Suggestions on a system of nursing for hospitals in India / [Florence Nightingale].

  • Nightingale, Florence, 1820-1910.
Date:
[1865]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Suggestions on a system of nursing for hospitals in India / [Florence Nightingale]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    SUGGESTIONS. 1. The evidence obtained by the Royal Commission on the Sanitary State of the Indian Army and the information contained in the Minute No. 151 of the Sanitary Commission for Bengal show that the systematic introduction of female nursing into Civil, Military General, and Regimental Female Hospitals would be of great service for the sick in India. 2. The evidence shows that the class of women hitherto employed in this work has been of a comparatively humble character, and without due training, while the nursing has been at the same time highly appreciated by the sick. 3. The desirableness of introducing an organized system of nursing is certainly un¬ doubted, and it cannot but excite great satisfaction that the Governor-General in Council has decided that this improvement shall take place. 4. At the beginning of so important a measure, it is to be feared that nothing but difficulties have to be encountered. But there is no reason why these should not be eventually overcome. It is necessary to state this at the commencement, lest any apparent want of success at first should lead to discontinuance of effort. 5. So far as can be seen the difficulties in India will be of the same kind as, but greater in degree, than those we have had to encounter at home. We have had to introduce an entirely new system, to which the older systems of nursing bear but slight resemblance. Our constant feeling has been that the need is universal and that our means are limited, mainly because the study and practice of nursing as a profession, second only in importance to medicine itself, dates only a few years back in England. It exists neither in Scotland nor in Ireland at the present time. And we, out of our limited means, have to supply a trained Nurse or Matron here and there, in the hope that each may become a centre of improvement, however small, until the growing conviction of the importance of the vast field of usefulness which we have opened for women shall supply us with agents sufficient in number and of such character as will enable us to meet the all but overwhelming demands for help which we receive from all quarters. 6. It will be seen that our means of assisting India directly are at present very limited ; and yet we are most anxious to send some seed. Good nursing does not grow of itself; it is the result of study, teaching, training, practice, ending in sound tradition which can be transferred elsewhere. 7. The great difficulty to begin with is obtaining suitable material for.training. Even in England, where there is such a constant outcry of want of women’s work, com¬ paratively few apply even as candidates for instruction, although we pay all the costs of training, including payments in the name of wages to Probationers. Of those admitted for training, a proportion are found on trial to be unfit. But all our Nurses, to whom we grant certificates, are taken up at once by different Institutions. [We have just sent twelve and a Matron to Liverpool, and are besides training nineteen for Manchester.] And every woman at all competent is at once appointed Matron to a Hospital. It is necessary that at the very beginning the difficulties which have to be met in organizing a system of nursing for India should be known. It is taken for granted that the difficulties in India, to say the very least of it, will not be fewer than ours at home. 8. Supposing, for the sake of argument, that you have the means of training, viz., a capable Matron, Medical Officers willing to help, and suitable material, probably you could not do better than frame your procedure upon a model which has hitherto been found to answer very well, viz., the Rules for admission and training Nurses at St.