Hospitals, dispensaries and nursing : papers and discussions in the International congress of charities, correction and philanthropy, section III, Chicago, June 12th to 17th, 1893 / ed. by John S. Billings, M.D., Henry M. Hurd, M.D.

  • International Congress of Charities, Correction, and Philanthropy (1893 : Chicago).
Date:
1894
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hospitals, dispensaries and nursing : papers and discussions in the International congress of charities, correction and philanthropy, section III, Chicago, June 12th to 17th, 1893 / ed. by John S. Billings, M.D., Henry M. Hurd, M.D. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    applied the following words taken from a physician's address dealing with the relation of the nurse's work to that of the physician : The hands of a nurse are the physician's hands lengthened out to minister to the sick. Her watchful presence at the bedside is a trained vigilance supplementing and perfecting his watchful care ; her knowl- edge of his patient's condition an essential element in the diagnosis of disease ; her management of the patient, the practical side of med- ical science. If she fails to appreciate her duties, the physician fails in the same degree to bring aid to his patient. In district nursing we are confronted with conditions which require the highest order of work, but the actual nursing of the patient is the least part of what her work and influence should be among the class which the nurse will meet with. To this branch of nursing no more appropriate name can be given than instructive nursing, for educational in the best sense of the word it should be. Realizing, then, the kind and quality of the work to be done, we pass on to the consideration of the order of woman required to perform such duties, and those of us who have had much experience with nurses, and know all we would have them to be, and how much they really must be, as* the various classes of women pass in review before our mental vision, will be inclined to agree with the writer of a letter which came to me a short time since. After asking me to recommend a head-nurse for a hospital, and enumerating at length the qualities she must possess to be successful, he concluded with the words, In short, we require an intelligent saint. The idea still prevails in many minds that almost any kind of a woman will do to nurse the sick, and that the woman who has made a failure of life in every other particular may as a last resource undertake this work. After many years of continuous work among patients and nurses, I am convinced that a woman, to become a trained nurse, should have exceptional qualifications. She must be strong mentally, morally, and physically, and to do thorough work she must have infinite tact, which is another name for common sense. She should be as one of the women of the Queen's Gardens in Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies, or such an one as Olive Schriner describes when she says, A woman who does woman's work needs a many-sided, multiform culture; the heights and depths of human life must not be beyond her vision; she must have knowledge of men and things in many states, a wide catholicity of sympathy, the strength that springs from knowledge and the magnanimity that