The present crisis at Guy's Hospital.

  • Lonsdale, Margaret
Date:
1880
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The present crisis at Guy's Hospital. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    acquaintance with hospital work being that they must study the character and special requirements and fancies of the particular medical man or surgeon under whom they were placed, with a view of gaining his approbation by every means in their power. The day nurses were seldom if ever allowed to be absent from the ward when the medical officer came his rounds ; therefore the only time at which they could obtain air and exercise was after nightfall, when the visits of the medical staff were over and their day's work was ended. Their meals, sometimes with the single exception of dinner, were taken in the kitchen or day-room of the ward. In the evening, by arrange- ment with the matron, who was a kind of upper servant or housekeeper, the lower order of nurse, or scrubber, was left in charge of the patients, while the old-fashioned head nurse went out to take her hardly earned holiday, too often, alas! in the nearest public-house. She came back at the regulation hour, more or less the worse for drink as the case might be, and went to bed to sleep off the effects of it; no inquiry was made into her condition, since it was nobody's business, as long as she satisfied the medical men by the work which came under their notice, to ask how her hours off duty were spent, or what her own moral condition might be. I am far from saying that every nurse under the old system was drunken or dissolute, but I do say that, as a ride, their moral character was unsatisfactory, and that the long hours of work, with no regular interval allowed during the daytime for proper air and exercise, together with the practice of eating their food in the impure air of the wards, render the supporters of the old system largely responsible for the low moral as well as physical condition of the nurses who work under it. It is obvious that in an article like the present, details of nursing would be out of place. It ought, however, to be equally obvious, without going into details, that a woman untrained, undisciplined, and overworked, such as I have described, however intelligent she may naturally be, is not in any sense of the word fit to be called a nurse. So much for day nurses under the old system. A few words about night nurses must be added. These were even more hardly dealt with in the matter of long horns and work than the day nurses, and they accordingly revenged themselves upon the authorities by sleeping whenever they were pretty safe from the chance of a visit from the house doctors to the ward, regardless of the wants and dangers .of their patients, of whose pillows and blankets they often made free use for their own convenience and comfort. A medical man told me that when he was a student at St. Bartholomew's, a patient who had only had on six leeches was left, in consequence of this practice of the niobt nurses, to bleed to death. At certainly one large hospital, probably at others, no food whatever was allowed for the nurse's use during the night. She was fed during the day, and was supposed to be able to provide her own provisions for the night out of her email
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