putterings 436 < 437 > 438 index
test tubes, linen closet, about twenty beds
...a roomful of apparatus, an interne puttering about with test tubes. Another door discovered a linen closet. At the end was the ward — about twenty beds. Bee retraced her steps. She was to report to the ward office
— Ruth Louise Partridge, Adventures with a Lamp : The Story of a Nurse (1939) : 31
Indiana U copy/scan (via google books) : link (snippet only)
earlier, same chapter (entitled “Surveillance”) —
Bethia [Bee] Ware let herself blithely into the psychopathic building; this was usually her state of mind on a service she liked. Strangely, she did like psycho. Things were being done there with endocrines, and water therapy and rest, and queer new-fashioned medicines used in queer ways. This was nursing...
the next chapter is entitled “Suicide.”
photo, taken from obituary, The (Provo, Utah) Daily Herald (November 17, 1981) : 4 : link (newspapers.com)
Ruth Louise Partridge (1898-1981), “a mother, singer, pianist, nurse, and author in Provo, Utah”
BYU Library, Special Collections / Ruth Louise Partridge papers / MSS 1544 : link
and nobody’s fool, I think, having spent some time with her writing.
descendent of Edward Partridge (1793-1840), early convert and first Bishop of the Church of Latter Day Saints
wikipedia : link
1,284 instances (and probably counting) of “Ruth Louise Partridge” at Utah Digital Newspapers (as of 20240617)...
link
for example,
“Minutia” by Ruth Louise Partridge, Provo Daily Herald (December 24, 1947) : link
Don’t expect any sweetness and light stuff from me this Christmas. I'll leave that to people who haven’t lived as long. While I don't object to your saying that “God’s in His Heaven” I will never admit that “All’s right with the world.” Whereas in Christ's time, there was only one Judas Iscariot to cope with, nineteen-hundred and forty-seven years later, the planet is crawling with them. On the other hand, there is the Friendship Train. And so it goes.
Was grateful for a little snow on Monday. A nice present for my forty-ninth birthday. With my un-flair for arithmetic, it is very discouraging to have to cope for a whole year with a number like forty-nine. I can neither add, subtract, multiply nor divide such a number as forty-nine. I will be glad to reach fifty next year, for even such a brain as mine can cope with fifty, a nice round number that can be cut into fives, tens, and is reasonable even with decimals. Three cheers for fifty...
—
publications
- Ruth Louise Partridge, Adventures with a Lamp (E. P. Dutton, 1939)
LoC : permalinkBook is in hand : Fascinating, tough-minded, probably based in author’s experience. Wonder if my grandmother and her sister, both nurses in Los Angeles at that time, may have read it.
- Ruth Louise Partridge, Thirty-six celluloid collars (Provo, Utah: Press Publishing Company, 1973)
essays, 89 pp; subtitle: “Authored as well as could be expected”
subject : Latter Day Saints
local note : “This heterogeneous collection, dedicated to those who read it, is doubly dedicated to those who buy it.”
from bookseller description, and catalog entry, BYU Library : linkbook is in hand : a heterogeneous and entirely readable collection that includes pieces from the author’s column(s) in Provo newspapers, some verse, and even a long excerpt from her novel Adventures with a Lamp.
- Ruth Louise Partridge, Other Drums (Provo, Utah; 1974)
fictionalized history re: Mormons
borrowable at archive.org : linkcited (approvingly) in Scott H. Partridge, “Edward Partridge in Painesville, Ohio” in Brigham Young University Studies 42:1 (2003) : 50-73
link (Jstor)