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Good for Harriet and her academic achievement! Except in those days and for another couple of generations thereafter I think nurses had to wear uncomfortable uniforms and stand whenever a doctor entered the room. Nowadays Harriet might have been trained as a physician like her brothers.

And of our woman in print, Bessie Cushing, and her phone number. Were New Ipswich phones also on the Greenville exchange? Our number as 151-2. A party line. Private lines we assumed were reserved for businesses or the wealthy. I seem to remember a bank of telephone operators in Greenville sitting at a switch board. Was this on a second floor on the main drag? Above Mr. Crisafulli’s shoe store? Why do I remember this anyway? Was a troop of Girl Scouts brought there on a field trip?

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I paid my way through college working as an on-call emergency lab tech at the Lemuel Shattuck Hospital (named after a New Ipswich farm boy who started the first dept of health in the US in the 1800s) in Jamaica Plain Mass. Mass General Hospital RN graduates were considered an elite group of nurses. I can attest that they were very good. BTW, there are Shattuck graves in New Ipswich, but Lemuel is buried in Auburn Mass because that's where his wife is from. With regard to phone numbefs, Highbridge was on the Greenville exchange, we werre 57-12.

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The Greenville Phone Co. might have been on Main Street. I remember the phone company building somewhere between Main and Berniers Oil

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Harriet's parents Deacon John C. and Harriet I belive lived in what is now the home of Olliver Niemi. Harriet's brother John L. lived in the house across the Smithville Bridge that was Dick Martin's house.

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You are correct. Ollie's house was a popular place. Ed Wheeler's daughter Mabel had her wedding there, she married Leon Livingston, who I think was grand uncle to our friend John.

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Actually, Harriet could have attended (if she had wanted to) the Boston University School of Medicine which had taken over the New England Female Medical College in Boston co-founded by Samuel Gregory and Lemuel Shattuck who was also president of that institution in the early 1850s. Lemuel lost 2 young daughters to disease, Rebecca and Frances. I suspect this had a lot to do with his interest in public health. On the issue of nurses vs doctors, I respect them both. I have witnessed occasions when a nurse disagreed with the doctor in assessing the patient's condition and thus saving that patient's life. Usually, a young doctor working with an experienced nurse.

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