Notes on nursing : what it is, and what it is not.

  • Nightingale, Florence, 1820-1910.
Date:
1859
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Notes on nursing : what it is, and what it is not. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material is part of the Elmer Belt Florence Nightingale collection. The original may be consulted at University of California Libraries.

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    If a patient is cold, if a patient is feverisli, if a patient is faint, if lie is sick after taking food, if he has a bed-sore, it is generally the fault not of the disease, but of the nursing. What nursing I use the word nursing for want of a better. It has been limited to ought to do. signify little more than the administration of medicines and the application of poultices. It ought to signify the proper use of fresh air, light, warmth, cleanliness, quiet, and the proper selection and administration of diet—all at the least expense of vital power to the patient. Kursing the It has been said and written scores of times, that every woman Bick little makes a good nurse. I believe, on the contrary, that the very understood, elements of nursing are all but unknown. By this I do not mean that the nurse is always to blame. Bad sanitary, bad architectural, and bad administrative arrangements often make it impossible to nurse. But the art of nursing ought to include such arrangements as alone make what I understand by nursing, possible. The art of nursing, as now practised, seems to be expressly constituted to unmake what Grod had made disease to be, viz., a reparative process. ZSTursing ought To recur to the first objection. If we are asked. Is such or to assist the such a disease a reparative process ? Can such an illness be unac- reparative companied with sutferino^ ? Will any care prevent such a patient ^ ■ from suffering this or that ?—I humbly say, I do not know. But when you have done away with all that pain and suffering, which in patients are the symptoms not of their disease, but of the absence of one or all of the above-mentioned essentials to the success of Nature's reparative processes, we shall then know what are the symptoms of and the sufferings inseparable from the disease. Another and the commonest exclamation which will be instantly made is—Would you do nothing, then, in cholera, fever, &c. ?—so deep-rooted and universal is the conviction that to give medicine is to be doing something, or rather everything; to give air, warmth, cleanliness, &c., is to do nothing. The reply is, that in these and many other similar diseases the exact value of particular remedies and modes of treatment is by no means ascertained, while there is universal experience as to the extreme importance of careful nursing in determining the issue of the disease. Nursing the II. The very elements of what constitutes good nursing are as ^®^^- little understood for the well as for the sick. The same laws of health or of nursing, for they are in reality the same, obtain among the well as among the sick. The breaking of them produces only a less violent consequence among the former than among the latter,— and this sometimes, not always. It is constantly objected,—But how can I obtain this medical knowledge ? I am not a doctor. I must leave this to doctors. }f^^]^ ^^^^^ ^^j mothers of famihes! You who say this, do you know that one in every seven infants in this civilized land of England perishes before it is one year old ? That, in London, two in every five die before they are five years old ? And, in the other great cities of stood.