Notes on Nursing

Notes on Nursing - What It Is,
and What It Is Not

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Title: Notes on Nursing What It Is, and What It Is Not
Author: Florence Nightingale
Release Date: May 26, 2004 [EBook #12439]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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NOTES ON NURSING:
WHAT IT IS, AND WHAT IT IS NOT.
BY FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
1898.

PREFACE.
The following notes are by no means intended as a rule of thought by
which nurses can teach themselves to nurse, still less as a manual to
teach nurses to nurse. They are meant simply to give hints for thought

to 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
another of her life, charge of the personal health of somebody, whether
child or invalid,--in other words, every woman is a nurse. Every day
sanitary knowledge, or the knowledge of nursing, or in other words, of
how to put the constitution in such a state as that it will have no disease,
or that it can recover from disease, takes a higher place. It is recognized
as the knowledge which every one ought to have--distinct from medical
knowledge, which only a profession can have.
If, then, every woman must at some time or other of her life, become a
nurse, _i.e._, have charge of somebody's health, how immense and how
valuable would be the produce of her united experience if every woman
would think how to nurse.
I do not pretend to teach her how, I ask her to teach herself, and for this
purpose I venture to give her some hints.

TABLE OF CONTENTS.
VENTILATION AND WARMING HEALTH OF HOUSES PETTY
MANAGEMENT NOISE VARIETY TAKING FOOD WHAT FOOD?
BED AND BEDDING LIGHT CLEANLINESS OF ROOMS AND
WALLS PERSONAL CLEANLINESS CHATTERING HOPES AND
ADVICES OBSERVATION OF THE SICK CONCLUSION
APPENDIX

NOTES ON NURSING:
WHAT IT IS, AND WHAT IT IS NOT.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Disease a reparative process.]
Shall we begin by taking it as a general principle--that all disease, at
some period or other of its course, is more or less a reparative process,
not necessarily accompanied with suffering: an effort of nature to
remedy a process of poisoning or of decay, which has taken place
weeks, months, sometimes years beforehand, unnoticed, the
termination of the disease being then, while the antecedent process was
going on, determined?
If we accept this as a general principle, we shall be immediately met

with anecdotes and instances to prove the contrary. Just so if we were
to take, as a principle--all the climates of the earth are meant to be
made habitable for man, by the efforts of man--the objection would be
immediately raised,--Will the top of Mount Blanc ever be made
habitable? Our answer would be, it will be many thousands of years
before we have reached the bottom of Mount Blanc in making the earth
healthy. Wait till we 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 be inevitable
and incident to the disease are very often not symptoms of the disease
at all, but of something quite different--of the want of fresh air, or of
light, or of warmth, or of quiet, or of cleanliness, or of punctuality and
care in the administration of diet, of each or of all of these. And this
quite as much in private as in hospital nursing.
The reparative process which Nature has instituted and which we call
disease, has been hindered by some want of knowledge or attention, in
one or in all of these things, and pain, suffering, or interruption of the
whole process sets in.
If a patient is cold, if a patient is feverish, if a patient is faint, if he is
sick after taking food, if he has a bed-sore, it is generally the fault not
of the disease, but of the nursing.
[Sidenote: What nursing ought to do.]
I use the word nursing for want of a better. It has been limited to
signify little more than the administration of medicines