'In addition to being able to ensure that a dog was not emotionally disturbed by its surroundings, nurses were to be capable of assuaging the anxieties oftheir human clients... Such abilities were more than projections of MacRae Frost’s or Collins’s imaginations. Eminent dramatist George Robert Sims, as sketch columnist for the sports weekly the Referee, related in January 1913 how his “little dog Flash” had contracted an illness in the run-up to Christmas, turning the season into “a very anxious one” for a while. Though the services of “the greatest dog doctor in the world,” Alfred Sewell, had been procured, prior commitments meant that a canine nurse had to be sent for. Decorations were put up without much enthusiasm until, thanks to the “splendid nursing” and “charming and romantic personality” of one Marion E. Shaw, “who for ten days and nights hardly left the sufferer’s side,” “the shadow of a domestic tragedy” was lifted from the writer’s home. [note: '[George Robert Simms], “Mustard and Cress: Canine Nurses’ Institute,” Referee, 5 January 1913, 13.']' (302-303)