Lectures on nursing / by William Robert Smith.

  • Smith, William Robert, 1850-1932.
Date:
1875
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Lectures on nursing / by William Robert Smith. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    nursing. There is the honest pleasure of having done your duty; and this will be in proportion to the difficulties encountered. Then, what greater joy and satisfaction can you have, than the assurance which you will frequently receive from the doctor, that you really have been the means of saving a person’s life; that to good nursing, and not to medicine, he is in- debted for his restoration to health and strength. Again, amongst all the changes which have taken place in our midst during the past thirty years, none is more remarkable than the great desire which exists now for systematic and trained nursing. The world, especially the medical world, seems to have awakened to a sense of its great importance. A few years since, nursing in our hospitals meant nothing more than the attendance which a few old women could give in a rough and ready manner between floor scrubbing and laundry work. How different it is to-day! Since Miss Nightingale first startled this country with the idea that a woman of education and gentle birth c$>uld leave a home of luxury and ease to staunch the bleeding, and moisten the fevered lips of those wounded in war, we have had no lack of ladies— ladies both by birth and station—willing to give up all for such a noble cause. Did not “Agnes Jones,” think you, my friends, independently of the position she occupied as Lady Superintendent of such an impor- tant institution as the Liverpool workhouse, find a rich reward for all her self-denial in the love which