, the sponge, as we know, being only the
skeleton of the organism."
While all this travelling was being enjoyed, and made most useful
as well, to hundreds of thousands of readers, Lady Brassey was not
forgetting her works of philanthropy. For years she has been a leading
spirit in the St. John's Ambulance Association. Last October she
gave a valuable address to the members of the "Workingmen's Club and
Institute Union," composed of several hundred societies of workingmen.
Her desire was that each society take up the work of teaching
its members how to care for the body in case of accidents. The
association, now numbering over one hundred thousand persons, is an
offshoot of the ancient order of St. John of Jerusalem, founded eight
hundred years ago, to maintain a hospital for Christian pilgrims. She
says: "The method of arresting bleeding from an artery is so easy that
a child may learn it; yet thousands of lives have been lost through
ignorance, the life-blood ebbing away in the presence of sorrowing
spectators, perfectly helpless, because none among them had been
taught one of the first rudiments of instruction of an ambulance
pupil,--the application of an extemporized tourniquet. Again, how
frequent is the loss of life by drowning; yet how few persons,
comparatively, understand the way to treat properly the apparently
drowned." Lectures are given by this association on, first, aid to the
injured; also on the general management of the sick-room.
Lady Brassey, with the assistance of medical men, has held classes in
all the outlying villages about her home, and has arranged that simple
but useful medical appliances, like plasters, bandages, and the like,
be kept at some convenient centres.
At Trindad, and Bahamas, and Bermudas, when they stayed there in
their travels, she caused to be held large meetings among the most
influential residents; also at Madeira and in the Azores. A class was
organized on board the _Sunbeam_, and lectures were delivered by
a physician. In the Shetland Islands she has also organized these
societies, and thus many lives have been saved. When the soldiers
went to the Soudan, she arranged for these helpful lectures to them
on their voyage East, and among much other reading-matter which
she obtained for them, sent them books and papers on this essential
medical knowledge.
She carries on correspondence with India, Australia, and New Zealand,
where ambulance associations have been formed. F
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