xt751c1tg09q https://exploreuk.uky.edu/dips/xt751c1tg09q/data/mets.xml The Frontier Nursing Service, Inc. 1931 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. VI, No. 4, Spring 1931 text The Quarterly Bulletin of The Frontier Nursing Service, Inc., Vol. VI, No. 4, Spring 1931 1931 2014 true xt751c1tg09q section xt751c1tg09q (
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. The Quarterly Bulletun of
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6 The Fr0nt1er Nursung Servwe, Inc.
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VOL. VI. SPRING, 1931 NO. 4
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THE QUARTERLY BULLETIN OF
THE FRONTIER NURSING SERVICE, Inc.
Published quarterly by the Frontier Nursing Service. Lexington. Ky.
SUBSCRIPTION PRICE $1.00 PER YEAR A
VOLUME VI. SPRING, 1931 NUMBER 4 ,
“Entered as second class matter June 30, 1926, at the Post Office at Lex- Q,
ington, Ky., under the Act of March 3, 18'79." l

FRONTIER NURSING SERVICE 1
"' FOREWORD
rl ‘
Spring has come again to the Kentucky Mountains. The
i long, hard year of drought and famine is drawing toward its
close. About seventy per cent of our families are on Red Cross
° relief, families who never in their lives were on relief before.
{ During the six years since the Frontier Nursing Service began
its work we could count the people who have asked us for charity
i on the fingers of two hands. But famine is no respector of per-
Q. sons—the proud and self-respecting suffer most. Until the
Qi next harvest the Frontier Nursing Service must continue its
program of supplying four quarts of milk a week to several
thousand children. During this one winter alone we had to put
y shoes on over seven hundred little feet.
Our fight to stave off disease began early. Between June
and September of this pas·t year, when the wells and springs
were drying up and the rivers turning into deep pools of green
. slime between sandy bars one could cross dry shod, our devoted
little corps of nurses gave 11,023 inoculations to people scattered
over 1,000 square miles in the battle royal against typhoid,
` dyphtheria, smallpox, influenza. Dysentery, skin diseases due
to scarcity of water for bathing, bowel diseases among the ill-
nourished children took their toll. In one day, two Frontier
Nurses gave 498 inoculations.
¢ Upland pastures were parched to brown ruin as the months
went by with-out rain; grass withered to yellow straw, corn in
the ear wizened in misshapened shocks, cows went dry, many
were killed, many driven away to be sold for whatever they
would bring. Famine cast a lengthening shadow across the
t baked hills. Back to this stricken land swarmed thousands who
had lost their jobs at the mines or in industry, or on the rail-
r-oads, back where the margin of living is never far above hunger
level, back to swell the cornbread line. This was the picture,
( and the effects of it are still with us and will be until the next
harvest. But with the coming of spring and heavy rainfalls that
h have penetrated into the subsoil and raised the rivers and re-

U 2 ` THE QUARTERLY BULLETIN J__—__~{__é-
stored the wells, we feel that the harvest won’t fail us again. ,
Everybody has been working prodigiously——a sort of outpouring ,
of gratitude for the thousands of friends all over the United x
States who have held back the famine and are seeing the crisis I
through. Never was such clearing of land, such building of new ·
fences, such a planting of gardens——every man, woman and child
is doing his part.
It was not until early April that we got our first real "tide"
in two years. The winter before everybody had gotten busy on
the timber, and hundreds of rafts of black walnut and white
oak lay all through the year scorching on the river bars waiting
for water to bear them down the stream. Timber is the moun-
taineer’s one cash crop. The final and awful disaster for us in
the drought lay in this unmarketed timber. By the first of last i
July the depreciation was one-third of its value. When at last l
this spring the "tide" came the excitement was like the return
of troops from war. All up and down the rivers word waas
passed that the waters were rising. In a few hours they rose
ten feet, then fifteen, and the great rafts, each with three men #
to man them, swung out to mid-stream. The moorings were {
severed and on a great rus·h of current they started down. As ij
the first rafts passed they began cheering, these quiet High- {
landers, and the people on the shores cheered and waved back at g
them. Then more rafts followed, over two hundred on the Mid- Y
dle Fork alone, and for forty miles down the river the cheering i
men were answered by the people on the shore. Women dropped _Q
their hoes, men stood at the plows waving their hats·. Like a
triumphant army the rafts swept on. The drought was broken, L
the heavens had opened, the harvest is to come. S
"I once more smell the dew, the rain
And relish versing
Oh, my only Light! `
It cannot be that I am he
On whom thy tempest fell all night." .
“I know of no finer work anywhere than that which Mrs. Breckin- —
ridge is doing through the Frontier Nursing Service, Inc., for a portion {
of our population which is sadly in need of help/’
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT.
(Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt.) ’

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SAYINGS OF THE CHILDREN
'I`hree-year-old girl, poking her head in the cabin where
the Frontier Nurse is dressing a dirty wound with a lysol solu-
3 tion, "I smell a nurse."
i
Four-year-old boy, inquiringly of a slim, short-haired nurse
L astride her horse, "Air you a boy or a girl?"
f· Nurse, with a smile, "A boy."
if Four-year-old, "I knowed you was a boy but I thought you
l was a girl."
i
Six-year-old girl, asked what she had been eating all winter,
shyly replied, "Beans an’ ole ’taters."
,3
. “It is the women and children of the frontier who suffer most from
l the Zack of woman’s nursing, and it is the outstanding work of Frontier
Nursing Service, Inc., to go to them with their ministries of mercy and
healing. It is incidentally a service of angelic adoent·nre." _
’ JOHN H. FINLEY, Editor,
. New York Times.

i{”__.Arii)___ THE QUARTEIILY BULLETIN ___fr _`rWir* *7 7
THE ROMANCE OF A MOUNTAIN HOSPITAL 9
——— I
li
Every time we visit ours we are thrilled again by the stories l
of the patients. Here lies a boy with a bullet through his breast,
there a man under-nourished and haggard fighting pneumonia;
in the children’s sunny ward a s·ix-year-old boy with a blood {
count down to twenty from profound anemia coming from hook-
· worm, and a skin like parchment———near him a baby getting over A
a double mastoiditis with hearing badly impaired. The baby A
has no mother but a neighbor woman is bringing him up with
her own seven, and the little blue and white shirt with black
collar and cuffs in which he came to us (in the nurse’s arms on I
horseback) was· painstakingly stitched by his foster-mother’s
loving, worn hands. p
Where every case is a romance let us describe the last two ‘
4 arrivals only. One is a four-weeks old baby born on Wolf Creek p
"back of the beyond" without medical or nursing care, her eyes
infected—brought down to our nearest nursing station with both
eyes so blinded by pus that it is impossible to tell yet whether _
any sight can be saved at all. Treatment every fifteen minutes
for twenty-four hours; the condition clearing up, the doctor
holding out a faint hope that the outcome won’t be total dark- I
ness for life.
` Just the day before the latest case came in, an expectant
mother riding sideways behind the nurse-midwife on her horse. i
Where else in the world would a woman at the end of her nine
months be brought in such a fashion to a hospital door? She
was lifted gently down and carried in. The nurse explained that `
she was troubled about the case, she was sure the baby was dead A
» and the mother had felt no life for several days, so she had
brought her in where our Dr. Capps could see her. The patient i
\

moswma Nunsmo smwrce 5
was very tired and had been under-nourished all the past year
9 and overworked. There was no vitality to pass on to the newest
Q "least one." It was born in the night—and dead.
li
i "I bring you a pillow, oh, little dead soul,
‘ Of thyme and green grasses.
I weave you, a winding shee-t, little dead soul,
i Of mist from the passes. ~
A fair linen napkin I lay on your head,
. Bleached white in the light that the harvest moon shed, _
, And set the tall tapers to burn by the bed,
And chant holy Masses.
I wash you in goat’s milk, oh, little dead soul,
From pastures so sunny.
I sweeten your bitter pale mouth, little soul,
With red wine and honey.
A platter of salt now I give you to hold,
, And comb the death damps from your ringlets of gold,
‘ And lay on your eyelids, so silent and cold,
, A fair piece of money.
But whither and whither, and where. little soul,
_ Through silence benumbing?
A little wild bee, are you now, little soul.
2 To God’s hive a-humming?
j But may Virgin Mary and Jesus, her Son,
. The Spirit and Father, the dread Three in One,
i With Blessed Saint Peter, and Holy Saint John,
l Await you at coming."
A Gaelic Midwife’s Dirge.
{ From the Hebrides.
l We are accustomed now to getting letters addressed, “Frontier Nurs-
ing Service, Kentucky Mo1mtains," but the other day one came straight
to our door by the mule-back mail delivery from South Africa, addressed,
; “Pioneer Midwives’ Association, Kentucky."

€_;_; i___'£‘3 `£‘. _*2kI _r_Aie" was . YA r4r
IN MEMORIAM
The Frontier Nursing Service records with sorrow the
death of Dr. Ralph Waldo Lobenstine at St. Luke’s Hospital in
New York City at the age of fifty-six. i
To his position at the top of American obstetrics he added
a sense of public responsibility toward all women in childbirth
so fine and so rare that we shall not soon meet his like again.
The Frontier Nursing Service shares the grief of his family and
friends and of its sister-association, The Maternity Center Asso-
ciation of New York, of whose Medical Advisory Board he was
Chairman. The Frontier Nursing Service feels keenly his loss
from its New York Committee and from the plans he was di-
recting so ably for a training school for nurse-midwives in New
York. No problem of the woman in labor from the congested
tenements of our greatest city to the remotest creek in the Ken-
tucky mountains was ever presented to him without receiving
his sympathetic consideration. All agencies occupied in better
maternal care will look for the guidance of his spirit in the years
to come.
“The significance of what the FNS is doing extends far beyond the
areas to which you are bringing comfort and relief. All over the world the
outstanding health problem of the moment is to devise means of bringing
the benefits of modern sanitary science to the remote rural districts. I
have had opportunity to study efforts being mcule along this line in France, rp
Italy, Poland, Jugoslavia, Hungary, and other countries, but I know of no t".
district in the world suffering from such economic handicaps as yours to —'
which so complete and admirable a maternal and health service is being
rendered?
C'.—E. A. WINSLOW,
Yale University School of Medicine.

iv r*i _—__M fin NURSING SEEECE 7
g IN MEMORIAM
The following resolution was passed on Thursday, April
2nd, 1931, by the Executive Committee of the Frontier Nursing
Service. The members present were:
Mrs. S. Thruston Ballard,
Mr. Percy Booth,
Mrs. Mary Breckinridge,
Mrs. Joseph Carter,
Mrs. S. C. Henning,
Mr. Edward J ouett,
Mr. C. N. Manning,
Mr. Bethel Veech.
Since the last meeting of this Committee, Mrs. Embry L.
Swearingen, a Trustee of the Frontier Nursing Service, has en-
tered a wider sphere of usefulness in the Great Beyond.
She was a woman of wide vision, broad, deep sympathy and
contributed largely of her time and means to the work of this
Service. Her great social charm and delightful personality en-
deared her to all. We shall miss the pleasure and inspiration of
her presence at our meetings, but, above all, we shall feel the
loss of her able counsel and helpful interest in all that pertains
to our cause.
RESOLVED, That we express our deep sympathy to Mr.
Swearingen and his family in the death of our former associate,
that we place on record our high appreciation of her character
and services, and our hope that the influen'ce she so sweetly ex-
erted in life may still guide us in the great unfinished task that
lies before us.
' "This most couwrageous of preseiibday social experiments is the out-
FT; standing piece of midwifery work being done in the country. Until the
_· methods, here proved to be practicable, are widely adopted uz. rural
& America, we can not hold up our heads among enlightened coimti·ies."
HAVEN EMERSON, M. D.,
College of Physicians and S'lL7`{]€O‘llS,
Columbia Uvzliversity.

S THE QUARTl·]I{g};"§EDI;ETIN _Am__ 5
BRUTUS AND BOWLINGTOWN
Thes·e two lovely Centers, the one on an eminence looking i
for miles up and down Bullskin Creek, and the other nestling
on a hillside close to the Middle Fork of the Kentucky, are com-
pleting their first winter’s work. Almost at once they have
stepped into a huge program—clinics of fifty and sixty patients,
ardent co-operation on the part of their mountain neighbors, it
many babies brought into the world, much sickness nurscd safely B
back to life and health again.
The Center at Brutus is a memorial to Belle Barrett Hughitt, i
a lovely yellow house with orange blinds. It follows the general Q
plan of the Frontier Nursing Service Centers, no two of which
are altogether alike and every one of which has the following y
accommodations: A living room with a fire place of the native .
_ stone for the nurses’ evenings, social gatherings of the neighbors §
and local committee meetings; a trim little kitchen; a bedroom i
for each nurse and one for their housekeeper; guest accommo—
dations; bath, and lastly but most important a well equipped dis- E
pensary and large waiting room with a spare bed for the visit-
ing doctor or the patient brought into the Center. -
The Center at Bowlingtown, the Margaret Durbin Harper, is , Q
of white clapboards· with green trimming and shutters. At thc »,
first meeting of local citizens the land was donated and local 1
subscriptions of over $500.00 in lumber and labor, and the use T
of mules and locust fence posts were pledged as is the custom D
wherever we start a new Center. The two hundred men and —
women present were deeply moved to learn that the Margaret ;
Durbin Harper Center was to be given in memory of a baby
born on Kentucky soil more than one hundred years ago, by a T
daughter who has never ceased to cherish her memory. · .
“Brought-ou" plumber riding iu heavily to repair the Hospital water
system. "What I d0u’t know about mules would fill volumes cmd volumes? ,

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A Suggestion to Those Who Have Only
Five or Ten Cents to Give

With its huge service covering great distances the Frontier
` Nursing Service attracts and needs many large givers, but no
one need feel on that account that his small gift will not be as
; useful as it is welcome. We badly need thousands of pocket
handkerchiefs for our thousands of children to whom we are try-
ing to teach good health habits. If you have only seven cents
* to give, buy a gay handkerchief with five and post it to us with
a two-cent stamp.
"RE'FLECTIONS ON BIRTH CONTROL"
— BY MARY BRECKINRIDGE
I VVi1l appear in an early issue of
. HARPER’S MAGAZINE
l
2

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FRONTIER NURSING SERVICE, Inc.
CHAIRMAN TREASURER DIRECTOR
Mrs. S. Thrustou Ballard, _ Mr. C. N. Manning, Mrs. Mary Breckiurldga,
Louisville, Ky. Security Trust C0., Lexington, Ky. Wendover, Ky.
, The full report of the work and the expenditures of the
Frontier Nursing Service during the past fiscal year will be
published in the Summer Issue of the Bulletin, and at the same
I time the first complete list of its National Board of Trustees and
i Executive Board will be printed, the names on its various com-
· mittees and its field staff, its medical and nursing advisory
COLlI1CllS. For 1‘€3SOllS' of Sp3.C€ and €CO1lOlTly all ’Ell€S€ 1l3m€S
have not been re-issued in the smaller numbers of the Bulletin.
V Committees to further and extend this work are now established in:
_ NEW YORK PITTSBURGH
Chairmanship Pending Chairman: Mrs. Charles S. Shoemaker
Executive Secretary: Miss AnneWinsl0w ST PAUL
‘ BOSTON - . ' · -
Chairman: Mrs. E. A. Codman Chairman. Mrs. Edwin White
, Treasurer: Mr. Charles Jackson _ lll/I[INNéEAPOLIS _
CINCINNATI Chairman. rs. umner T. McKnight
, Chairman: Mr. James M. Hutton _ DETROIT
ST, LOUIS Chairman. Mr. Gustaxus D. Pope
l Chairman: Mr. Harry French Knight _ CLEVELAND
z BALTIMORE Chairman. Mrs. Leonard C. Hanna
Chairman: Dr. William H. Welch PHILADELPHIA
CHICAGO Chairmanship Pending
Chairmanship Pending ROCHESTER
Executive Secretary: Mrs. John C. Gardner Chairman: Miss Helen Rochester Rogers
L0U1svILLE '
Chairman: Mrs. S. C. Henning
Vice-Chairman: Mrs. John Price, Jr.

S ____ rnoxrmn Nur>us1xc‘ siznvicic __ ,__ u
. FORM OF BEQUEST ,
For the convenience of those who may be willing to remem-
, ber this institution in their wills, this form of bequest is sug-
gested:
"I hereby devise the sum of ...........................,............
dollars (or property properly described) to the Fron-
tier Nursing Service, a corporation organized under the
laws of the State of Kentucky?
It is prc·1'<·rre