A War Nurses Diary Sketches From A Belgian Field Hospital PDF Download

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1918 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XV A MILITARY HOSPITAL We were now a fully recognized Belgian Military Hospital although we were staffed by English surgeons and nurses. But the arrival of the Belgian Surgeon Major and his staff of officers gave us a standing we never had before, and a Power was behind us. After the great rush of April, 1915, we assumed more and more the nature of a base hospital, yet with the unspeakable advantage of being only three or four miles from the battle-line. We were thus able not only to save a great many lives that would have died during a long initial journey, but also to see our patients well on the road to recovery before we sent them, not to a base-hospital now, but to a convalescent home. We enlarged our borders and our boarders and added four large wooden huts. These came out in sections from England, and it took twenty soldiers just one day to erect one hut. They were raised off the ground on wooden rests, held thirty beds each and had two little rooms at either end-- bathroom and lavatory one end, nurses' sittingroom and kitchen the other. They were fitted with mica in lieu of glass windows. A very interesting and necessary branch of our work was the X-Ray Department. We had possessed an X-Ray room ever since we had been at Hoogestadt, but it now sprang suddenly into fame, being reorganized by no less a person than the renowned Madame Curie, who discovered radium! For two or three weeks she lived with us, sharing our daily life, sitting next to us at meals, the most unassuming and gentlest of women. Her daughter was with us too, and stayed there all that summer after her mother left to aid other hospitals. They brought their own motor-ambulance which held the dynamo which worked the X-Ray apparatus. Madame Curie used to rise...