Henry Street nurses

Sue Barton, Visiting Nurse, Helen Dore Boylston

I've posted before about my attachment to the Sue Barton books.  As an adult, I was able to find my own copies of the books through the internet, except for one.  There were very few copies of Visiting Nurse listed and they were far out of my price range.  Last month I discovered that a company called Image Cascade is publishing new paperback editions, with vintage covers, and I ordered Visiting Nurse.  I've found the other books to be a bit dated but still enjoyable reading, reminding me of why I loved them so much as a kid, and I was curious to see if this one held up as well.

Visiting Nurse is a fictional account of six months spent working with the Henry Street Nursing Service, part of the Henry Street Settlement work in New York City.  I don't remember ever thinking that much about the setting, but now that I've read about Jacob Riis and visited Hull House in Chicago, I realized that nurses in this book were either a real group or based on one.  With a quick google search, I learned the reality behind the book, which even includes a cameo by the founder, Lillian Wald.  I don't think Boylston ever worked with the program, from what I can find, but she clearly admired their work, which she showcased.

In the book, Sue's work takes her through the crowded slums, in and out of tenements, meeting the diversity of peoples that make up the neighborhoods.  Many are recent immigrants or migrants, and Boylston skirts the edges of caricature with her Irish and Italian patients.  Sue is later transferred to a district in Harlem, where many of the African American characters sound like Prissy in Gone With the Wind, yet Boylston clearly wants to portray them in positive ways and condemn racist attitudes.

A major plot element revolves around women's careers and marriage.  Connie, a close friend from training, is engaged and will marry soon, abandoning her career, which Sue privately considers a waste.  Another friend from training, Kit, who joins Sue at Henry Street, seems to be focused on a career, with no thought of marriage (like Boylston herself, perhaps).  Sue is engaged to Bill, a young doctor she met during her training, and she wants to be married but isn't yet ready to give up her own work.  Henry Street nurses can be married, though in 1939, when the book was published, nurses and teachers often had to give up their work at marriage.  By the end of the book, Sue seems poised to have both marriage and a career, working with Bill in his country practice as a rural district nurse.  Since my mother worked as a nurse for most of my childhood, I took it for granted that women could do both (though without realizing how difficult and draining it could be).  I apparently also took for granted that all the doctors are men and the nurses women; I don't think there is a single female doctor in the entire series.

Now, though, I want to read more about Lillian Wald and the real world of the Henry Street Settlement.

An American nurse in the Great War

"Sister,"  Helen Dore Boylston

I have loved the Sue Barton books, by Helen Dore Boylston, since I was a kid, and I have five on my shelves today.  My mother was a nurse, and I was in love with the idea of going to nursing school.  Other girls might have been reading about boarding schools and wishing their parents would send them to the Chalet School.  I wanted to follow Sue Barton and Cherry Ames to nursing school.  I've forgotten most of the other series, but I still re-read Sue Barton (and I much prefer her to the less realistic Cherry Ames).

I never gave much thought to the author, though.  I don't know if the library copies I read even had an author note; if they did, it didn't make any impression.  In just the past few weeks, thanks to the internet, I've learned that Boylston served as a nurse in France during World War I; that she kept a diary of her experiences, which she later published; and (most surprisingly to me) that she became close friends with Rose Wilder Lane, with whom she took a driving tour from Paris to Albania in 1926.

I still feel, after reading Testament of Youth, that I know far too little about the First World War.  So I got Boylston's nursing diary, "Sister," from interlibrary loan.  I thought it would be an interesting companion to Testament of Youth.  Boylston, a trained nurse and an American, kept a diary that she published in 1925. Vera Brittain had no experience when she left Oxford to volunteer as a V.A.D. nurse.  Her Testament is a memoir, published in 1933.

Boylston's diary opens in February, 1918, at a convalescent hospital in Paris Plage, where she is recovering from flu and trench fever.  There is no introduction, no background, nothing to tell us how she came to be in France. A later entry mentions her third anniversary in France, but it's not clear if she only kept a diary in 1918 or only chose to publish the last year's entries.  From other sources I learned that, soon after her graduation from nursing school, she volunteered for service with a medical unit from Harvard.

Boylston details the day to day life of the medical station, which from what I can tell was located on the western coast of France, near Le Touquet.  She records her fellow nurses, the patients she cares for, the different wounds they suffer, the arrivals of yet more wounded, and the terrifying air raids that go on for weeks.  But the diary is just as much about her time off-duty, getting all the fun she could out of life to balance the mud, the fear and the death.  There is very much a "seize the day" flavor to her entries, especially with regard to the men she dates.  Normal rules and moralities don't apply; married men are considered "war rations," available for the moments of fun snatched between bombs and 48-hour shifts in the operating theatre.  Brittain's Testament is much more sombre in tone, reflecting of course the loss of her fiancé Roland Leighton in 1915, perhaps Brittain's different temperament, and also their different circumstances.  Boylston doesn't mention any relatives or friends in the armies. In addition to her fiancé, Brittain lost her only sibling Edward and two of their best friends in the war.

When Boylston returns to the United States in January 1919, like many veterans she finds the adjustment difficult:

"How we worked! We gave all we had to give, and life was glorious. Even numbed with fatigue as we were, we knew it was glorious. . . I can't stand it here much longer, in this place where nothing ever happens and every day is like every other day."

On the last page of the book, we learn that she has volunteered again, for the Red Cross, and is sailing to Paris.  As far as I can discover, she never wrote of those adventures.

I can't say I learned much about the Great War itself, but I caught at least a glimpse of what it was like to be part of that war, caring for those who fought it.