rted in remote
districts and in summer a Holiday Home at Suida was run to which the
women and children could come from the Petrograd Maternity Hospital
for a rest. They also took charge of two hospitals, temporarily
without any medical staff, in a remote part of the Kazan district,
where they were objects of the most intense curiosity.
The interpreters were kept busy answering questions about the ages,
salaries and husbands of the staff, and the nurses' wrist watches
roused great excitement.
That their gratitude and kindness was very real, though their notions
of suitability of place and time were primitive, was shown by the gift
of three live hens being dumped, at 4 a.m., on the bed of a sister
sound asleep.
The final piece of work was the establishing of an infectious Hospital
for peasants and soldiers in Volhynia, sixty miles behind the firing
line in Galicia. This was done at the urgent request of the Zemstovos
Union.
There they had to deal with a great deal of smallpox and in another
case with scabies which they stamped out in one small village. These
Units left Russia before the recent changes, but their work was
valuable and appreciated, and again American women helped us in
raising the necessary funds, having subscribed $7,500 towards the
Units.
One of the workers, Ruth Holden, of Radcliffe College, Boston, died in
one of the epidemics. We have had American women, as we have had men,
helping us from the beginning of the war. The American Women's War
Relief Fund most generously offered to fully equip and maintain a
surgical hospital of 250 beds at Oldway House, Paignton, South Devon,
at the beginning of the war, and this offer was gratefully accepted by
the War Office through the Red Cross Society.
They also gifted six motor ambulances for use at the front--and these
and the hospital have been of the very greatest service to our wounded
men.
Others of our medical women are with mixed Units, such as The Wounded
Allies' Relief Committee. Dr. Dickinson Berry went out with others in
a Unit from the Royal Free Hospital to help the Serbian Government,
and Dr. Alice Clark is in the Friends' Unit.
Our medical women have won rich laurels and have established
themselves in their own profession permanently and thoroughly. Behind
the Hospitals, we have the thousands of women who every day are
working at the Hospital Supply Depots of our country. These are
everywhere and nothing is more wonderful than the
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