Nurse's Scrapbook and Letter 1933 Fire Guthrie Robert Packer Hospital Sayre, PA

Description

A scrapbook kept by a young woman named Annie K. Clinch while a nursing student at the Robert Packer Hospital (now known as the Guthrie Clinic) in rural Sayre, Pennsylvania from about 1933-1934.
The scrapbook measures about 9" x 11" and has more than 60 pages worth of clippings.
The tragic May 1933 fire and subsequent rebuilding dominates its content which, apart from two lovely postal cachets, is composed entirely of newspaper clippings, and included as well are about 8 pages of handwritten notes which include the clear highlight of this item: a four-page, approximately 350 word detailed eyewitness account of the fire and rescuing of the patients which Clinch participated in.
Here is a partial transcription of the letter (which is recorded on her own nurse's home stationary and seems to have been written to herself or simply for posterity, the day following the fire):
"
May 4
th
, 1933 /
Today marked one of the most disastrous fires I have ever heard of or seen. The Robert Packer Hospital in which I am in training was almost destroyed by fire. The place where I worked was all destroyed. We had about 265 patients. Every patient was saved. We worked hard. God must have been with us or we could not of had things like we did. The patients did not cry out. They were calm. Today a man told me how he looked out the window and saw the fire felt the het on his face and he could not move. He told how he make up his mind not to call for help that others needed help more than he. Another patient half dazed walked out with only his night gown on. A lady from M. Ward thought only of her little boy that was on Children’s ward and started for the children’s ward. But all this time the hospital was in darkness. The patients were taken, some in beds some in wheel chairs, others being carried to different places. The Coleman Parish House had about 100 patients. They were women and children. We to see the funny side for in the center was one old man – Grampy Rayon? In the nurses home we had about 30 women, the same old Women’s Ward, bed pans, bed pans, and more bed pans. In the class room’s we had part of men’s ward. […] Yes in Power’s funeral home we had 17 men. This makes me thing of what one of the patients told me to night. He had just had a 1/6 of morphine and had gone to sleep. He new he was being moved but to his surprise he woke up in a funeral home. Again he went to sleep and this time he woke up in the funeral car on his way to Waverley Hospital." [sic all]
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