Nursing sisterhoods, and hospital schools for nurses / by P.C. De La Garde.

  • De La Garde, Philip Chilwell, 1797-1871.
Date:
1867
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Nursing sisterhoods, and hospital schools for nurses / by P.C. De La Garde. 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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    0 As educated women are clearly contemplated, how will the scheme work ? Are they to be lady doctors, under another name ? or will they criticise, and control, and counteract without responsibility \ Will the medical man become a mere ceremony; a convenience, hired reluctantly, to take the blame, if any ; just as the regular practitioner is sent for, when a case grows too perilous for the reputa- tion of the quack ? -Rely upon it nothing of the kind is thought of; but to that it will come. Gentlemen, do not infer that I am repressive of im- provement, but the painfully menial services, the direct personal assistance, which it is a nurse’s bounden duty to render, without flinching, to the helpless and infirm, would be most unseemly if undertaken by a young gentle- woman, fresh from the tutelage of the schoolroom and the nursery, and reared in the most scrupulous abstraction from whatever is equivocal or indelicate. My own idea of society is, a great collection of all sorts of people, each one contributing his own peculiar quality for the common weal. If the intelligent or the refined, the laborious or the humble, be absent, society is incom- plete ; and if any section affects the actual business of another, it will furnish but sorry substitutes. This does not forbid an earnest striving to excel in one’s own proper duties—without which indeed all would stagnate ; but whoever aims at a position other than his own, should be conscious and sure of powers which are irrepressible. Now there is an old book, and in it a quaint passage which we all learnt when children, though some seem to think it becoming to have forgotten it; so I would suggest to the vain and restless of both sexes and all ranks, that they should be content “ to do their duty in that state of life to which it has pleased God to call them.”