The other is from a missionary secretary. “We are needing a nurse for our oldest hospital in China. The hospital is closed because the doctor is ill in America and will not be allowed to return this year unless someone is found to accompany her back to China. Will you consider going for us?”
On the one hand there is the life in a well furnished hospital, congenial work, friends near, an honored profession, under the stars and stripes—and yet? On the other hand, a foreign land, an unknown tongue, strange people, untried climate, opposition of friends, the end of a career—and yet?
And a voice said, “Whom shall I send and who will go for us?” Will it be easier to answer the first or the second call? Where is the need greater? The twilight deepens. The tenderest voice the world has ever heard breaks the stillness, “Will you go for me? I need you there. I will teach you to love them because they are mine, and I will go with you all the way.” Peace and content come with the decision. In the morning two letters are mailed. Another superintendent is found for the hospital in America and a few months later the oldest hospital for women in China is reopened.
“China is not ready for and does not need nurses,” was one of the greetings. Never mind about China. She does not always know what she needs. God needed one nurse and perhaps more. Later on in the year he also wanted one more doctor; for February 14 brought a beautiful valentine to this oldest hospital in the shape of a very much alive little doctor lady whom the Chinese people soon named the “Good Doctor.”
All diseases known to mankind crowded into the clinics. Houses with dark, unlovely rooms where the lives of thousands of mothers and helpless babies go out every year; trips out into districts where western medicine had never been before; visits to the leper colony, whose hopeless sisters are waiting release in death; dirt, disease, ignorance and age-long superstition, —all these things make one think that China might use a few nurses if she had them.
No national word for nurse, no textbooks, “work fit only for coolies”—these were a few of the difficulties encountered at the beginning.
Trips were made to other parts of China. Letters, arguments, articles and books were written and translated. Conventions were held. To-day there is a fine nurses’ association of China, with its constitution equal to any in the world, a course of study for Chinese nurses, a nurses’ department in the Medical Journal of Shanghai, a national word for nurse and nurses’ schools starting all over China. Calls for nurses are coming from public institutions, the church and the family. All these things prove that China is ready for nurses and now she realizes her need. This was not accomplished in a day. There were hours of teaching, encouraging and explaining. Tears and prayers often mingled before the novices understood. But at last came the realization that this is the kind of work meant when it is said of the Master, “He came not to be ministered unto but to minister and to give his life.”
FIRST GRADUATING CLASS, WITH DR. LYON IN CENTER, DR. HATFIELD AT RIGHT, MISS SIMPSON AT LEFT
Another scene. Four sweet girl graduates, all dressed in white, step forward to receive their diplomas and school pins. Bishop Bashford has just finished his address, and Mrs. Bashford her charge to the class, as she brings the greetings of a hundred thousand mothers of America to the first nurses to graduate from our oldest hospital in China. No, the oldest hospital is gone, but in its place is being raised the Magaw Love Hospital. “I am come that ye might have life and that ye might have it more abundantly,” is the motto given for the school by Mrs. Bashford. May the graduates of the school ever be worthy to follow in the footsteps of that queen of all nurses, Florence Nightingale, for whom the training school is named.
In these years the hospital family has grown to fifteen girls and if you were to talk with the thousands to whom they ministered last year, the answer would be, “God bless our nurses. Their hearts are warm and their hands tender, like ‘Doctor Jesus’ and they have made us understand his love as no one else ever has before.”
Another letter lies on the desk. “My heart is almost breaking for joy to-day. The first class has just been graduated—my jewels for the King. I would rather have had these five years in China than the highest position that America could offer. Perhaps my life is, as you say, buried, but if so, I find it is in a rich mine and my heart’s wish is that every nurse in America might know the joy of investing a score of years here. I am satisfied with the returns.”
(Written by Miss Cora E. Simpson and first published in Woman's Missionary Friend, December, 1913.)
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