Notes on hospitals / by Florence Nightingale.

  • Nightingale, Florence, 1820-1910.
Date:
1863
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Notes on hospitals / by Florence Nightingale. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    blished. The administration complains of the sisters^ and the doctors wish the sisters were completely under them. The sisters complain of the administration, and wish that the order had it completely under itself. And all are the best possible friends, and the collision and com- petition does the greatest possible good. And all work much better for it, and none know how much evil it prevents, how much good it secures. But in giving this unqualified opinion in favour of nursing by sister- hoods, provided the administration be secular, I must add a caution against two mistakes, whether committed in France or in England, in Roman Catholic or in Protestant institutions, viz. (i.) the female head of the sisters must reside in the institution nursed by them, and neither in a nurses' home, or Maison Mere, not the hospital, nor in a home where other works of charity, not hospital ones, are carried on. If she has other works of charity which appear to her more important, then she had better not undertake hospital ones. Hospital nursing is jealous, and demands her whole heart. It will not have a divided allegiance. It will not be too much of her whole life to gather experience and learn to govern such institutions. If she has several hospitals, as the Augiis- tinians of Paris, the female head must live where the novices, or pro- bationers, or whatever they are called, are trained. She must be at once matron of the hospital, which means of the nursing in it, and super- intendent of the nurses. It will not do for her to head the nurses or probationers in their home, and to leave the heading of them in the hospital to a matron, or other superior. (2.) The sisters must not be the heads of wards merely in order to use ' moral influence,' as the inexperienced sometimes fancy will be sufficient. If a lady has, in addition, the same knowledge and experience as an old-fashioned hospital head nurse, which indeed many nuns, but only in secularly governed hospitals, have, good; she is fit to be sister or head nurse; if not, not. No. 3, where the nurses are secular under their own secular female head, the hospital having its own separate and secular government— is, unquestionably, the system which secures the best nursing, after No. T. Out of the other systems of nursing, Nos. 2, 4, and 5, in each of which there is but one sole authority, although in No. 2 a religious one, in Nos. 4 and 5 a secular one, over both nurses and administration, are equally to be deprecated— Nos. 4 and 5, because the nurses, whether male or female, are under the sole command of the male hospital authorities; in this case the arrangements as to hours, proprieties, and sanitary rules generally, would strike any one as all but crazy. Such are the rules which give nurses twenty-four hours on duty in a ward—or which put them to sleep