Ladies-In-Waiting

Sterilized Stewed Apples—Zephyrettes

Cup of Somnolina

(A beverage from which everything pleasant and

harmful has been extracted by a beneficent process.)

7.30—Miss Blossom, the nurse, insists on reading to me. It is not a good performance but it doesn’t matter. I know that Dick and Amy Darling are just starting for the theater.

8.30—Tepid sponge bath.

9—Massage.

9.30—Glass of peptonized water.

9.45—Temperature and pulse taken.

10—Lights out.

Never in all my twenty-five years of life have I passed a busier or more exhausting day.

    Wednesday

Precisely like Tuesday save for some new experiences in diet. There was a mild process-drink called Cocoatina; Teaette also made its appearance. There were dolls’ mattresses of shredded excelsior moistened with milk; nut salad, and Grahamata mush. I could never have supposed so many new cereals could be invented.

There is mush in the evening, mush in the morning,

Mush when it’s looked for and mush without warning.

It is rather like the immortal “Charge of the Light Brigade”:

Oats to the right of them,
Corn to the left of them,
Wheat to the north of them,
Grits to the south of them,
Into the Valley of Mush rode the two hundred.

    Thursday

I was allowed to sit on my balcony for an hour this morning. This would have been a pleasant change had I not heartily disliked at first sight my next-door neighbor who was sitting on the adjoining balcony. At noon she sent me a bunch of pansies and her card: Mrs. Grosvenor Chittenden-Ffollette.

Among fifty or sixty attendants there are always a few who gossip in spite of repeated warnings from the authorities. Sometimes it is a young nurse, sometimes a masseuse, a manicure or a shampooer, but there are always those who retail the news, mostly innocent news, of an institution like this. Cold-packing, or rubbing, or spraying, or electrifying, or brushing, or polishing—all these operations open the flood-gates of speech and no damming process is effectual. Miss Phœbe Blossom is the herald who proclaims tidings of various kinds in my room, and there is also a neophyte in the electricity department who is always full of information and quite unable to retain it. It would be almost more than human to ask them to be silent when they are the only links with the world outside. A system reduced to nothingness by a supper of Wheatoata Coffee, Cracker-dust Croquettes, Cosmos with milk, and a choice of Cerealina, Nuttetta, Proteinetta, or Glucosa is in no fit state to resist gossip.

It seems that Mrs. Chittenden-Ffollette is more than a mere woman—she is a remarkable “case,” and has proved a worldwide advertisement for this sanitarium. Dr. Stanwood has almost effected a cure; her disease has had to be named and her symptoms have been written up in all the medical journals. I don’t know what sort of person she was before she became a case, but she is now a greater tyrant than Caligula or Catherine of Russia. As to her disease, she has those things that she ought not to have, and she has not those things that she ought to have, and there is no health in her; or at least there was not until she came here a year ago. Now she is strong enough to perambulate in the corridor a little while each morning or be wheeled along the board-walk in the afternoon, and when she hears that some of the other patients are suffering, she sneers at their modest, uninteresting ailments and glances in at their doors with half-disguised contempt. You know the expression of the prize dog who is borne from the show hung with medals and ribbons—how he gazes on the little mongrel curs that gather with the crowd in the streets?

Her name, Chittenden-Ffollette, is of as vital importance as her medical-journal malady. When the third floor is in dire confusion; when Mrs. Parks has hysterics and Miss Simmons is crying for her mother, and Mrs. Bell’s hot-water bottle has burst in the bed, and Miss Phipps has discovered that the undergraduate has bandaged the wrong ankle, Miss Blossom sometimes becomes flustered and hurried and calls her patient Mrs. Follett, whereupon she says, “Chittenden-Ffollette, if you please!”

If by any chance she sees the Chittenden-Ffollette without the hyphen in the Nurses’ Bedside Record Book or scribbled on the morning paper she doesn’t need any stimulant the rest of the day. The omission of the hyphen sends up her pulse and temperature to the required point for several hours, though there is always a reaction afterward. I’ve told Dr. Levi that I should name one of her complaints hyphenitis. The occasional operation performed on the hyphen by Miss Blossom, or the young lady at the stationery counter, might be called hyphenotomy. Everybody detests Mrs. Chittenden-Ffollette, but as the banner patient of the sanitarium she must be treated with respectful consideration. All America’s most skillful physicians have struggled with her organism. They have tried to get her symptoms into line, so to speak, so as to deduce some theory from the grand array of phenomena, but the symptoms courteously decline to point in any one direction. When the doctors get seven eighths of them in satisfactory relation there are always two or three that stay out and sulk, refusing to collaborate in any sort of harmony. They act precisely like an obstinate jury, in that they calmly refuse to agree, and then Mrs. Chittenden-Ffollette appeals to a higher court where flaws in the testimony are always found, judgment is reversed, and a new trial ordered. The greatest surgeons in Europe have left the bedsides of crowned heads to ponder over her inscrutable mysteries, and have returned to their sovereigns crushed and humbled. All this attention would have upset a stronger character than hers, and now that she is in a fair way to recover, her pride will have its inevitable fall. Though much more agreeable and docile than when she entered, she is in uniformly low spirits. The truth is, she liked being an unsolved mystery and she is a good deal nettled at being found at last both soluble and curable—obliged to live, like an ex-president, on the glories of the past.

    Friday

Buckle, in his “History of Civilization,” claims that men and women are divided into three classes. The first and lowest talks of persons, the second of things, and the third and highest, of ideas. I should divide the human race into four, instead of three classes, and name as the lowest those persons who discuss their symptoms. The patients here are counseled not to do it, so the vice is reduced to a minimum, being practiced, say, not more than three out of the fourteen waking hours.

Swinging in a hammock in a shady nook this afternoon the conversation that floated to me under my distant tree was somewhat after this fashion.

Mrs. A. “Once I had neurasthenia. For three months I couldn’t be moved in bed, and for nine weeks I couldn’t turn my head on the pillow.”

Mrs. B. } “Mercy!”

Mrs. C. } “Oh, Mrs. A.!”

Mrs. D. } “Good gracious!”

Mrs. E. “Cerebro-spinal meningitis is worse than neurasthenia. I had it four years ago, and the doctor said he’d never seen a woman live that was as ill as I was. One night my temperature was 167.”

Mrs. C. } “Goodness!”

Mrs. B. } “That’s pretty high!”

Mrs. A. } “Are you sure?”

Mrs. E. “Yes, I’m perfectly sure, or at least I think I am; I am seldom wrong on figures.”

Mrs. A. “I asked, because I’ve noticed here that the thermometers register only 110, and I wondered how they measured the temperature when it rose above that point.”

Mrs. E. (huffily). “Probably they have extra long thermometers for extreme cases.”

Mrs. F. “I am glad that in this sanitarium they take the temperature by tucking the barometer-thing under the arm. My doctor at home always puts it under the tongue, and it is a perfect nuisance. He never gets it well placed but that I think of something I want to say. Then, of course, I have to keep still for three minutes, which seem three hundred, and by that time I have either forgotten it or changed my mind, so there I am!”

Mrs. G. “Just after my youngest child was three years old—”

Mrs. F. (interrupting). “I was going to say, when Mrs. E. spoke about the barometer, that after I was engaged to Mr. F. I had a dreadful attack of brain fever. I was ill in bed three months and they couldn’t touch a brush to my hair for nine days.”

Mrs. D. } “Horrors!”

Mrs. E. } “Dreadful!”

Mrs. C. } “Heavens!”

Mrs. G. (bravely). “Just after my youngest child was three—”

Mrs. X. “A man patient was brought on to our floor this morning.”

Mrs. S. “Our floor? I wish they would have separate corridors for male patients.”

Mrs. X. “This gentleman is an old friend of Dr. Levi’s. His wife has been here four weeks, and now he’s been taken ill, so they’ve put him next her on the first floor.”

Mrs. S. “I don’t care, I hate to have him near us.”