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.

    11/88 (page 7)
    England, nearly one out of two?* The life duration of tender babies (as some Saturn, turned analytical chemist, says) is the most delicate test of sanitary conditions. Is all this premature suffering and death necessary ? Or did Nature intend mothers to be always accompanied by doctors ? Or is it better to learn the piano-forte than to learn the laws which subserve the preservation of offspring ? Macaulay somewhere says, that it is extraordinary that, whereas the laws of the motions of the heavenly bodies, far removed as they are from us, are perfectly well understood, the laws of the human mind, which are under our observation all day and every day, are no better understood than they were two thousand years ago. But how much more extraordinary is it that, whereas what we might call the coxcombries of education—e.g., the elements of astro- nomy—are now taught to every school-girl, neither mothers of families of any class, nor school-mistresses of any class, nor nurses of children, nor nurses of hospitals, are taught anything about those laws which God has assigned to the relations of our bodies with the world in which He has put them. In other Avords, the laws which make these bodies, into which He has put our minds, healthy or un- healthy organs of those minds, are all but unlearnt. Not but that these laws—the laws of life—are in a certain measure understood, but not even mothers think it worth their while to study them— to study how to give their children healthy existences. They call it medical or physiological knowledge, fit only for doctors. Another objection. We are constantly told,— But tlie circumstances which govern our children's healths are beyond our control. AVhat can we do with winds ? There is the east wind. Most people can tell before they get up in the morning whether the wind is in the east. ♦ Upon this fact the most wonderful deductions have been strung. For a Curious deduc- long time an announcement something like the following has been going the tions from an round of the papers:— More than 25,000 children die ever)'year in London excessive under 10 years of age; therefore we Avant a Children's Hospital. This spring death rate, there was a prospectus issued, and divers other means taken to this effect:— *' There is a great want of sanitary knowledge in women; therefore we want a Women's Hospital. Now, both the above facts are too sadly true. But what is the deduction] The causes of the enormous child mortality are peifectly well known; they are chiefly want of cleanliness, want of ventilation, want of white- washing; in one word, defective household hygiene. The remedies are just as well known: and among them is certainly not the establishment of a Child's Hospital. This may be a want; just as there may be a want of hospital room for adults. But the Registrar-General would certainly never think of giving us aa a cause for the high rate of child mortality in (say) Liverpool that there was not sufficient hospital room for children; nor would he urge upon us, as a remedy, to found a hospital for them. Again, women, and the best women, are wofully deficient in sanitary know- ledge; although it is to women that we must look, first and last, for its appli- cation, as far as honaihold hygiene is conc-erned. But who wouUl ever think of citini,' the institution of a Women's Hospital as the way to cure this want I We have it, indeed, upon very high authority that there is some fear lest hospitals, as they have been h{(herto,\n&y not have generally increased^ rather than diminiahed, the rate of mortality—especially of child mortality.