International Nurses Day

It's International Nurses Day and the birthday of Florence Nightingale.

As a very healthy individual I have no nurse stories to share, although my aunt and my friend were and are in the profession so there are already two nurses whom I like very much.

Instead I will recommend reading about Miss Nightingale and her Notes on Nursing.

It's been a couple of years since I read it through and I am rather too uninformed to do justice to it, but the book is a straightforwardly written introduction to good nursing and a compendium particularly of home nursing advice for the general public. Her consideration is for the patient, her repulsion for ignorance and misdirection in their care; and she is much more direct and sharp than one would expect from the mythical figure of the angel of the ward as the Victorians painted her.

One acidulous but funny observation (which she drops in toward the end as an editorial note) that still applies today is this:

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.

Miss Nightingale's principles of sanitation, order, and so on are second nature in this century; in terms of thoughtfulness and neighbourly perspicacity her ideal nurse, though she is supposed to be an impersonal being much like the stereotype of an elite secretary, still constitutes (I am guessing) a progressive role model.

Besides her book functions as a very worthwhile and general primer on considerateness even for those of us who rarely have to take care of a sufferer.

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Illustration: Florence Nightingale [Wikimedia Commons]

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International Nurses Day [ICN]
Notes on Nursing: What It Is, and What It Is Not [Gutenberg.org], Florence Nightingale (D. Appleton and Company, 1898)
International Nurses Day [Wikipedia]