Notes on nursing : what it is, and what it is not.

  • Nightingale, Florence, 1820-1910.
Date:
1860
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Notes on nursing : what it is, and what it is not. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material is part of the Elmer Belt Florence Nightingale collection. The original may be consulted at University of California Libraries.

    15/156 (page 9)
    But the art of nursing ought to include such arrange- ments as alone make what I understand by nursing, pos- sible. The art of nursing, as now practised, seems to be ex- pressly constituted to unmake what God had made disease to be, viz., a reparative process. To recur to the first objection. If we are asked. Is Nursing •^ ^ ' ought to as- Buch or such a disease a reparative process ? Can such ^ist the re- parative pro- an illness be unaccompanied with suffering? Will any cess. 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 pa- tients are the symptoms not of their disease, but of the ab- sence 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 insep- arable 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 some- thing, or rather everything; to give air, warmth, clean- liness, &c., is to do nothing. The reply is, that in these and many other similar diseases the exact value of par- ticular 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. II. The very elements of what constitutes good nurs- Nursing the ing are as little understood for the well as for the sick. The same laws of health or of nursing, for they are in re- ality the same, obtain among the well as among the sick. The breaking of them produces only a less violent conse- 1*