Florence Nightingale: Notes on Nursing

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      During the Crimean War (1853–56), when Florence Nightingale and about three dozen trained nurses arrived in Scutari, near Constantinople (now Istanbul), British soldiers were seven times more likely to die from contagious diseases (mainly cholera and typhoid) than from their wounds. Nightingale and her nurses worked tirelessly to change those statistics. Upon her return to England, Nightingale took up the cause of sanitation in military hospitals and aimed to change the nature of nursing . Writing in a clear and sensible voice, she summoned all her experience in her Notes on Nursing: What It Is, and What It Is Not, first published in 1859. This document was intended "simply to give hints for thought to women who have personal charge of the health of others." She summarized the chief elements of nursing in chapters on ventilation and warming, health conditions inside houses, petty management, food, beds and bedding, light, cleanliness of rooms and walls, personal cleanliness, appropriate conversation with patients, and observation of the sick. The text that follows is an excerpt from the book's conclusion.

      The source of the following passage is an 1898 edition of Florence Nightingale's Notes on Nursing: What It Is, and What It Is Not.

      Now for the caution:—

      (3.) It seems a commonly received idea among men and even among women themselves that it requires nothing but a disappointment in love, the want of an object, a general disgust, or incapacity for other things, to turn a woman into a good nurse.

      This reminds one of the parish where a stupid old man was set to be schoolmaster because he was "past keeping the pigs."

      Apply the above receipt for making a good nurse to making a good servant. And the receipt will be found to fail.

      Yet popular novelists of recent days have invented ladies disappointed in love or fresh out of the drawing-room turning into the war-hospitals to find their wounded lovers, and when found, forthwith abandoning their sick-ward for their lover, as might be expected. Yet in the estimation of the authors, these ladies were none the worse for that, but on the contrary were heroines of nursing.

      What cruel mistakes are sometimes made by benevolent men and women in matters of business about which they can know nothing and think they know a great deal.

      The everyday management of a large ward, let alone of a hospital—the knowing what are the laws of life and death for men, and what the laws of health for wards—(and wards are healthy or unhealthy, mainly according to the knowledge or ignorance of the nurse)—are not these matters of sufficient importance and difficulty to require learning by experience and careful inquiry, just as much as any other art? They do not come by inspiration to the lady disappointed in love, nor to the poor workhouse drudge hard up for a livelihood.

      And terrible is the injury which has followed to the sick from such wild notions!

      In this respect (and why is it so?), in Roman Catholic countries, both writers and workers are, in theory at least, far before ours. They would never think of such a beginning for a good working Superior or Sister of Charity. And many a Superior has refused to admit a Postulant who appeared to have no better "vocation" or reasons for offering herself than these.

      It is true we make "no vows." But is a "vow" necessary to convince us that the true spirit for learning any art, most especially an art of charity, aright, is not a disgust to everything or something else? Do we really place the love of our kind (and of nursing, as one branch of it) so low as this? What would the Mère Angélique of Port Royal, what would our own Mrs. Fry have said to this?

      NOTE.—I would earnestly ask my sisters to keep clear of both the jargons now current every where (for they are equally jargons); of the jargon, namely, about the "rights" of women, which urges women to do all that men do, including the medical and other professions, merely because men do it, and without regard to whether this is the best that women, can do; and of the jargon which urges women to do nothing that men do, merely because they are women, and should be "recalled to a sense of their duty as women," and because "this is women's work," and "that is men's," and "these are things which women should not do," which is all assertion, and nothing more. Surely woman should bring the best she has, whatever that is, to the work of God's world, without attending to either of these cries. For what are they, both of them, the one just as much as the other, but listening to the "what people will say," to opinion, to the "voices from without?" And as a wise man has said, no one has ever done anything great or useful by listening to the voices from without.

      You do not want the effect of your good things to be, "How wonderful for a woman!" nor would you be deterred from good things by hearing it said, "Yes, but she ought not to have done this, because it is not suitable for a woman." But you want to do the thing that is good, whether it is "suitable for a woman" or not.

      It does not make a thing good, that it is remarkable that a woman should have been able to do it. Neither does it make a thing bad, which would have been good had a man done it, that it has been done by a woman.

      Oh, leave these jargons, and go your way straight to God's work, in simplicity and singleness of heart.

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