First Steps in Nursing

May 1916

When one is young and at school one has no option in the matter - one has to do exams. The only escape is to be ill, and then one's fond mother can send an excuse. If one does exams when one is grown up and quite old it is entirely one's own fault, and one only has oneself to thank. These were the reflections which occurred to me, somewhat late in the day I confess, as I sat waiting for my home nursing exams. We sat round an outer room, and a clerk called our numbers at intervals, and we passed through a door to encounter the doctor. One of my fellow sufferers aptly remarked that it reminded her of the dungeon scene in 'The Sign of the Cross.'

In preparation for this fatal day, my own doctor had taken me to the museum at St. Timothy's.
"I am taking my own students," she had said, "and you can come too, if you are sure you can see things."
I informed her that I had beheld without swooning that choice collection of waxworks of which Guy's is so inordinately proud, and she accordingly allowed me to join the excursion. Carefully labelled items of the human body stood in pickle jars behind glass doors, and a curator took down various gems and explained them to us. I endeavoured now to recall his words of wisdom, but the only exhibit I could clearly remember was a veritable cushion of hair which someone had collected in her inside by tidily swallowing her combings each morning.

The clerk called my name and I rose. Moritura te saluto!
"If you have to make a poultice, remember not to make it too wet," was nurse's parting injunction.
The doctor greeted me without emotion, and, pointing to a small boy, told me to imagine that he had burnt all his fingers, and to do them up accordingly. Now if there was one bandage in the world which I hated more than the others it was fingers, especially when they were the thickness of lead pencils, and the tape slipped off the tips the instant I relaxed my grasp. I remembered that the book said begin with the little finger, but I disobediently ignored this, and started with the thumb. I felt there was slightly more to get hold of in that, and I wanted to show that I knew how to do a spica. Also the longer I was over the thumb, the less time I should have for tips, as I felt sure the patience of the doctor would never hold out while I did them all. In the middle of the operation the tape slipped from my unsteady hold, and, undoing itself, rolled merrily away cross the floor. I retrieved it hastily and wound it up, hoping the doctor had not seen. He came, as I expected, while I was struggling with the middle finger, and told me to leave off.
"Now make me a linseed poultice," he said, and I departed to a table on which the horrid ingredients were set forth. Remembering Nurses' parting warning, I did not make it too wet, instead I achieved a solid slab of brick-like appearance and stability. It did not look right even to me, so having laid it out on brown paper I continued to pat it in the hope of improving it, while the doctor hovered around.
"Is that ready for inspection?" he enquired at last.
It wasn't, but I saw no probability that it ever would be. I moved aside, and he picked it up and bent the paper smartly backwards. The poultice instantly shot off and landed with a thud in a pail under the table.
"Rather too dry!" he remarked pleasantly. "Come and sit down."
He arranged four of us in a row, and, standing in front, began to ask us questions in turn. It was like some ghastly game. One half expected him to count, "One, two, three!"
"What is the average pulse rate of an adult?"
"Seventy-two," said my right-hand neighbour.
"And of an infant?"
"One hundred to one hundred and twenty," I gasped.
"Average temperature?"
"98.4," replied my other neighbour.
"And of an infant?"
"One hundred and one," said my sister, promptly walking into the trap.
"What do you think?" asked the doctor of No.1, who replied, firmly, "98.4."
"What a horrid catch!" exclaimed my sister.
"Sorry," purred the doctor - he really was rather a sport.
He asked me various riddles as to what I should do if this or that catastrophe happened, and here another injunction of Nurse's really provided help in time of trouble.
"If the examiner is a man," she had instructed us, "always begin your answer, 'I should send for the doctor!' If it is a woman - well, you needn't be so careful to put it in."
Finally, he gave me a glass to do a sort of proportion sum in; it was something about 1 in 50, and finally reduced me to a state of collapse.

"You could be a nurse," a palmist said to me some time later, looking at my hand.
"So I thought once," I admitted candidly, "before I did that exam. Now I think that nursing is like marriage - there is a lot more in both than meets the eye, and to make a success of either one needs to be very clever - and very good.

H. M. NIGHTINGALE