It’s time for another Poetry Friday, this week hosted by Tabetha Yeats. Thank you, Tabetha for hosting.
This week I want to touch on something that is close to my heart, and that is the profession of nursing. My mother, Betty Scully, was a nurse who trained in Binghampton City Hospital during World War II while my father was overseas. Though she left nursing to raise children and work in our family’s restaurant, she was always a nurse, ready to cure my frequent bouts of Strep throat (and cause a little dread) with her glass syringe and penicillin. She’d give neighbors their prescribed injections, such as vitamin B12, in our restaurant kitchen where she alway wore white nurses’ shoes. Her nursing skills gave my mother, in my eyes, a certain power.
During this Covid 19 epidemic, I admire and am so grateful for all nurses, especially those on the front lines. Nursing is more technical and of course different than it was for Clara Barton, who nursed soldiers during the Civil War, before ICU’s, drugs and electronic medical records. But nursing’s ultimate mission is unchanged: to heal and comfort the sick.
This poem by Rosemary and Steven Vincent Benet from “A BOOK OF AMERICANS,” a book for young readers, celebrates Clara Barton:
Clara Barton by Rosemary and Steven Vincent Benet Brave Clara Barton Stood beside her door, And watch young soldiers March away to war. "The flags are very fine," she said, "The drums and trumpets thrilling, But what about the wounds When the guns start killing?" Clara Barton went to work To help keep men alive, And never got a moment's rest Till eighteen-sixty-five. She washed and she bandaged, She shooed away the flies, She hurried in nurses, She begged for supplies. Read the rest here
I’m also an admirer of Florence Nightingale, who was an indefatigable bedside nurse, but also a statistician, scientist and fighter for public health. She came from a wealthy family and dismayed her mother with her determination to be a lowly nurse or any career at all. But she would confront any obstacle to become a nurse.
When the British military doctors plunged into the war against the Russians in Crimea in 1850, they didn’t prepare adequately for war injuries. They also never considered the infectious diseases that soldiers, weakened by poor food, poor shelter and bad water, would encounter. From the beginning, military leaders resented bitterly her interfering in the health care of soldiers. Still, she persisted, determined to do her part to help.
Florence Nightingale spent several years with a crew of nurses in Crimea stuffing mattresses, making beef tea, and keeping notes, collecting public health data. Then, she returned to England with her knowledge of sanitation and health and improved the hospitals at home. She made a such a difference that she became the second most popular woman in England after Queen Victoria, so popular that the men who ran the government and were loath to listen to her, had to. She improved not only England’s hospitals but the sewers, too. She was a public health pioneer. Her sister wrote of her, “She is ambitious–very, and would like . . . to regenerate the world.”
Today we sense tension between public health experts and the government. When we hear some of our leaders denying inconvenient facts, one only has to think about the lessons learned from luminaries such as Florence Nightingale. Here’s my brief impromptu tribute to her:
From Crimea to England: Florence Nightingale Dig wells for clean water. Insulate cold huts. Fresh meat, no more gristle, bandage all cuts. Soldiers died of disease, much less from the guns. She collected the data, her life's work begun. A one woman think tank, back home she would start to improve England's health with her numbers and smarts.