Part 15

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 Mere Angelique 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 everywhere (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.

APPENDIX.

TABLE A.

GREAT BRITAIN.

AGES.

| Nurse | Nurse | NURSES. | (not Domestic | (Domestic | | Servant) | Servant) | -------------------+---------------+-----------+ All Ages | 25,466 | 39,139 | Under 5 Years. | ... | ... | 5- | ... | 508 | 10- | ... | 7,259 | 15- | ... | 10,355 | 20- | 624 | 6,537 | 25- | 817 | 4,174 | 30- | 1,118 | 2,495 | 35- | 1,359 | 1,681 | 40- | 2,223 | 1,468 | 45- | 2,748 | 1,206 | 50- | 3,982 | 1,196 | 55- | 3,456 | 833 | 60- | 3,825 | 712 | 65- | 2,542 | 369 | 70- | 1,568 | 204 | 75- | 746 | 101 | 80- | 311 | 25 | 85 and Upwards | 147 | 16 | -------------------+---------------+-----------+

TABLE B.

AGED 20 YEARS OF AGE, AND UPWARDS.

|Nurse |Nurse | |(not Domestic |(Domestic | |Servant) |Servant) | -----------------------------------------------+--------------+-----------+ Great Britain and Islands in the British Seas. | 25,466 | 21,017 | England and Wales. | 23,751 | 18,945 | Scotland. | 1,543 | 1,922 | Islands in the British Seas. | 172 | 150 | 1st Division. London. | 7,807 | 5,061 | 2nd Division. South Eastern. | 2,878 | 2,514 | 3rd Division. South Midland. | 2,286 | 1,252 | 4th Division. Eastern Counties. | 2,408 | 959 | 5th Division. South Western Counties. | 3,055 | 1,737 | 6th Division. West Midland Counties. | 1,225 | 2,383 | 7th Division. North Midland Counties. | 1,003 | 957 | 8th Division. North Western Counties. | 970 | 2,135 | 9th Division. Yorkshire. | 1,074 | 1,023 | 10th Division. Northern Counties. | 402 | 410 | 11th Division. Monmouth and Wales. | 343 | 614 | -----------------------------------------------+--------------+-----------+

NOTE AS TO THE NUMBER OF WOMEN EMPLOYED AS NURSES IN GREAT BRITAIN.

25,466 were returned, at the census of 1851, as nurses by profession, 39,139 nurses in domestic service, and 2,822 midwives. The numbers of different ages are shown in table A, and in table B their distribution over Great Britain.

To increase the efficiency of this class, and to make as many of them as possible the disciples of the true doctrines of health, would be a great national work.

For there the material exists, and will be used for nursing, whether the real "conclusion of the matter" be to nurse or to poison the sick. A man, who stands perhaps at the head of our medical profession, once said to me, I send a nurse into a private family to nurse the sick, but I know that it is only to do them harm.

Now a nurse means any person in charge of the personal health of another. And, in the preceding notes, the term nurse is used indiscriminately for amateur and professional nurses. For, besides nurses of the sick and nurses of children, the numbers of whom are here given, there are friends or relations who take temporary charge of a sick person, there are mothers of families. It appears as if these unprofessional nurses were just as much in want of knowledge of the laws of health as professional ones.

Then there are the school-mistresses of all national and other schools throughout the kingdom. How many of children's epidemics originate in these! Then the proportion of girls in these schools, who become mothers or members among the 64,600 nurses recorded above, or schoolmistresses in their turn. If the laws of health, as far as regards fresh air, cleanliness, light, &c., were taught to these, would this not prevent some children being killed, some evil being perpetuated? On women we must depend, first and last, for personal and household hygiene--for preventing the race from degenerating in as far as these things are concerned. Would not the true way of infusing the art of preserving its own health into the human race be to teach the female part of it in schools and hospitals, both by practical teaching and by simple experiments, in as far as these illustrate what may be called the theory of it?

FOOTNOTES

Upon this fact the most wonderful deductions have been strung. For a long time an announcement something like the following has been going the round of the papers:--"More than 25,000 children die every year in London under 10 years of age; therefore we want a Children's Hospital." This spring there was a prospectus issued, and divers other means taken to this effect:--"There is a great want of sanitary knowledge in women; therefore we want a Women's Hospital." Now, both the above facts are too sadly true. But what is the deduction? The causes of the enormous child mortality are perfectly well known; they are chiefly want of cleanliness, want of ventilation, want of white-washing; in one word, defective household hygiene. The remedies are just as well known; and among them is certainly not the establishment of a Child's Hospital. This may be a want; just as there may be a want of hospital room for adults. But the Registrar-General would certainly never think of giving us as a cause for the high rate of child mortality in (say) Liverpool that there was not sufficient hospital room for children; nor would he urge upon us, as a remedy, to found a hospital for them.

Again, women, and the best women, are wofully deficient in sanitary knowledge; although it is to women that we must look, first and last, for its application, as far as household hygiene is concerned. But who would ever think of citing the institution of a Women's Hospital as the way to cure this want?