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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    being the only view. I shall never forget the rapture of fever patients over a bunch of bright-coloured flowers. I remember (in my own case) a nosegay of wild flowers being sent me, and from that moment recovery becoming more rapid. This is no People say the effect is only on the mind. It is no such thing. fancy. 'p|jg efiect is on the body, too. Little as we know about the way in which we are affected by form, by colour, and light, we do know this, that they have an actual physical eft'ect. Variety of form and brilliancy of colour in the objects presented to patients are actual means of recovery. But it m.ust be slow variety, e. g., if you shew a patient ten or twelve engravings successively, ten-to^one that he does not become cold and faint, or feverish, or even sick; but hang one up opposite him, one on each successive day, or week, or month, and he will revel in the variety. riowcTs. The folly and ignorance which reign too often supreme over the sick-room, cannot be better exemplified than by this. While the nurse will leave the patient stewing in a corrupting atmosphere, the best ingredient of which is carbonic acid; she vdll deny him, on the plea of unhealthiness, a glass of cut-flowers, or a growing plant. ISTow, no one ever saw overcrowding by plants in a room or ward. And the carbonic acid they give off at nights would not poison a fly. JS'ay, in overcrowded rooms, they actually absorb carbonic acid and give off oxygen. Cut-flowers also decompose water and produce oxygen gas. It is true there are certain flowers, e.g., lilies, the smell of which is said to depress the nervous system. These are easily known by the smell, and can be avoided. Enect of body Volumes are now written and spoken upon the effect of the mind on mind. upon the body. Much of it is true. But I wish a little more was thought of the effect of the body on the mind. You who believe yourselves overwhelmed with anxieties, but are able every day to walk up Eegent-street, or out in the country, to take your meals with others in other rooms, <S:c., &c., you little know how much your anxieties are thereby lightened ; you little know how intensified they become to those who can have no change ;* how the very walls of their sick rooms seem hung with their cares: how the ghosts of their troubles haunt their beds ; how impossible it is for them to escape from a pursuing thought without some help from variety. A patient can just as much move his leg when it is fractured as change his thoughts when no external help from variety is given him. This is, indeed, one of the main sufferings of sickness; just Sick suffer to * It is a matter of painful wonder to tLe sick themselves how much painful excess from ideas predominate over pleasurable ones in their impressions; they reason with mental as well themselves ; they think themselves ungrateful; it is all of no use. The fact is, as bodily pain, that these painful impressions are far better dismissed by a real laugh, if you can excite one by books or conversation, than by any direct reasoning; or if the patient is too weak to laugh, some impression from nature is what he wants. I have mentioned the cruelty of letting him stare at a dead wall. In many diseases, especially in convalescence from fever, that wall will appear to make all sorts of faces at him; now flowers never do this. Form, colour, will free your patient from his painful ideas better than any argimient.