Produced by Carol David and PG Distributed Proofreaders
NEW YORK:D. APPLETON AND COMPANY72 FIFTH AVENUE1898.
The following notes are by no means intended as a rule of thought bywhich nurses can teach themselves to nurse, still less as a manual toteach nurses to nurse. They are meant simply to give hints for thoughtto women who have personal charge of the health of others. Every woman,or at least almost every woman, in England has, at one time or anotherof her life, charge of the personal health of somebody, whether child orinvalid,—in other words, every woman is a nurse. Every day sanitaryknowledge, or the knowledge of nursing, or in other words, of how to putthe constitution in such a state as that it will have no disease, orthat it can recover from disease, takes a higher place. It is recognizedas the knowledge which every one ought to have—distinct from medicalknowledge, which only a profession can have.
If, then, every woman must at some time or other of her life, become anurse, i.e., have charge of somebody's health, how immense and howvaluable would be the produce of her united experience if every womanwould think how to nurse.
I do not pretend to teach her how, I ask her to teach herself, and forthis purpose I venture to give her some hints.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Disease a reparative process.]
Shall we begin by taking it as a general principle—that all disease, atsome period or other of its course, is more or less a reparativeprocess, not necessarily accompanied with suffering: an effort ofnature to remedy a process of poisoning or of decay, which has takenplace weeks, months, sometimes years beforehand, unnoticed, thetermination of the disease being then, while the antecedent process wasgoing on, determined?
If we accept this as a general principle, we shall be immediately metwith anecdotes and instances to prove the contrary. Just so if we wereto take, as a principle—all the climates of the earth are meant to bemade habitable for man, by the efforts of man—the objection would beimmediately raised,—Will the top of Mount Blanc ever be made habitable?Our answer would be, it will be many thousands of years before we havereached the bottom of Mount Blanc in making the earth healthy. Wait tillwe have reached the bottom before we discuss the top.
[Sidenote: Of the sufferings of disease, disease not always the cause.]
In watching diseases, both in private houses and in public hospitals,the thing which strikes the experienced observer most forcibly is this,that the symptoms or the sufferings generally considered to beinevitable and incident to the disease are very often not symptoms ofthe disease at all, but of something quite different—of the want offresh air, or of light, or of warmth, or of quiet, or of cleanliness, orof punctuality and care in the administration of diet, of each or of allof these. And this quite as much in private as in h