AMUSING!

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXI, Issue 214, 24 August 1931, Page 6

AMUSING!

HOSPITAL DEFINITIONS. A hospital is a collection of corridors covered by a roof and supported by its foundations and contributions. A ward is a room attached to the side of a corridor. It contains fresh air in large quantities, nurses, beds, and patients. A bed has positions, but no magnitude. Its real duty is to glorify the ward. To disarrange a bed is a criminal offence. It is a far, far better thing to have a tidy bed than a comfortable patient. A patient is a victim -of circumstances, and of a conspiracy between the doctor and the hospital authorities. When the meal-time arrives ha understands why he is called a patient. A nurse is essential for the proper running of a hospital. Her cluef duties are to wake the patients when asleep. A meal is a long, thin thing about three inches in diameter and about two hours long. It is incomplete without rice pudding. This is , supplied cither as a pleasant surprise or to annoy the patients, who thereafter faint at the mere mention of it. A clinical thermometer is a morbid, cold-blooded instrument which requires warming up twice a day. This it is the duty of the patient to do. A doctor is a member of the medical profession, who is usually to bo found at the other end of a stethoscope. His greatest joy is to push a shoe-horn down one’s throat, coupled with the request to say “Ah.” A chart is a scrap of paper hanging on a board at the he|d of your bed. It has often been mistaken for a Tube map, but is really the life story of a clinical thermometer set to music.