Notes on Nursing | Page 2

and the
application of poultices. It ought to signify the proper use of fresh air,
light, warmth, cleanliness, quiet, and the proper selection and
administration of diet--all at the least expense of vital power to the
patient.
[Sidenote: Nursing the sick little understood.]
It has been said and written scores of times, that every woman makes a
good nurse. I believe, on the contrary, that the very elements of nursing
are all but unknown.
By this I do not mean that the nurse is always to blame. Bad sanitary,
bad architectural, and bad administrative arrangements often make it

impossible to nurse.
But the art of nursing ought to include such arrangements as alone
make what I understand by nursing, possible.
The art of nursing, as now practised, seems to be expressly constituted
to unmake what God had made disease to be, viz., a reparative process.
[Sidenote: Nursing ought to assist the reparative process.]
To recur to the first objection. If we are asked, Is such or such a disease
a reparative process? Can such an illness be unaccompanied with
suffering? Will any care prevent such a patient from suffering this or
that?--I humbly say, I do not know. But when you have done away with
all that pain and suffering, which in patients are the symptoms not of
their disease, but of the absence of one or all of the above-mentioned
essentials to the success of Nature's reparative processes, we shall then
know what are the symptoms of and the sufferings inseparable from the
disease.
Another and the commonest exclamation which will be instantly made
is-- Would you do nothing, then, in cholera, fever, &c.?--so
deep-rooted and universal is the conviction that to give medicine is to
be doing something, or rather everything; to give air, warmth,
cleanliness, &c., is to do nothing. The reply is, that in these and many
other similar diseases the exact value of particular remedies and modes
of treatment is by no means ascertained, while there is universal
experience as to the extreme importance of careful nursing in
determining the issue of the disease.
[Sidenote: Nursing the well.]
II. The very elements of what constitutes good nursing are as little
understood for the well as for the sick. The same laws of health or of
nursing, for they are in reality the same, obtain among the well as
among the sick. The breaking of them produces only a less violent
consequence among the former than among the latter,--and this
sometimes, not always.
It is constantly objected,--"But how can I obtain this medical
knowledge? I am not a doctor. I must leave this to doctors."
[Sidenote: Little understood.]
Oh, mothers of families! You who say this, do you know that one in
every seven infants in this civilized land of England perishes before it
is one year old? That, in London, two in every five die before they are

five years old? And, in the other great cities of England, nearly one out
of two?[1] "The life duration of tender babies" (as some Saturn, turned
analytical chemist, says) "is the most delicate test" of sanitary
conditions. Is all this premature suffering and death necessary? Or did
Nature intend mothers to be always accompanied by doctors? Or is it
better to learn the piano-forte than to learn the laws which subserve the
preservation of offspring?
Macaulay somewhere says, that it is extraordinary that, whereas the
laws of the motions of the heavenly bodies, far removed as they are
from us, are perfectly well understood, the laws of the human mind,
which are under our observation all day and every day, are no better
understood than they were two thousand years ago.
But how much more extraordinary is it that, whereas what we might
call the coxcombries of education--_e.g._, the elements of
astronomy--are now taught to every school-girl, neither mothers of
families of any class, nor school-mistresses of any class, nor nurses of
children, nor nurses of hospitals, are taught anything about those laws
which God has assigned to the relations of our bodies with the world in
which He has put them. In other words, the laws which make these
bodies, into which He has put our minds, healthy or unhealthy organs
of those minds, are all but unlearnt. Not but that these laws--the laws of
life--are in a certain measure understood, but not even mothers think it
worth their while to study them--to study how to give their children
healthy existences. They call it medical or physiological knowledge, fit
only for doctors.
Another objection.
We are constantly told,--"But the circumstances which govern our
children's healths are beyond our control. What can we do with winds?
There is the east wind. Most people can tell before they get up in the
morning whether the wind is in the east."