xt7m639k4w8k https://exploreuk.uky.edu/dips/xt7m639k4w8k/data/mets.xml The Frontier Nursing Service, Inc. 1943 bulletins  English The Frontier Nursing Service, Inc. Contact the Special Collections Research Center for information regarding rights and use of this collection. Frontier Nursing Service Quarterly Bulletins The Quarterly Bulletin of The Frontier Nursing Service, Inc., Vol. 19, No. 2, Autumn 1943 text The Quarterly Bulletin of The Frontier Nursing Service, Inc., Vol. 19, No. 2, Autumn 1943 1943 2014 true xt7m639k4w8k section xt7m639k4w8k Z4/IK Quartcr/y /6’u//din
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THE QUARTERLY BULLETIN of THE FRONTIER NURSING SERVICE, Inc.  
Published Quarterly by the Frontier Nursing Service, Lexington, Ky. { 1
Subscription Price $1.00 Per Year
VOLUME 19 AUTULIN, 1943 NUMBER 2
"Entered as second class matter June 30, 1926, at the Post Office at Lexington, Ky.,
under Act of March 3, 1879."
Copyright 1943 Frontier Nursing Service, Inc.
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“ ‘ INDEX
F
. ARTICLE AUTHOR PAGE
  A Letter to Santa Claus 38
{ _;  A Sequence for Advent 34-37
E Beyond the Mountains _ 55
( Q . Encounter with a Serpent Rose Avery 51
{ Field Notes 67
From a Sergeant in the R.A.S.C. 40
(a letter) _
General Clark Eulogizes Journal ofthe A. M. A. 14
Glimpses of Our Christmas Secretary Vanda Summers 42-43
(drawings)
Handbook of Obstetrics A Book Review 53
I Wanted A Christmas Baby Ruth Peninger 19
(illustrated)
Journeys of Study Dootora Tagualda Ponce 9
Mrs. Bolton’s Message to Nurses 2
Old Courier News (illustrated) 44
Old Staff News 21
Report of a Student Nurse—Midwife Catherine Lory 15
Shots on Bull Creek Hannah Mitchell 8
» The Kingdom (verses) The Oxford Book of Carols 78
I The Story of Joe Mary Breckinridge 3
4 Victory Shrine, poem and illustrations Inside back cover
, Welcome to Vthe Doughboy (verse) A. P. Herbert 18
S BRIEF BITS
A Christmas Interlude Anne Fox 41
A Friend of Man British Journal of Nursing 13
A Surge0n’s Prayer Col. John J. Moorhead 54
Ednie and Eva (A Picture) 66
Q" Just Jokes, Soldiers, Horses, Children V 39
1 Just Jokes, Water 20
  Keep It Dark! Rotary Bulletin 13
ei News from Georgia 33
A "Not Only for Christmas" (verse) Whittier 77
Sacrifice The Outpost, London 7
"The Mother of the Son" The Outpost, London 13
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MRS. BOl.TON’S MESSAGE TO NURSES _:
"ln The world ThaT lies ahead, no one will live in idle- lll
ness. The unimaginable needs oT all The people oT The T;. lr
earTh will demand The consTrucTive eTTorT oT each one.  
I Nursing oTTers The discipline, The Training. The rich ex-  
perience oT renewing liTe in recreaTing The desire Tor in
consTrucTive living. Nursing. as no oTher Training ThaT I V
know, prepares you To meeT The shock oT The devasTaTion y
man has wroughT in €·od`s world and TiTs you To Take
your parT, your woman`s parT oT re—creaTion in The world
ThaT we musT build upon The ashes oT ThaT which has been
desTroyecl. To all nurses everywhere l would say: The
people oT America have no words wiTh which To express
Their appreciaTion oT your courage. your sTeadTasTness.
your TaiTh. Wherever you serve. wiTh The Torces. or on `
The home TronT ThaT needs you so sorely. Too, know ThaT
our graTeTul hearTs are wiTh you. And may The inTiniTe
and eTernal God consTanTly recharge you wiTh His ener- .
gy. His genTleness, His TorTiTude, and His divine love. s
ThaT you may be upheld and sTrengThened in The work  
you have chosen To do. And may He give us all courage  
To uphold decency. and honor and TruTh. unTil in His own  
Time we come again To peace." · i
—The Honorable Frances Payne Bolton,  Ni
"Nursing Streamlined," Tomorrow,
Vol. 3, pp. 56-58, (Sept.) 1943.  
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 6
I
E FRoN·r1ER NURSING smzvics 2
  A THE STORY OF JOE
  by
glé  MARY BRECKINRIDGE
 
  P; It was the Christmas season in 1926 in the heart of the
  Kentucky mountains. A twelve-year-old boy named Joe was
  homeless. His mother had died in childbirth and his father was
  a moonshiner serving a term in a Federal jail far away "in the
  settlements." , `
Q- There wasn’t much about Christmas, as he knew it, to ap-
  peal to Joe. A friendly neighbor had taken him into his cabin.
1 This meant a bed stretched to accommodate one more child; a
l supply of corn bread, potatoes, sorghum and salt pork stretched
e to feed one more child; the warmth of an open fire in a stone-
and-mud chimney stretched to warm one more child. The spirit
of Christmas had come to that cabin. The neighbor had never
read "The Vision of Sir Launfal" so he didn’t know how well
A these words described him:}
"The Holy Supper is kept, indeed,
{ In whatso we share with another’s need;
Not what we give, but what we share,
. For the gift without the giver is bare;
` Who gives himself with his alms feeds three,
· Himself, his hungering neighbor, and Me."
Z Joe and his host, whose name was Clarence Jones, lived on
g the banks of the Middle Fork of the Kentucky River some forty
it horseback miles from the nearest railroad which Joe had never
  seen. The Frontier Nursing Service had just built one of its out-
  post nursing centers in that area. It was a job to build because
  it took the mule teams from three to four days to go to the rail-
  road and return with "fotched—on" supplies. There were several
 { hundred children in this country who had never had a Christmas
  present or seen a Christmas tree or heard of Santa Claus. Most
 gl of the little girls had never owned a store doll or even seen one.
· A number of the children (among them Joe) had never had a
  pair of shoes. They tied up their feet during the winter in sack-
if; ing or used a pair of heavy grown-up boots passed down to them.
 T. The Frontier nurses heard that Joe "warn’t doin’ no good"
  and went to see him. They found his feet badly swollen, his face
 gl `
 A _A. .l... -..h.._lAA*l..-.---.- ...... . 

   V
4 THE QUARTERLY BULLETIN ,
E
bluish with dark circles under the eyes. They found that he was  
always tired and didn’t want to play. Clarence was worried  
about Joe.  
The Frontier nurses got Dr. Heim from the Red Bird Mis-  
sion thirty miles away to come and look over Joe and the doctor K .
said he had a heart disease called endocarditis. This was before '. _;
the Frontier Nursing Service had built its own Hospital, and  f°
had its own doctor. The Children’s Hospital in Louisville said  
they would take Joe in. The only problem was how to get him  
out of the mountains.  
All November and December it had rained, or snowed and  
thawed. There were three "tides" in ten days before Christmas  
and our Nursing Centers (we only had three then) were ma- F
rooned from one another by a waste of river twenty feet above
its banks and angry torrents tearing down the mountainside. 1
There wasn’t any telephone connection and rarely could the
United States Mail Service, mounted on muleback, get through.
The Frontier Nursing Service had planned Christmas for all .
of its children with knives and balls for the boys and dolls for
the girls, warm clothing and shoes for many, and candy for ’
everybody; all sent by friends from "the settlements? For ten
days before Christmas no second-class mail could get through “
anywhere, so the Service had to plan for its Christmas parties
to take place when travel was possible again. But there was Joe, I
and there were some other patients, who needed to get out of
the mountains for hospital care. How could we get them out? ri
There came a lull in the storms and, although it wasn’t pos- 5
sible to get mule teams through, a man could ride along the  
trails and ford the rivers if he was careful about quicksand. I ~
lived at Wendover about fourteen miles down the same river on Q
the banks of which Joe was living. I was planning to go out of  J;
the mountains and wanted to take the patients with me. As soon  {
as horses could travel, I asked a neighbor named Elihu Mosley  I
to go up the river and get Joe and bring him down to me on  
horseback. I sent a heavy coat with Elihu for Joe to wear, a g  i·
coat given us by another Joe from "the settlements."  if H
A Late one gloomy afternoon, Elihu came riding through the  
gates of Wendover with Joe on the horse behind him. As soon as  
he saw me, Joe smiled and said, “That was a nice warm wrop  

 I FRONTIER Nunsmo snnvicm 5
{ _ .
  what you sent for me to wear." Thus J oe’s first word of greeting
  was one of courteous appreciation. Where had he learned it, I
  wondered. Joe stayed with me in the Log House at Wendover
  for a few days of rest before he could stand any further travel-
K _ ing. The second day he came to me and asked if I could write.
i , When I said I could, he asked, "Will you back a letter for me to
, ` Clarence? He was kind to me." Again I marveled. For the first
  time in my life it came to me that the bread-and-butter letter was
  not just a thing of social etiquette. Joe had taught me that it is
  the outcome of a grateful heart.
  But Joe had more astonishments in store for me. He pulled
J out of his pocket five cents that Clarence had given him, and that
? was all the money he had ever had in his life, and presented it to
me. Said Joe, "If you bust this nickel, you can pay for a stamp
; for that thar letter." The waif of twelve years old who had de-
pended on the charity of a neighbor for the bread he ate, had not
been beggared. He wanted to pay his way.
· I was confronted with the problem of how to get out of the
mountains. I had an expectant mother, whose condition was not
' normal, to take out with me for hospitalization in Lexington be-
cause our own Hospital was still an unerected dream. Neither
A she nor Joe could ride horseback the twenty-four miles from
Wendover to the railroad. While I brooded over this problem,
i my nearest neighbor, Taylor Morgan, told me he had some
y planks and could make a boat. I had pitch. In one day, he built
j~ and caulked a flat—bottom boat which we named "The Ambu-
  lance." We turned the iloods to our advantage and, on the thir-
  tieth of December, floated down the river from Wendover. In the
‘ bow of the boat stood my neighbor Taylor Morgan, builder of
A · "The Ambulance," guiding our destinies with the branch of a
 Q pawpaw tree. Next, on a plank, sat Mallie, age three, and Han-
 _ nah, age eight, sisters that I was taking out for treatment and
 I , had picked up along the river banks. On the next plank, I sat
  with Joe snugly wrapped up in woolens and blankets. The third »
 ._ —' plank held the expectant mother and a crippled, cross-eyed child
if  A of six, named Jean. Lastly, in the stern, on the luggage, which
  included supplies for any emergency, sat my secretary Martha
  Prewitt, alternately baling out our leaky vessel with a tobacco
 Q can and steering with a shingle.

 6 THE QUARTERLY BULLETIN  
Thus we made twenty miles with the current downstream.
‘ Twice we landed our precious freight, to portage the worst rap- l
ids, while we took the boat through-——at the mouth of Hert’s  
, Creek, and again in that foamy bit of water near the mouth of ‘ 
Bettie’s Branch known as Judy’s Whirlpool. Q A p,
There is a branch called Trace that runs into the Middle I ,
Fork opposite Possum Bend where we built a nursing center a ,5
year later. We abandoned our boat at Trace and got hold of a  
mule team. Only four miles and one mountain were between us i
and the coveted railroad but it took us three hours by mule  
wagon—the hardest lap of all--to cover these four miles in the  
dark. There was no road-just rocky, ilooded creeks on both  
sides of the mountain and almost incredible mud at the gap. We.  
had left Wendover at eight in the morning. At eight that night L
we stood by the tracks at a way-station when the long train i
I came thundering through. I felt J oe’s hand and Hannah’s trem— Z
ble in mine, for they had never before seen a train. "Won’t hit git ~
us‘?" gasped Joe. Later, in his Pullman berth, sinking back on I
white pillows, he added: "I thought hit was goin' to be like a
waggin." The impression made by a train upon a child who has
never seen one was explained to me once by another mountain
boy who said, "I wouldn’t have been so scared of gittin’ into the A
middle of hit if fust I could have seen the end of hit." J
When I tucked Joe in for the night, he turned his big, sad
. brown eyes up to mine and said, "I stood this better’n I thought ,
I could," and I whispered under my breath, "Indeed, Joe, you
did." As the train thundered down out of the mountains we L
counted our little boatload over—everyone of them safe-—with j
grateful hearts.  
Joe only lived a few weeks at the Children’s Hospital which F
  had gathered him in. During this period, his heart disease ran T"
a varying course. At one time he was better and needed shoes.  
His kind host, Clarence, sent a dollar to add to our dollars to pay  
for the shoes. Joe had one of the nurses take a snapshot of him  
in a wheel chairawith his feet stuck out so that the shoes loomed  
large in the foreground of the picture. After that he became  ;
rapidly worse and I never saw him again. ; 
I During the few days that Joe spent at Wendover, he stayed  I
pretty close to the big wood fire in the stone chimney in the liv- - 

 2 ‘ FRONTIER NURSING SERVICE 7
g ing room. Because of his heart condition, his circulation was so
2 poor that he felt the cold bitterly. Once when I stopped to speak
  to him, he raised his big, sad eyes to me and said, "Do you reckon
’ when I git back from the settlements I could go to a home with
N i ` room near a big fire? There’s allus so many children at Clar-
‘  ‘·, ence’s there hain’t much room near the fire." Well, we had a big
._ ’ fire at Wendover and I promised Joe that when he came back
  from the settlements his place would be at our hearth.
;» But Joe died, and has left in my memory an unfading im-
  rint. This homeless bo of twelve whose mother had died in
I Y
  childbirth, whose father had been a moonshiner and was serving
1 his term in a Federal jail, this boy who thanked you for sending
it a warm wrap to cover him, who thought of a thank-you letter
to a host and paid for the stamp out of the only nickel he had in
I the world, who bore uncomplainingly the pangs of his mortal ill-
ness and twelve hours of traveling of a character so exhausting
that strong men could well have complained of it, this waif
neglected of civilization, whenever I think of him I recall the
divine promise: "And they shall be mine, saith the Lord of hosts,
in that day when I make up my jewels."
SACRIFICE
"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for
his friends." ,
Perhaps 2nd Lt. Harvey D. Johnson remembered those words from the
Bible in the few seconds before his bomber crashed into an empty football
field near London, for he deliberately sacrificed his own life to save those
of unnumbered unknown British civilians. With his ship afire, Lt. Johnson
had ample time to bale out and save himself. Other pilots before him faced
by the same problem have jumped and prayed the plane crashing into the
g homes below would kill no one. But this American pilot made his own de-
; cision, a deliberate decision, one which he knew would result in his own
  death. He flew his ship to the first clearing in a sea of houses, then drove
lr it straight into the ground.
  Just as Lieutenant Johnson had planned . . . no one else was hurt.
. "No greater love hath any man."
4 In the House of Commons, Sir Archibald Sinclair, Secretary of State
I for Air, told the story. He related how Johnson, who is unmarried but
=,_  leaves his parents, Mr. and Mrs. R. B. Johnson, Philadelphia, hedge-hopped
1 over rows of houses despite flames which licked at him from the disabled
. ship.
·, "I am sure the house will wish to join with me in paying tribute to his
g gallantry," said Sir Archibald.
  The members did. They stood and cheered Johnson’s memory.
  —T}ze Outpost, London.-
 v'

 2 THE QUARTERLY BULLETIN E
l
SHOTS ON` BULL CREEK  
by E
HANNAH MITCHELL, R. N., Certified Midwife £i_
"I reckon I’m goin’ down to git my fever shot" was the  ri 
answer Marthy Napier gave to all the queries as she walked the  if
three miles down Osborne’s Fork to the Bull Creek Clinic. She
stopped often and advertised at each resting place, "Mis’ Mitchell ,5
says, hit’s goodeto have these vaccinalations and I am feelin` a  
heap better, seems like my rhematiz ain't hurtin’ me so much,  
sides I don’t want to die with the fever like they did fore the  
nurses come." Seventy-four years old, she spread the propa-  
ganda on the virtue of typhoid immunizations each week she  
came until ten came from her vicinity (out of district) to have  
I their shots. She even broughther daughter, weighing almost  g
two hundred and "terrible hard to git about."  ·
"I want more parents to have typhoid serum. You can have  . _
more children, but the children can’t get another mother or  
father" was the selling point this year to the older folks, and  
wherever I saw them I urged ‘the,shots.’ In spite of the fathers  
being away in war or in war work, and the mothers busy with  
canning and crops, they responded beautifully. There were  
seventy-eight mothers and thirty fathers who answered my plea.  
There were three hundred and thirty-eight complete typhoid g
I; immunizations in my district this year out of a count of four  
· hundred and fifty-eight people. Seventy-three came from out of  
the district to be immunized.  
A family now living in Cincinnati came back to their old l_
home and brought their children with whooping cough. The next  
Wednesday, I had several mothers waiting with their babies for
. "whooping cough shots." Fifty-six children were immunized  S
against pertussis and thirty against diphtheria.  Q7
They’re still coming——some whose children are taking the  
combined Diphtheria and Pertussis toxoid, others for the  
straight Diphtheria and Pertussis toxoid and even an occasional p
¤ typhoid vaccine because, "I shore want hit and I didn’t git hit  
. this summer when you were vaccinatin’ everybody."  i
- We’re not one hundred per cent immunized on Bull Creek Y 
yet——but by the way, have you had your shot?  .

 E Fnonrimn Nunsmc snizvicn 9
l
  V JOURNEYS OF STUDY
gi I THE FRONTIER NURSING SERVICE
P ' . by Doctora Tegualda Ponce
` -"  Published in La Union
if Valparaise, Chile, Sabado 26 de Diciembre de 1942
i Translated by Vanda Summers
if Abridged
  I have in my program of work the study of the attention of
  the parts of rural areas. "In these terranes, and thanks to the .
  Kellogg Foundation who served to portion out these areas, I vis-
Q ited the Frontier Nursing Service, a service of nurses of the fron-
  tier which has its center at Wendover, State of Kentucky.
 g After Johns Hopkins and the Maternity Chicago Lying-In,
 · the experience most important of my life was here, and in spite
 . _ of a place so new and unique. Never could I have imagined that
  this Service of nurses could be hidden in the heart of the moun-
  tains of Kentucky, in an isolated region to which nobody has to
  go; and, it is for this, that this journey merits a brief story of
  the sight and study of it. ·
  I started my journey at Battle Creek, Michigan, where I re-
  sided before going to establish myself at Ann Arbor. I took the
3 train at Detroit. In this big city of millions of inhabitants, I took
  the night train to Cincinnati. I occupied the Pullman coach. Cin-
  cinnati, 500,000 inhabitants, offers gifts and remembrances of
  silver made by Indians>—their equal cannot be found anywhere.
l_ Here, I wrote myiirst letter recounting this visit. A third train
{ was taken to reach Winchester in the center of the State of Ken-
tucky. From Winchester to Hazard the conductor gave me these
 ; pointers: we went through seventeen tunnels; we crossed the
 j same river twenty-six times; in the last forty-seven kilometers,
  the train stopped at ninety-six stations. The way is tortuous
  throughout its length to such a point that there are not two
_ kilometers in a straight line. This gives you the idea of the geo-
  graphical formation of the extensive territory occupied by the
 , Appalachian Mountains. We enter regions even more difficult—
I  so much so, that it is impossible to construct canals and open up
 . State roads. »

 _ 10 THE QUARTERLY BULLETIN `  
The part we went through is marvelously beautiful between  
low mountains, reminding me at each instant of the South of q
Chile, with the same little houses and the poor cabins in which  
exist the same rural problems with which we are confronted. I tx 
arrived in Hazard. A maiden in clothes of an Amazon waited for '— 
me. She was a "courier," a person who is charged with the duties  ,
of awaiting and accompanying travellers. Even the word of l   
French origin, suggesting the idea of running, could be called ji'
"guia" (guide) in Castilian. She is one of the girls that come  
from very good families and give voluntary work in the moun-  
tains. Her mission is to look after the horses and to go with the  *
nurses on their travels when necessary. They are maidens young { 
and beautiful, and they love their work and they are always ?
ready to be of service. It was about six in the afternoon; she in-  
vited me to eat in a hotel at Hazard before going on to Hyden.  
It was a "sad" day and a good part of the way it rained and after  
some time, the rain came down heavily.  
. Hyden is about iifty kilometers from Hazard. Here is the  
Hospital, sitting on a shelf of the mountain. At nine o’clock at  
night, we were received by the Directress of the Hospital and a  
nurse-midwife—both English. The following day, a Monday, V
there was a weekly clinic of "embarrassed" women (P. N.’s), in  
charge of the medico, Dr. Kooser, an excellent person. Dr.  
Kooser is very well informed on all recent procedures. He prac-  
~ tices detailed examinations for all the diseases, just as efliciently  
and well done as in Johns Hopkins or any other hospital of good  A
prestige. The clinic functions all day; the midwifery students as-  
sist, learning the theory and practice, insuring them a good prep-  
aration forptheir work. I obtained the necessary material, litera-  .
ture and technique, to be repeated here with us; a grand oppor- .  
tunity for our people.  p
On the following day, Tuesday, they operated on an eighth A  I
day postpartum—a rapidly growing ovarian cyst which now  ,
showed signs of twisting very appreciably. A surgeon from Haz-  i?
ard arrived to conduct the operation for the doctor of the  
F. N. S. Results were good. { 
After five days of observing things in Hyden, we went to  
I Wendover-—five kilometers more into the interior of the moun-  Q
tains. We arrived at the headquarters of the Service, which was J 

 Q Fnoiwinn NURSING smnvicm 11 _
l
? . founded in 1925 by Mrs. Breckinridge—a very interesting and
  charming woman sixty years old who lives with all her personnel
  in the middle of the mountains, working for the numerous popu-
_ - lation around her. For twenty years, she has known the region
  and its problems. From her marriage she had two children who
_. died when they were very small. She resolved to dedicate her
i Y life to this work which grew and was realized.
  The proposition of this beneficial work was to obtain aid for
2} these people where there was no medical aid. There was founded
  a school of midwives, the observation of which was the motive
  of my journey, which, as I have said before, has been an ex-
€ ceptional privilege. The Service is divided into districts; each
  center serves an area of ten kilometers around. The total area
—_  covers eighteen hundred square kilometers. All this has to be at-
  tended to on horseback. It was not long before the opportunity
  came to me to do a round on the district. There was a prenatal
 J and a postpartum visit. The work is carried on with supplies in
  saddlebags, which hang on the horse ....
{ Arrived home little realising we would be called out again.
 g A hot bath was indicated and during this healthy occupation, I
{  was deep in thought when suddenly came the call to a sick girl we
  had seen that afternoon. It was ten o’clock on a dark night when
  we mounted our horses. We had big flash lights but did not use
 _ them because some horses are not used to them. Everything re-
 f sulted well and when we returned to Wendover it was two-thirty
  a. m. It was an indelible experience, working in similar circum-
 Q4 stances as ours, encountering the same problems, equal to those
=_  that are presented in our home services with one sole difference I
 Z —that here they speak English. We encountered the same dis-
  mantled beds without sheets, under-clad children, and a lot of
 ‘_ poverty of which we see so much! But here, working with few
  resources, using what they have at their disposal with an excel-
. ' lent technique of asepsis and knowing very well what they should
 ; do, or not do.
  The following day, we were in the dining room at seven-
 1 thirty with an excellent breakfast which everybody enjoyed very
 Q, much. An hour later, we went to an outpost center situated at
 4 Bowlingtown—eighty kilometers. We arrived at eleven-thirty
 ° and had lunch. In this center, there is a clinic in which this

 i
. iz THE QUARTERLY RUL1.E·1·11i1  
— l
nurse-midwife does her prenatal examinations and discovers any l
abnormalities. On the return after one hundred and sixty kilo-  
meters in the car, I was so exhausted that we asked permission  
not to be present at dinner. They waited on me with great deli-  "
cacy in every way.  
The following morning they made me acquainted with the .
oiiices, recently installed in a new building, constructed after a F 
fire, which they called the Garden House. Here are the offices of  
the secretaries, the couriers, nurses. I visited with the social  
worker, a young woman whom I had met at Reading, Pennsyl- sg
vania. We experienced the agreeable surprise of meeting again  
in the middle of the Appalachian Mountains. Here goes the tenth *
day of the month. I went to a reunion of the nurses of the sec-  p
ond district of Kentucky. It was all full of inspirations and inter-  
esting sights. It is difficult to understand how a group of young  .
women, of such valour, intellect and morale can live here, away  
from everywhere. ; 
They are all young with the exception of Mrs. Breckinridge  
who is, as we might say, spiritually as young as the rest; the ex- f 
planation being that the work is full of interest, is above all ~ 
human. She is loved by all who come in contact with her and  Z
everything is done with kindness. She merits much admiration  
because her work is unique in its kind and has no parallel.  ~?’
Nobody can believe how Mrs. Breckinridge started the work  
l of this mission. Without any road facilities the work was very  
difficult; but there are all the comforts that anyone could wish.  
Her ever-increasing correspondence was the reason the govern-  ii
ment started a post office adjoining her work. True it is, that   »
there is no electric light, but numerous oil lamps illuminate the  Q.
rooms. There are candelabra which give such beauty to the cor-  
I ners. With this luck and these surroundings so beautiful, is ef-  €Z
fected the desire to work in this atmosphere. Each person car- ;y 
ries her flashlight; The drinking water comes from springs and  L
a well. The visit to the spring is a walk promising a sight of %
natural beauty. There are many hens and roosters, the pastime  ’ H
of the few free hours of Mrs. Breckinridge. My room opens on to gf 
a porch near the nurse’s room where everybody lives in the grand  i
free air and sleeps with the doors open.  
The nurses practice preventive medicine and teach hygiene ? 

 i
Q FRONTIER NURSING SERVICE 13
i
3 so well that infectious diseases have visibly diminished. Extra-
  ordinary data in this Appalachian region—they have one of the
  best maternal and infantile mortality rates in the United States
 " and also of the world. E
  The parting was painful in saying goodbye. They had been
, ’ so attentive and cordial and given me so much to remember that
-'  I will never forget them. The return journey was made from
  Hazard at six in the morning to Lexington, arriving at the city
  at mid-day. Six hours afterwards, I took the train to Cincinnati
  and arrived there at nine and the following morning found me in -
g Bat