Northern Times.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1860-01-19 00:00:00

MISS NIGHTINGALE ON NURSING.

The following extracts from Miss Florence Night-
ingale's new book on nursing will be interesting to all
our readers :

VARIETY IN THE SLCR ROOM.
Volumes are now written and spoken upon the
effect of the mind upon the body. Much of it is
true. But I wish a little more was thought of the
effect of the body on the mind. You who believe
yourselves overwhelmed with anxieties, but are able
every day to walk up Regent-street, or out in
the country, to take your meals with others in
other rooms, &c., you little know how much your
anxieties are thereby lightened ; you little know how
intensified they become to those who cai have no change;
how the very walls of their sick rooms seem hung with
their cares ; how the ghosts of their troubles haunt their
beds ; how impossible it is for them to escape from a
pursuing thought without some help from variety.
A patient can just as much move his leg when it is
fractured as change his thoughts when no external help
from variety is given him. This is, indeed, one of the
main sufferings of sickness; just as the fixed posture is
one of the main sufferings of the broken limb.
It is an ever recurring wonder to see educated people,
who call themselves nurses, acting thus. They vary
their own objects, their own employments, many times
a day; and while nursing. (!) some bed-ridden sufferer
they let him lie there staring at a dead wall, without
any change of object to enable him to vary his thoughts ;
and it never even occurs to them at least to move his
bed, so that he can look our of window. No, the bed is
to be always left in the darkest, dullest, remotest part of
the room.
I think it is a very common error among the well to
think that " with a little more self-control" the sick
might, if they choose, " dismiss painful thoughts " which
" aggravate their disease," &c. Believe me, almost any
sick person who behaves decently well exercises more
self-control every moment of his day than you will ever
know till you are sick yourself. Almost every step that
crosses his rooin is painful to him ; almost every thought
that crosses his brain is painful to him ; and if he can
speak without being savage, and look without being un-
pleasant, he is exercising self-control.
Suppose you have been out all night, and instead of
being allowed to have your cap of tea, you were to be
told that you ought to exercise "self-control," what
should you say ? Now, the nerves of the sick are always
in the state that yours are in after you have been up a"
night.

NOISE IN THE SICK ROOM.

Never to allow a patient to be waked, inten-
tionally or accidentally, is a sine qua non of all
good nursing. If he is roused out of his first
sleep, he is almost certain to have no more sleep. It is
a curious but quite intelligible fact, that if a patient is
waked after a few hours' instead of a few minutes' sleep,
he is much more likely to sleep again. Because pain, like
irritability of brain, perpetuates and intensifies itself. If
youhave gained a respite of either in sleep you have gained
more than the mere respite. Both the probability
of recurrence and of the same intensity will be diminished;
whereas both will be terribly increased by want of sleep.
This is the reason why sleep is so all-important. This
is the reason why a patient waked in the early part of
his sleep loses not only his sleep, but his power to sleep.
A healthy person who allows himself to sleep during the
day will lose his sleep at night. But it is exactly the
reverse with the sick generally; the more they sleep, the
better will they be able to sleep.
I have often been surprised at the thoughtlessness

5

(resulting in cruelty, quite unintentionally) of friends
or of doctors, who will hold a long conversation just
in the room or passage adjoining to the room of the
patient, who is either every moment expecting
them to come in, or who has just seen them, end
knows they are talking about him. If he is an amiable
patient, he will try to occupy his attention, elsewhere
and not to listen—and this makes matters worse—for
the strain upon his attention and the effort he makes
are so great that it is well if he is not worse for
hours after. If it is a whispered conversation in the
same room, then it is absolutely cruel ; for it is impos-
sible that the patient's attention should not be involun-
tarily strained to hear. Walking on tip-toe, doing any-
thing in the room very slowly, are injurious, for exactly
the same reasons. A firm, light, quick step, a steady,
quick hand, are the desiderata ; not the slow, lingering,
shuffling foot, the timid, uncertain touch. Slowness is
not gentleness, though often mistaken for such ; quick-
ness, lightness, and gentleness are quite compatible.
Again, if friends and doctors did but watch, as nurses can
and should watch, the features sharpening, the eyes
growing almost wild, 'of fever patients who are
listening for the entrance from the corridor of the
p:rsons whose voices they are hearing there, they
would never run the risk again of creating such expecta-
tion, or irritation of mind. Such unnecessary noise has
undoubtedly induced or aggravated delirium in many
cases. I have known such—in one case death ensued.
It is but fair to say that this death was attributed
to fright. It was the result of a long whispered
conversation within sight of the patient, about an
impending operation ; but any one who has known the
more than stoicism, the cheerful coolness, with which
the certainty of an operation will be accepted by any
patient, capable of bearing an operation at all, if it is
properly communicated to him, will hesitate to believe
that it was mere fear which produced, as was averred,
the fatal- result in this instance. It was rather the
uncertainty, the strained expectation as to what was:to
be decided upon.
naml
enlye,edforhia
rdidocytosraoyr tfrh
iaetn
dthteo oltehaevre cthome
pamotnienctausaned,
communicate his opinion on the result of his visit to
the friends just outside the patient's door, or in the
adjoining room, after the visit, but within hearing or
knowledge of the patient, is, if possible, worst of all. '
It is, I think, alarming, peculiarly at this time,
when the female ink-bottles are perpetually impres-
sing upon us " woman's" "particular worth and
general missionariness." to see that the dress of
women is daily more and more unfitting them
for any " mission," or usefulness at all. It is
equally unfitted for all poetic and all domestic purposes.
A man is now a more handy and far less objectionable
being in a sick room than a woman. Compelled by her
dress, every woman now either shuffles or waddles—only
a man can cross the floor of a sick room without shaking
it. What has become of woman's light step ?—the firm,
light, quick step, we have been asking for ?

GOVERNMENT EMIGRATION.—The Government emi-
grant vessel, Herald of the Morning, 1,355 tons, Capt.
George Rudolph, belonging to Messrs. H. T. Wilson
and Chambers, of Liverpool, which sailed from Birken-
head on the 2nd of August, arrived at Melbourne, Vic-
toria, on the sth of November, with 418 emigrants, 279
of whom were single women, under charge of Surgeon
Superintendent Horatio Costerton. Three births, but
no deaths, occurred during the voyage.