to me to tell her of the different death-beds I had witnessed, especially of the death-bed repentances. I can only say that, with the exception of two, none of all my men was afraid to die. I don’t remember one who ever expressed repent- ance ; many wished to live, but all seemed to die without fear of the future. The saddest thing about a death in the hospital is the immediate removal of the body. The attendants come with the white sheet which so closely enfolds them, they are silently taken to the dead-house, and the work goes on as if they had never been. Next morning the empty bed, fresh for another patient, is the only reminder of the past night.
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