Notes on nursing for the labouring classes / by Florence Nightingale.

  • Florence Nightingale
Date:
1868
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Notes on nursing for the labouring classes / by Florence Nightingale. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    which they « used to like themselves, and then give it to all their ti lends and to all their poorer neighbours who will take it. Now instead of giving medicine, of which yon cannot possibly know the exact and proper application, nor all its consequences, would it not be better if you were to persuade and help your poorer neighbours to remove the dunghill from before the door, to put in a window which opens, or an Amott's ventilator, or to drain cleanse, and lime-wash their cottages? Of these tilings the benefits are sure. The benefits of the inexperienced administra- tion or medicines are by no means so sure. An almost universal error amongst women is the supposition that everybody must have the bowels opened once in every twenty- four hours, or must fly immediately to aperients. The reverse is the conclusion of experience. This is a doctor's subject, and I will not enter more into it- but will simply repeat, do not go on taking or giving to your children your abominable courses of aperients, without calling in the doctor. It is very seldom indeed that, by choosing your diet, you cannot regulate your own bowels; and every woman may watch herself to know what kind of diet will do this; deficiency of meat produces constipation, quite as often as deficiency of vegetables ; baker's bread much oftener than either. Home-made brown bread will oftener cure it than anything else. A really experienced and observing nurse neither physics herself nor others. And to cultivate in things pertaining to health observation and experience in women who are mothers, governesses, or nurses, is just the way to do away with amateur physicking, and, if the doctors did but know it, to make the nurses obedient to them,—helps to them instead of hindrances. Such education in women would indeed diminish the doctor's work- but no one really believes that doctors wish that there should be more illness, in order to have more work. (2.) Nothing but observation and experience will teach us the ways to maintain or to bring back the state of health. It is often thought that medicine is the curative process. It is no such thing; medicine is the surgery of functions, as surgery proper is that of limbs and organs. Neither can do anything but remove obstructions; neither can cure; nature alone cures. Surgery re- moves the bullet out of the limb, which is an obstruction to cure, but nature heals the wound. So it is with medicine; the function
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