American University
Beirut, Syria
February 19, 1939.Dear Miss Turner,
Every day I look at the lovely picture. It is well framed with a dark map [sic] & a fine black frame & all the light from its depths sines out for me to enjoy. You were most successful.
The colored glass of Chartres Cathedral still stays on the dresser - after the various Xmas cards have one by one been put away.
And the Holyoke calendar hangs over the telephone in my office, so that at least every day my eye lights on it.
Where has the time gone. I think I wrote you Christmas week. I spent a few days treating an infection & had time for a little writing.
Since then things have doubled up. Two classes in Anatomy & Physiology to make up for last fall's idleness. I'm digesting Carlson & Johnson & selecting from it to build into my notes. Maybe that course will one day approach a really useful tool. Each time I teach it, I carry along with reference reading I haven't been really familiar with before. The lab. part is very bad. Maybe next year it will improve. I do not give it time enough, or money enough. But the children seem to like it. Sometimes an upper class student will drop into the preliminary class for an hour and then I am pleased.
The school otherwise needs so many things. We are building our library - $100 has gone into it this year, including some for the ward libraries. On each ward, a dictionnary [sic], an appropriate nursing reference, a journal reference, and a book on charting, at least. This means the girls can look things up, at need.
We manufactured a class room out of a linen closet & put a big table & chairs & black board & curtains into it. Ten minutes after it was fixed, the medical students were in it for a class and a week later they moved out the table and put a patient in. He was pretty sick though & had to have it. Now we are getting a bigger table that has to have the door taken off to move it in and out.
The medical dean, my boss, says I am still itnerested in the school as I was in the former job more than in the hospital nursing service. I said yes I am and I mean to let him think so. He doesn't know how completely the one depends on the other or that the one cannot be sacrificed to temporary demands of the other without both eventually suffering.
We are weeding. I'm inclined to believe that second & third trials in nursing do not yield very good results. One undesirable has gone, another two must go when the time comes. I believe the school will ultimately benefit. It is dangerous business to have a little power. Dean Goodrich would say of a girl, "Here is your chance as a school to save her." I'm a little too inclined to feel that if she is hopeless by reason of her endowment & past training, in her first year's trial, we won't be very effective in an effort to change her. I do not believe one becomes honest & clear thinking & conscientious as a result of teaching after the age of 18.
Maybe I'm wrong. Am I?
It is a great place. There is a possibility that the League of Red Cross Societies (Paris) will send students under the Red Crescent from Iraq & Iran to us for training instead of to Paris & London as in the past. They have sent to me asking for our bulletin & it would add to our prestige, maybe enough to influence the Syrians to get busy & send us some worthy applicants.
All our best students are from out of the coutnry. Our German Jewess in this year's class is a complete joy!
My best to Charlotte and any other friends you may think of.
Love as ever
KatyI have a house for the summer with a maid and an extra room!