Anna Louise Tittman Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

Anna Tittman
Q. So most of them would be in labor by the tine they &ved?
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A. Oh, yes, yes.
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Q. Then what was your procedure as a student tralnee for astance with a
woman in labor?
A. Well, the babies were born right In the room where thq were going to
stay, not in a delivery room, during my period. The deliewy mom care
along pretty quickly after that. You got the patient fnta the room and
made her as comfortable as you could until her pains becar@--she didn't leave
horn until the pains were pretty regulw and pretty hard, especially if it's
her first baby. Then the doctbr had to cq. Miss Matt ws had somthlng
to say about that, t 00.
it to her and so forth. See, we didn't have floor supervlisors. But we'd
have older nurses working with the younger nurses, and we ask them what to
do. It was just a basic training, but it wasnl t any worn4 at our place
than it was at others.
She ' d kind of be looking out for % hat and we reported
Now St. John's cam along with their school later, and I klped establish
that with Sister Magdalene, who was in chmge. But that1a ahead now. That's
when I was secretary of the State B o d of Nurse Examiners.
Q. &at kind of pain killers did you use?
A. I don't know.
Q. Maybe none?
A. I don't bow of any, no.
Q. Did they practice the episiotow?
Q. The cutting so that the bi&h canal is not tom?
A. No, they let them get tom in those days. They mended them afterwards
and got another fee out of it.
Q. You mntioned the tuberculosis patients. Would they be out there
s m r and winter in their tents?
A. Well, there wasn't aombody there all the tim. It w+ put up special
for this one man. He was there dmingthe smr periods and I dimtt have
his care. There weren't so many TB sanitariums in those Ms. We didn't
have our county place then; we didn't have one in Sangmrt County. But,
otherwise, they stayed at home and got everybody else infected. You see,
now whole families--1 guess yay know that whole families, if they have a
patient in one family-have to ,be watched year after year until they're better.
So many of the boys came horn? *om the AT, you see, with TB. They nay have
had it before they .left home athout knowing.
Q. You mentioned that you didn't bathe patients every da . How often did
you change linens?
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