NURSES' HEROISM

Dominion, Volume 34, Issue 81, 30 December 1940, Page 4

NURSES' HEROISM

The Battle Of London COLLEAGUES' TRIBUTE ‘■Some of them -ire dead, these colleagues of ours; some of them lie seriously injured in wards in their own or other hospitals; some have providentially escaped the whistling bomb and the falling masonry. They are till, however, on the nurses’ roll of honour the roll of those who carried on in spite of danger," said a nursing journal, in paying tribute to members of the nursing profession in England. "We are not able Io give their names. We may not mention the hospitals which have fallen casualties in this time of terror. There is, however, something particularly just in not identifying any one nurse or hospital. In cases like these the individual only represents hundreds of her colleagues who would have behaved in just the same way had they been in the same circumstances.

"From among the welter of ruins and rumour.” the writer continues, "have emerged some line stories. Almost every account, ol a hospital bemlted includes Hie statement that ‘the nursing staff behaved magnificently.’ There are stories of individual fortitude an'd heroism that warm our hearts —of a sister who crawled through lhe wreckage of a Kentish hospital giving injections to women patients who were trapped; of the young nurse who was rescued uninjured after being buried for three hours, ami insisted on taking her place with tlie other nurses; of lite t.urse in a London hospital who was pinned, injured, .tnder debris for 15 hours, and whose clieerl'tilness and courage were vanquished only by another air-raid alarm, the shock of which killed her. “We have seen nothing that so neatly sums tip the position as this simple phrase, which appeared in a London daily paper: 'The hospital, which was bombed last night, was able to carry on today as the result of the fine work of the medical and nursing •staffs.’

“We carry on. That is the only answer the hospitals and nurses of this country have to make to the Nazi bomber. But if, will prove (he last word in this dreadful argument.’’