The Mangonui Hospital

Northland Age, Volume 1, Issue 6, 13 November 1931, Page 1

The Mangonui Hospital

Hospitals, as a rule, are places that most of us are glad to keep out of—at least as patients. Even as visitors it is seldom a cheerful occasion—we don’t like to see our relatives or friends there—and the sight of ill or injured people, though it may make us thankful we are well ourselves, is for most people rather depressing. To visit the sick and afflicted is of course, a Christian duty, but when done as a duty, it seldom does much good. But externally, the Mangonui Hospital is a bright and cheerful place, and like Jerusalem of old, beautiful for situation. On the right is the isolation ward, standing grimly apart. On the breezy heights above Mangonui Harbour the hospital looks over a stretch of rolling country, and out on the deep, blue waters of the South Pacific. Most of the surrounding land seems poor gum country covered with sombre-coloured scrub, but the flower border in front of the building has a fine showing of healthy shrubs and flowers. A palm nods welcome at the front entrance, and a canary cocking his head and casting an Inquisitive eye on us, added a few cheery notes. In front is a well grassed paddock on which a couple of sleek, well-fed cows were browsing. In the middle is a surfaced tennis court looking as if it was well used as well as well kept. Matron Black was busy preparing to depart on her annual holiday, but very courteously spared us some of her limited time to show us over her domain. It is hardly modern in its design ; like many Northern institutions, it bore evidence of having “just growed,” but it is beautifully kept, cool, comfortable and airy on that warm day ; and the patients looked cool and comfortable too. After all, if one is to be ill, it is a consolation to think there will be pleasant rooms to lie up in, pleasant-faced nurses to give one the best of care, and all the resources of medical science, comparatively speaking, to put one on one’s feet again. Possibly the thing that interested us most was the X-ray plant, whose electric eye can see right through us, and photograph our bones for leisurely inspection. It was housed in a dark room all by itself, and looked an innocent, if somewhat complicated, piece of machinery. But its eye is not only piercing, but deadly, and elaborate precautions have to be taken to protect the operators as well as the patients. Science has its perils as well as its benefits.

In the accident ward was little Leslie Matthews, much bandaged, but peacefully sleeping, pulling up fast, the nurse said. In an adjoining bed was Mr. McKenzie, whose painful four-hour crawl home after beingthrown by his horse and having his legbroken in two places, makes one shiver to think of it. He looked very pale and shaken, but was surprisingly cheerful and even a little humorous about his experience, and was doing all right, he said. Asked how he could have had fortitude enough to do what he did, he simply replied it had to be done, so he did it—as if anyone else would have done the same.

We peeped into the operatingtheatre where you can be . carved into bits and put together again as good as new, but did not venture in. There was the sterilising room, where a couple of vessels were boiling furiously and there was a penetrating smell of disinfectants. Also, there was the kitchen, bright and shining ; the store room with its ranged shelves of medical ammunition, an empty ward with “Lake Ohia Bed” over one of the white cots, an evidence of local benevolence. But the most pleasant part was the broad, sunny, sheltered verandahs outside the wards, ideal places one thought, to get better in. The hospital has its own war memorial, a brass tablet to Corporal William de Laval Willis, died of wounds received in the Dardanelles on May 12th., 1915. It is flanked by another brass tablet erected by a grateful public to the memory of Thomas James Trimnell, for forty years a faithful and hard-working member of the hard-worked medical profession in this locality, who died on September

Bth., 1910, but whose memory is yet green in many minds. As we bade the Matron good-bye, she pointed to a pine tree at the head of a hill on the left past the nurses’ quarters, and said if we wished to see a magnificent prospect, we should climb up the rather rough track. We both took her advice, and were glad we did. From the summit, the view on that sunny summer afternoon was glorious, the sweep of an almost perfect crescent of bay, the Waves rolling in gently unbroken from the coast of South America, throwing up white crests here and there on sunken rocks —it was certainly worth the climb. There was a seat there and a rough table, where previous visitors had gratified their thirst for fame by carving their names and initials on every available space, even on the edges. Even the clay sides of the pathway were carved in the same way. Human vanity has queer ways of showing itself. We had a last look at the hospital in its floral setting, and its rather dingy offshoots of buildings, and turned our faces to Mangonui to answer the call of the tea-bell.