Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Aspects Of Life In The U.S.A.

AFTER spending more than 20 years in private and general nursing in the United States, Miss Rose Gillick, of Farrell street, Glenelg, thinks American nurses lack something of the sympathetic approach to their work that is a characteristic of Australian nurses. Miss Gillick, who returned home recently for a long vacation, said that the attitude of American girls, who regarded nursing more as a job than as a vocation, was due possibly to lack of personal relationships in big hospitals, where treatment was frequently carried out by highly expensive and elaborate equipment. During most of the war years Miss Gillick was engaged in electro-cardiagraph work for military hospitals at the Polyclinic and Roosevelt Hospitals in New York, where she met numbers of patients who had been in Australia with the American forces. It was more or less a general practice for American doctors and dentists to assign a patient direct to hospital laboratories to be examined by specialised equipment as a basis for personal diagnosis. Miss Gillick remarked.

FOOD PROBLEMS

Food, though fairly plentiful in restaurants, had been a major problem in America in recent years. Miss Gillick said. Up to about six months ago she had not seen butter, tinned milk or cheese since before the war. A fruit spread concocted from apples was the main butter substitute. Bread had been controlled to some extent. At one stage its consumption in hotels and restaurants had been controlled by regulation. Meat and sugar were heavily rationed and she had seen house wives queue for hours at meat stores only to be turned away when supplies ran out. Women's clothing was scarce, and inferior in quality—but unrationed. Stockings had been practically unprocurable since before Christmas.

HOUSEHOLD GADGETS

Household labor saving gadgets had boomed in the States probably. Miss Gillick thinks, because American women refused to be tied down to housework. Young married women seldom stayed at home when a job offered activity and a change. It was tins factor as much as American inventive genius she considers, that led to the gigantic production of labor-saving devices and their wide use in middle and upper class homes, where electric washers, refrigerators, cake-mixers and other appliances were mote the rule than the exception.

The Advertiser Wednesday 31 July 1946 page 5

"Rose Dorothy Gillick was born on the 29 September 1886 at Craddock in the Flinders Ranges in South Australia.

Her family were pioneers in the far north of South Australia.

Rose spent four years training as a nurse at the North Adelaide Private Hospital.

She published stories in the Adelaide newspaper "The Register" about nursing in France during the war.

Following a short period home in Australia, Rose departed for the United States in 1920 and became a naturalised American on 6 March, 1933.  She returned to Australia in 1955 after 20 years nursing in New York." - SOURCE (nurses.ww1anzac.com)