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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    greater impairer of the digestion. Let the patient's taste decide. YoLi will say that, in cases of great thirst, the patient's craving decides that it will drink a cjreat deal of tea, and that you cannot help it. ^ Bat in these cases be sure that the patient requires diluents for quite other purposes than quenching the thirst; he wants a great deal of some drink, not only of tea, and the doctor will order what he is to have, barley water or lemonade, or soda water and milk, as the case may be. Lehmann, quoted by Dr. Christison, says that, among the well and active the infusion of 1 oz. of roasted^coffee daily will diminish the waste going on in the body by one-fourth, and^Dr. Christison adds that tea has the same property. Now this is actual experiment. Lehmann weighs the man and finds the fact from his weight. It is not deduced from any analysis of food. All experience among the sick shows the same thing.* ^^^^^' Cocoa is often recommended to the sick in lieu of tea or coffee. But independently of the fact that English sick very generally dislike cocoa, it has quite a difterent eifect from tea or coffee. It is an oily starchy nut having no restorative power at all, but simply increasing fat. It is pure mockery of the sick, therefore, to call it a substitute for tea. Por any renovating stimulus it has, you might just as well ofter them chesnuts instead of tea. •^^'^' An almost universal error among nurses is in the bulk of the food and especially the drinks they ofter to their patients Suppose a patient ordered 4 oz. brandy duriiig the day, how is he to take this if you make it into four pints'with diluting it ? The same with tea and beef tea, with arrowroot, milk, &c. Tou have not increased the nourishment, you have not increased the renovating power of these articles, by increasing their bulk,—you have very likely diminished both by giving the patient's digestion more to do, and most likely of all, the patient will leave half of what he has been ordered to take, because he cannot swallow the bulk with which you have been pleased to invest it. It requires very nice observation and care (and meets with hardly any) to determine what will not be too thick or strong for^ the patient to take, while giving him no more than the bulk which he is able to swallow. * In making coffee, it is absolutely necessary to buy it in the berry and grind it at home. Otherwise you may reckon upon its containing a certain amount of chicor}', at least. This is not a question of the taste or of the wholesomeness of chicory. It is that chicory has nothing at all of the properties for which you give coffee. And therefore you may as well not give it. Again, all laundresses, mistresses of dairy-farms, head nurses (I speak of the good old sort only—women who unite a good deal of hard manual labour with the head-work necessary for arranging the day's business, so that none of it shall tread upon the heels of something else) set great value, I have observed, upon having a high-priced tea. This is called extravagant. But these women are extravagant in nothing else. And they are right in this. Real tea-leaf tea alone contains the restorative they want; which is not to be found in sloe-leaf tea. The mistresses of houses, who cannot even go over their own house once a-day, are incapable of judging for these women. For they are incapable them- selves, to all appearance, of the spirit of arrangement (no small task) necessarj- for managing a large ward or dairy.