Training as a Hospital Assistant

We had basic training the first month and then I was sent off to St. Thomas, Ontario where there was a big hospital. It had been built by Mitch Hepburn’s government as a mental hospital and when the war came along the federal government took it over to make it a technical training school. Now my training consisted of on-the-job training. Here is how you bath a patient, this is how you take temperatures. We had contact training. I never did have a full course and the trade was at that time called a hospital assistant, which is a forerunner to the registered nursing assistants. We didn’t give medications, but we did the bed care and the temperatures, passed out the meals and made the beds and that sort of thing.