Nurse's Chronicle

FOR DEAR LIFE--Belinda Jelliffe--Scribner ($2.75).

For most laymen, the routine activities of the staff of a big hospital are shrouded in sanitary mystery. The stories concerning them are usually grim, sometimes Rabelaisian, seldom sensible. Last week the sensible, matter-of-fact autobiographical chronicle of a onetime nurse gave a good, clear picture of the day-to-day work and training involved. Written by the wife of Psychiatrist Smith Ely Jelliffe, For Dear Life is an unpretentious book, makes up in honesty what it lacks in literary finish.

Belinda Dan (Dobson) was born in a barn near Carleton, N. C., the daughter of a farmer who also made coffins for a living. Ambitious even in early girlhood, she hated the hard, constricting life of the farm, finally ran away. When she decided to become a nurse, the story really begins.

It was a strenuous, heart-breaking ordeal. Under a constant nervous strain, working long hours, haunted by the fear of blundering, learning that doctors were capable of alibiing themselves by blaming nurses, the girls often went to pieces, lost credit for months of work by hysterical outbursts or reckless dissipation. Belinda made her first blunder as an apprentice.

Called in to assist in an accident case in which a patient's nose had been sliced off, she sterilized the nose. When the doctor prepared to sew it on he cried out: "My God! You've cooked it!" She was not punished for thrashing a head nurse, but she was dropped for sneaking out after hours and getting caught. She was almost penniless before she was given another chance at another hospital.

She learned rapidly, finished her course with only a few interruptions, was soon head of a small hospital in the South. But amiable Southern disregard for her passionate cleanliness campaigns soon convinced her she could not manage the nurses. She became a private nurse, was mixed up in a ridiculous, small-city scandal, returned to New York, suffered poverty again before she got a fine but difficult job caring for a famed millionaire who was drinking himself to death. As soon as that job was over she was looking for work again. On the verge of a breakdown, she applied for employment with a celebrated psychiatrist named Dr. Stuart Ellery Jerrold (Smith Ely Jelliffe). He gave it to her and at that point Mrs. Smith Ely Jel-liffe ends her book.

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