Lately, there has been a degree of politeness in the elevators here in the TIME & LIFE Building that would be considered extraordinary anywhere. Practically everyone has had a sore arm or a sore leg--the result of vaccination for smallpox--and an understandable desire to protect them from sudden onslaught.

Like some 6,000,000 other New Yorkers, the staff of TIME Inc. underwent this mass vaccination during the recent threatened smallpox epidemic. There were no serious casualties, although the TIME & LIFE Medical Department--assisted by a private physician and serum from the Willard Parker laboratories--put in a grueling week vaccinating about 1,000 of us.

Normally, Nurse Dorothy Ryerson's department treats us, at some time or another, for most of the ailments common to office workers everywhere and for those peculiar to an organization like TIME. The common cold, of course, is our greatest foe, and the medical department gives out about 600 sets of cold tablets a month. Miss Ryerson is constantly removing bits of Manhattan from our eyes, fixing people who get hit on the head by file drawers, patching up the bruised elbows of those who tilt their chairs back too far, mending fingers that get caught in doors and stapling machines.

She is also just about the last person in TIME Inc. to see the overseas correspondent before he takes off, and the first to greet him on his return. Having arranged for the multitude of shots required by foreign service, she is likely to hear from correspondents or photographers, wherever they go, requesting this or that drug, a favorite prescription, some needed advice. Not long ago a photographer in a remote part of China cabled frantically for a rush order of medication for his wife, who was momentarily expecting a child.

On the home front also Miss Ryerson is usually the first to learn of coming events--generally by telephone from expectant mothers who want to know "what the doctor meant" when he said so-and-so. She is also invaluable in cases of emergency when some of us are unable to reach the family physician immediately. During the war she became accustomed to all sorts of emergencies, including this one: someone telephoned from his office and asked to see her at once on an important matter. When he arrived, he asked to be shown how to make a hospital bed. It seemed that his wife had missed her first-aid lesson that day and had called on him for help.

TIME researchers also occasionally turn to Miss Ryerson for emergency help in verifying the medical details of news stories. What she doesn't know, she can, of course, find out--sometimes with engaging results. Asked one day what items went into an emergency kit for snake bite, she called a herpetologist at the Bronx Zoo to make sure. The excited zooman refused to tell her a thing until she told him what kind of poisonous reptile had bitten her.

From long experience, Miss Ryerson maintains that she can recognize almost any TIME employee by looking at his throat. Her work, of course, is mainly preventive medicine and, although she says that TIME'S employees are an extraordinarily healthy lot, the records kept by her staff have proved very useful to doctors needing accurate information about someone's health history. This kind of care occasionally has other ramifications. A husband happened to drop in with his wife, who had a blister on her heel. While examining the blister, Miss Ryerson glanced at the husband and, in a way that nurses have, reached for a thermometer and stuck it in his mouth. The upshot of it was that the innocent husband, like any TIMEman, went home with a pocket full of cold pills and instructions to go to bed.

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