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| Subtitle | What it is and what it isn't |
| First Written | 1859 |
| Genre | Nonfiction |
| Origin | UK |
| Publisher | Dover |
| My Copy | dover paperback |
| First Read | December 02, 2025 |
Notes on Nursing
A really interesting manifesto about nursing, focusing on it as not a profession but a THING people do; and absolutely emphasizing fresh air, clean rooms, quiet rest. It's really interesting to see her emphasize this despite not having (I think?) access to the germ theory of disease - and in fact rejecting it in its early forms. Or at least that's how I'm understanding it here!
Noted on December 2, 2025
It is commonly thought that children must have what are commonly called "children's epidemics," "current contagions," &c., in other words, that they are born to have measles, hooping-cough, perhaps even scarlet fever, just as they are born to cut their teeth, if they live.
Now, do tell us, why must a child have measles?
Oh because, you say, we cannot keep it from infection—other children have measles—and it must take them—and it is safer that it should.
But why must other children have measles? And if they have, why must yours have them too?
Quoted on December 2, 2025
[a footnote here arguing against a proto-germ theory, I think?]
Is it not living in a continual mistake to look upon diseases, as we do now, as separate entities, which must exist, like cats and dogs? instead of looking upon them as conditions, like a dirty and a clean condition, and just as much under our own control; or rather as the reactions of kindly nature, against the conditions in which we have placed ourselves.
I was brought up, both by scientific men and ignorant women, distinctly to believe that small-pox, for instance, was a thing of which there was once a first specimen in the world, which went on propagating itself, in a perpetual chain of descent, just as much as that there was a first dog, (or a first pair of dogs), and that small-pox would not begin itself any more than a new dog would begin without there having been a parent dog.
Since then I have seen with my eyes and smelt with my nose small-pox growing up in first specimens, either in close rooms or in overcrowded wards, where it could not by any possibility have been "caught," but must have begun.
Quoted on December 2, 2025
To have pure air, your house must be so constructed as that the outer atmosphere shall find its way with ease to every corner of it. House architects hardly ever consider this. ... Badly constructed houses do for the healthy what badly constructed hospitals do for the sick. Once insure that the air in a house is stagnant, and sickness is certain to follow.
Quoted on December 2, 2025
It has been said and written scores of times, that every woman makes a good nurse. I believe, on the contrary, that the very elements of nursing are all but unknown.
By this I do not mean that the nurse is always to blame. Bad sanitary, bad architectural, and bad administrative arrangements often make it impossible to nurse. But the art of nursing ought to include such arrangements as alone make what I understand by nursing, possible.
Quoted on December 2, 2025
Let no one ever depend upon fumigations, "disinfectants," and the like, for purifying the air. The offensive thing, not its smell, must be removed.
Quoted on December 2, 2025