Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 181, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 August 1918 — BLUE GOWNS ARE BUSY [ARTICLE]

BLUE GOWNS ARE BUSY

Restoring Maimed Soldiers to Trades, Their Job. “Reconstruction Aids” Coax Wasted Muscles Back to Their Normal State. Washington.—Teachers, nurses and healers too, are the “Blue Gowns” of the army medical corps, at work now in the hospitals of the United States and “over there." Reconstruction aids is their official name, but the cheery hue of their distinctive uniform already has won a handler name for the special corps of seventy women whose membership treats and teaches among the maimed soldiers brought back from the battle front. Theirs is the work of coaxing back the wasted muscles and disused limbs of wounded men, and later by patient tutoring instilling deftness in new arts and vocations which the hospital schools are planning for the returned soldier.

Most of the “Blue Gowns” were recruited from the instruction staffs of manual training schools and. civilian hospitals. “Beside a table a young fellow in uniform was carving a conventional flower border on a wooden picture frame,” says an official description of their work. “The design was hls own and the work was his first piece. He las inclined to be clumsy because he using hls left hand. A ‘Blue Gown’ was ready to guide and advise him. As he becomes adept in left-hand-ed carving he is preparing for the time when he again will begin' to draft, this time with his left hand. This mental concentration upon a new task is be lieved by doctors and psychologists U be a valuable antidote for discouragement. “At the same open-air workshop one man was knitting a scarf. One group of men, temporarily crippled, were carving designs upon wooden blocks, and several were learfiing to weave upon hand looms.” In the treatment rooms inside the “Blue Gowns" were guiding electrical appliances and administering the complicated series of treatments that perfect the restoration work started by the surgeon at the front