Schwester Selma

Selma Mayer (3 February 1884 – 5 February 1984) known as Schwester Selma (German: Sister Selma or Nurse Selma; ) was an Israeli nurse who was the head nurse at the original Shaare Zedek Hospital on Jaffa Road in Jerusalem for nearly 50 years. For many years she was the right-hand assistant of the hospital's founding director, Dr. Moshe Wallach. Working long hours and with limited infrastructure, she trained and supervised all personnel at the hospital from 1916 to the 1930s, and founded the Shaare Zedek School of Nursing in 1934. She never married, and resided in a room in the hospital until her last day. In her later years she became known as the "Jewish Florence Nightingale" for her decades of selfless devotion to patient welfare.

Early life and education Selma Mayer was born on 3 February 1884, in Hanover, Germany, to a poor Jewish family. Her mother died in childbirth when Selma was five years old, leaving five young orphans. Selma later wrote, "Because I lost my mother very early and therefore had a rather difficult youth, a strong need grew in me to give people that which I had missed so much: mother-love and love of human beings. Therefore I chose the profession of nursing".

In 1906 she began working as a nurse at the Salomon Heine Hospital in Hamburg. She received on-the-job training in the hospital's departments of internal medicine, surgery, pediatrics, and obstetrics. In 1913 she and another nurse passed the government's nursing licensing exams, becoming the first Jewish nurses to receive a German State Diploma. but one quit due to the "primitive conditions" that existed at Shaare Zedek in those years and the other fled to Germany during World War I.

Embarking on a four-week train journey through Central Europe, Turkey, and Damascus, Schwester Selma arrived at Shaare Zedek in December 1916. Several weeks later, Jerusalem was hit by a year-long typhoid epidemic, and typhus and meningitis also raged in the city. The 40-bed hospital, which added another 110 beds to accommodate patients, was inundated. The hospital recruited untrained workers, whom Schwester Selma outfitted in "overalls and hoods" to protect them from infection; she ordered all incoming patients washed and shaved over their entire bodies. Schwester Selma also introduced German standards of nursing to the wards, including white uniforms for all hospital personnel, changing of uniforms and bed sheets daily, and daily bathing of all patients.

While attempting to provide a high level of patient care for Jews, Christians, and Arabs, Shaare Zedek operated without electricity, indoor plumbing, central heating, or gas cooking stoves. Kerosene heaters were used to warm bathwater, and paraffin lamps were used in the operating room. It was difficult to retain staff due to the working conditions and to the exacting, temperamental nature of Dr. Wallach. Nevertheless, Schwester Selma worked 18-hour days, and expected her nurses and aides to display the same work ethic.

During that era, hospital nurses and midwives were trained on the job. Schwester Selma trained and supervised all the nurses, operating-room nurses, and midwives in the hospital, to include not only teaching the former how to make hospital beds, how to diaper newborns but also swaddle infants. Sometimes she also substituted for the midwives, who did not live on the premises. For many years, Schwester Selma was Dr. Wallach's right-hand assistant in the areas of uterine curettages, tracheotomies, and ritual circumcisions, She would constantly remind her students, "Those who come to us need help". She wrote in her memoir, "Above all they should remember and never forget that one has to try everything when dealing with the patient to cause him as little pain as possible and to spare no effort".

Schwester Selma's contract included a three-month vacation in Germany every three years, but she took advantage of that clause only twice, in 1922 and 1925. In 1927 she was offered the position of head nurse at the Eidingen Stift Institution, a Jewish hospital in Leipzig. While she seriously considered the offer, the Frankfurt-based board of directors of Shaare Zedek convinced her not to leave, with a promise "to support her for the rest of her life". leading to an Arab siege of Jerusalem. Desiring to return to her post at the hospital, Schwester Selma spent three weeks petitioning the offices of the British Mandatory government, the incoming Israeli government, and even the underground leaders, to assist her. Finally the army agreed to put her on one of its armed convoys supplying food and medicine to the besieged city.

During Israel's polio epidemic in the early 1950s, Shaare Zedek was the only hospital in Jerusalem with an isolation ward. Schwester Selma displayed unceasing devotion to the running of the iron lung machines, teaching and supervising the untrained personnel who were recruited to work in the ward.

Shaare Zedek School of Nursing A nursing-school graduate receives a nurse's pin as Schwester Selma (second left) looks on, circa 1954. In 1934 Schwester Selma founded the Shaare Zedek Nursing School. The idea was initially opposed by Dr. Wallach, who worried that the school would emphasize theory over practical nursing, but Schwester Selma's curriculum proved him wrong. Examinations following the three-year course of study were administered by doctors from the British government hospital in Jerusalem. Schwester Selma taught all the practical nursing classes in the school's early years. She often welcomed staff and patients for a chat in her sparsely furnished room, where she poured them cups of mint tea.

Schwester Selma and Dr. Wallach adopted three girls who had been abandoned in the hospital. One was Samoohah Calderon, Numerous publications called her the "Jewish Florence Nightingale" for her decades of selfless devotion to patient welfare.

Schwester Selma once received a diamond ring from a Holocaust survivor whose sister had given her the valuable item before she was deported, saying, "If I do not return, give it to a human being who has never married and has devoted her life to helping other people". When the survivor read about Schwester Selma in the European press, she gave the ring to her.

Later life and death

Schwester Selma continued to work into her eighties. Even at that age, she did not consider it beneath her dignity to pick up trash from the floors, reminding her students that "there is nothing humiliating in our work". In 1973, while recuperating from a cataract operation, she dictated a short memoir, "Mein Leben und Erlebnisse im Shaare Zedek Spital" ("My Life and Experiences at 'Shaare Zedek'").

When the hospital moved to new and more modern headquarters in the Bayit Vegan neighborhood in 1980, Schwester Selma moved along with it. She died on Sunday, 5 February 1984, two days after her hundredth birthday – the same day a special tribute event had been planned in her honor at the hospital.