`Healing Love’ a story of a Bangor nurse

HEALING LOVE, by Helen Nichols, Windswept House Publishers, 152 pages, $10.95.

For more than a century Bangor’s Eastern Maine Medical Center has shone like a bright beacon of hope and healing to the region’s ill and injured. Founded in 1892 as Bangor General Hospital, it was housed in a converted gray stone mansion overlooking the Penobscot River. In addition to the 10-bed ward for males, the first floor boasted a minimal operating room (sparsely equipped with an operating table, two small tables and a sterilizer), a classroom where the student body of four nurses in training were taught, and a combination kitchen-laundry. Women patients were sequestered in a ward on the second floor, and here also was the hospital’s only private room.

In 1898, Nellie Foster, fictional heroine of “Healing Love,” arrives in Bangor to take the two-year nursing course at the hospital. Nellie, born and reared on a farm near Portland, is a former schoolteacher and co-owner of a millinery shop who has made this decision in the wake of her brother’s death at home, from typhoid fever. Convinced that his life might have been saved with hospital care, she has resolved to become a part of “that great work of healing.”

Nellie’s experiences at the hospital are rooted in factual information gleaned by author Helen Nichols (who lives in Steuben and holds a Master of Arts degree from the University of Maine) from her mother, Nellie Elder Benner, who became the hospital’s seventh graduate in the Class of 1897. “I used to hear her and a group of her friends who were nurses talk of their days in training,” explains Nichols, who has contributed her mother’s cap, uniform, textbook on obstetrics, doctors’ lectures and other memorabilia to the archives of the Eastern Maine Medical Center.

Leaving the gaslit Bangor railroad station, Nellie Foster is driven in a horse-drawn sleigh through the snowy streets of Bangor. Under the leaden January sky the city sprawls in what appears to Nellie to be awesome affluence. It is, she knows, a reflection of wealth from the lumber boom, a bonanza originating in Maine’s luxuriant forests to the north where even now woodsmen’s axes ring daily as they fell trees which will be floated down the Penobscot River in the spring. Sawed in Bangor, they are shipped on sailing vessels to all parts of the world. Nellie’s blue eyes widen as the hackman’s sleigh whirls past the handsome homes built by lumber barons, and the myriad of prosperous shops.

Once the hospital doors close behind her, however, Nellie has no time to think about anything else. As with all aspirant nurses, she is put on a month’s probation during which she has to prove that she can meet all challenges of work and study. In addition to carrying a heavy workload in the wards, she attends classes three days a week. Since the five other undergraduate nurses are far more advanced than she, Nellie has to study far into the night just to catch up with them. Her feet swell; her back hurts; and she is groggy from lack of sleep. Once, while carrying a heavy dinner tray to a patient on the second floor, she catches her foot in the hem of her long skirt while climbing the stairs. The tray tips, and food and utensils scatter in all directions. Still, somehow, Nellie survives and, like mythological phoenix, rises renewed from the ashes of each crisis.

Spun in the web of Nellie’s first year are other events — namely the national concern over the Spanish-American War, during which anxious local people wait patiently in front of the Bangor Daily News office for its special bulletin — and the fearful epidemic of typhoid in Bangor in July, during which so many critically ill victims are rushed to the hospital that the staff has to evacuate surgical patients to tents set up on the hospital lawn in order to free their beds for typhoid patients.

It was a time when Memorial Day brought out aged Civil War veterans who marched in a parade to the cemetery, followed by a “straggling line of small children waving flags”; when one of the more familiar sounds of the city was the clip clop of horse-drawn carriages, and the trolleys swayed along tracks giving vent every now and then to their authoritarian clang clangs. It was a time of innocence, when custom kept a rein on society and small pleasures loomed large. It was also a time when Bangor General Hospital was stretching its wings, preparing itself for the long upward flight to the peak of its fame a century later as the renowned Eastern Maine Medical Center. Although somewhat diaphanous as a novel, “Healing Love” offers a revealing look over one’s shoulder at Bangor’s long-ago past, one that gives substance to its shadow.

Bea Goodrich’s reviews are a monthly feature in the Books & Music section.