The Nurse's Pronouncing Dictionary - by Honnor Morten

Measuring a mere 11.5cm by 9cm, this little book was meant to be small enough to keep in your pocket, discreetly tucked away for whenever you might need it. Published in 1915, when the battles of World War One had begun to rage, I cannot help but imagine that this book found its way into the hands and pocket of a woman who nursed soldiers, or tended to victims of the fighting in one or other theatre of war or on the home front. Wrapped in a red hardback covering, with a prominent black cross on the cover, there is a toughness to this book, which seems fitting.  This book means business. It had a job to do and a part to play in the story of nurses at war time, women who needed the words to help them do a job that was key to the war effort. From A is for ‘Abasia - Difficulty to walking due to incoordination,’ to Z is for ‘Zymotic - a term which includes all epidemic, endemic and contagious diseases arising from germs’, and everything in between, this book must surely have been indispensable at critical moments in the career of a nursing practitioner. 

Interestingly, the book naturally opened on the letter B, a page that defines ‘Bone-setting’, ‘Borax’ and ‘Bovril’, amongst other things. One can only imagine why this is, we will never know.  Nor will we know who used this book and how, when, where and why it was pulled from a pocket, to aid its owner.  What I do know, is that it found its way to the bottom of a box of books, in an auction in Dublin, from where I pulled it out into the light, some 109 years after it was published. It was one of a collection of books, some religious in nature and others with a definite Irish interest, all dating from between 1913 and 1923, some with inscriptions belonging to the same woman.  Yet, inside the tiny book there is also a similar-sized page, perhaps a bookmark or sorts, with an image of Christ on one side, his heart exposed, and surrounded by thorns, and on the other, a certificate of Membership, approved by the Archbishop of New York, dated until 1 March 1923, specifically naming Saint Joesph’s Union, 381 Lafayette Street, New York, and the reverend Mallick J. Fitzpatrick, pastor.

This fact transports the book to New York City, in the post war years, and I wonder, yet again, how the good people of St Joseph’s Union might have required a nurse, along with her dictionary, to come to their aid. Of course, with the help of Google, it was no time before I discovered that that address was the Mission of the Immaculate Convent, an ‘elegant four-story residence with a high stoop’, once owned by by Alexander H.. Stephens, an esteemed surgeon, a Paris Millinery, a Dr Stuart, who used the building to provide ‘Electric Magnetic treatment.’  But from 1888 until 1965, the building became a Mission of the Immaculate Virgin - originally home for destitute and homeless children (boys), run by the Sisters of St. Francis, although the premises was left unused for many years when another home was opened on Staten Island, the convent located at 381 Lafayette St remained.  I have to thank historian Tom Miller who posted all these fascinating details on his blog: Daytonian in Manhattan, ‘The Mission of the Immaculate Virgin Convent - No 381 Lafayette St.,  July 20, 2016. It is certainly worth a look.

These details are all in keeping with the lady whose collection of books ended up in an auction housein Dublin recently.  Among them were prayer books and souvenirs from Rome, that suggested to me that the owner had been in the religious orders and was perhaps an English teacher. Perhaps she or her belongings found her way back to Ireland, perhaps to a niece or godson, who held on to them for a generation, and on their passing, there was no one to remember the Irish girl who went to New York over a century ago to minister to the poor, destitute boys of the city, and who kept the pocket guide to medical pronunciation in her possession for all those years, perhaps the only momento of her time there to survive. A lot of perhaps I know, but I wonder where the book has been for the last 50 years at least, and in whose care.  I'd like to think that it was of good use to someone. 

But the owner herself remains nameless, and I quite like it that way, because she can be anyone, any girl, any nurse with a tool of learning in her pocket, to take her around the world, a ticket to gain entrance her places that perhaps she might never have seen.  All in all, this is a powerful little book, because of its definitions and diagrams, of course, but also because of the book itself, as an historical artefact and the stories it tells. Stories of the type of people, women mostly, who used this book to help others and themselves in the early 20th century, when all women did not yet have the right to vote, or equal opportunity to achieve in science and learning.  In a way, this little red book was for some women, a passport into the future, giving them access to the language and learning that could change their lives: a taste of the type of world we enjoy today, making this tiny red book a mighty book indeed. 

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