Topic 45 
A TRIBUTE TO NURSES

MORE so than any other man I have ever known, Colonel Roosevelt was capable of adjusting himself to circumstances and seeing good in places where most humans would see naught of value.  He was a philosopher at all times.

When he was recovering from the serious operation of February, 1918, I commented on the fact that his surroundings in Roosevelt Hospital were comfortable.

"Indeed they are," said he, "and every one here is splendid.  It is almost worth while being sick to meet such people and realize the work that is done in such places.

"Take the nurses — clean, healthy young women, full of animal life and youth and spirit, at just that age when they might be excused if their thoughts and their time were devoted to pleasure, in here doing the hardest kind of work, much of it unpleasant, nearly all of it depressing, not for pay, but because they wish to be of service, to fit themselves for service.

"Thank God, I'm not a cynic; I've always believed in and respected American womanhood, but I tell you, Jack Leary, that I leave here with more respect and a better appreciation of what our girls really are.  We are all apt to take some things for granted.  Most of us, until we are forced into a place like this, never give a thought to the women who give up so much to serve.

"These girls here are all from good families.  Some, I am told, are from what, for want of a better term, we call our best families.  All have education enough to qualify in easier, pleasanter work, where hours are regular and there's ample time for theatres, parties, and all that sort of thing young folks love.  They serve a hard apprenticeship and when they graduate, go out to do work that more often than not is as unpleasant as any in the training period.  They are not well paid, and are about as casual in their employment, many of them, as a day laborer.  I suppose I always knew that, but, as I have said, I took it for granted as we take many things, until I came in here and had a chance to think.  Honestly I feel as though I had had a mental bath.

"After what I Ve seen here I 'm tempted, the next time some half baked jack of a preacher who cannot fill his church any other way cuts loose with an attack on American women, picturing them as brainless butterflies with never a thought of anything but cocktails, cabarets, and dress, who are’dooming the race' — that's one of their favorite declarations 

I 'm tempted to take him by the scruff of the neck and drop him in some first class hospital.  He’ll leave with his soul cleaner and in better working order than when he entered; that is, if he has a soul bigger than a mustard seed, and the girls won't be damaged any by his cluttering up the place for a few days.
"You did not go to church today? I thought not.  Well, there's your sermon.  — I'm in a sermonizing mood today, so you see I am getting better.  Seriously, though, it does one good to get down to brass tacks once in a while, and if any one ever asks you what I think of the nursing profession, you just tell them I said — no, they 're not angels, they are too practical for that, but trumps every one of them."

The respect the Colonel had for the nurses was reciprocated.  In his stays at Roosevelt Hospital on more than one occasion something as close to a row as one would expect in such a place developed over the question as to who should serve him.  All agreed he was a model patient and good in obeying orders, except that he had all of a strong man's opposition to being "waited on." In his sickest hours he always insisted on trying to help himself.

One dour member of Roosevelt's staff had rather an original way of explaining the Colonel's agility in obeying "orders."

"The folks here do not give him orders," said this surgeon.  "They think they do.  He's just come in, captivated everybody in the place, and conies pretty near to running things.  It's what I suspect he does everywhere.  Personally I’ll be glad when he gets out.  Why? Because the nurses and some of the fool doctors here can then think of something beside Colonel Roosevelt."