The Montgomery advertiser., 1905-06-04


 Not long ago she expressed the pecu- liar interest which she felt in the prog ress of district nursing. No class or work appeals to her more strongly It was in the homes of the poor that some of her earliest efforts in sick nursing were made, when as a woman or lei- sure she visited the cottages on her fathers estates in Derbyshire and Hampshire. At the institution of Kaiserswerth, too, where she graduat- ed as a nurse, her attention was chief ly directed toward the care of the sick
 poor Her earliest writings dealt with the same theme. The appalling condi-
 tion of the wounded in the hospitals of the East during the Crimean War summoned her to the care of the sol
 dier, and for many years afterward she made military hospitals her chief concern. But now she turns again to
 her earlier work, and the sick poor are in these latter years much on her mind.
 Miss Nightingale looking upon the
 home" as the great unit of the nation,
 feels that the chief need of the age Is
 the intelligently managed, pure, clean
 home in which the men and women of
 the future may be reared. and regards
 the district nurse as an important fac- tor in bringing about this condition
 The district nurse meets the family on their own ground, shows them in their own home how they can be clean and orderly, how they can help in nursing their sick ones, the way to obtain of- ficial sanitary nelp, how to ip1provise appliances. and often how to tide over
 difficulties and prevent their home be- ing broken up. To use one of Miss Nightingale's epressive phrases ,the
 district nurse can teach without seem ing to teach, which Is the ideal of teaching" When she heaxs about the
 erection of modern municipal dwell- ings for the poor, Miss Nightingale in-
 variably enquiries what effect they have on the habits of the people. She urg-
 es that the district nurse may be the medium of teaching the disorderly how to use improved dwellings, an impor- tant factor in the struggle with what
 she calls ''pauperized poverty"
 In the early stages of her career Miss
 Nightingale laid great stress on the
 maxim that a Nurse is born and not
 made" and she has never flinched from
 that position. She holds that of all
 occupations, nursing least lends itself
 to formula" as 1t deals with liv-
 ing bodies and spirits and cannot be
 formulated like engineering, or num-
 bered and registered like arithmetic and
 population. It must be sympathetic"
 The nurses art cannot be made a for
 mula any more than the painters.
 ''When the great painter, Fuseli," as
 Miss Nightingale has instanced, was
 examined as to how he mixed his col
 ors he replied: With brains, sir, and
 the good nurse, If she is asked how
 she nurses can often only answer:
 With brains and heart. sir, and with training and practice.
 Miss Nightingales view of the mat
 ter maybe illustrated by one of her own characteristic examples. "A great
 physician was heard to say. when ask
 ed how he treated pneumonia, don't
 treat pneumonia, I treat the person
 who has pneumonia If this is true
 in medicine, in which there is much
 that can be tested by examinations,
 how much more true Is 1t of medicines
 servant-nurslng2 Training. silent thing training, as well as word train ing, moral and sympathetic, as well as physical; training in tact and sym pathy; duct-training is necessary, and progress in training can never end but with a nurses life. A good nurse must be a good woman with sympa- thetic insight. She cannot be good nurse without"
 Miss Nightingale has always feared a danger that the office of nurse may be magnified until the proper line of demarcation between nurses and the medical faculty is lost. To use her own terse phrase, "a nurse should be nurse, not medlchl WoHldut anu any test of study which loses sight of this seems antagonistic to her conception of a nurses vocation. 'This most im- portant practical lesson that can be |. given to nurses" says Miss Nightin- gale, "is to teach them what to ob- serve, and how accurately to state the result of observation" patients life may hang on the report which the nurse gives to the doctor, and while text-boks may help with knowledge. they cannot supply the place of the observant eye. and the quality of ob- servation cannot be adequately tested by ability to pass technical examina- tion. In a message sent some little time ago to a garden party of nurses at her old home, Lea Hurst, Derbyshire, Miss Nightingale touched indirectly on this question. we hear a great deal nowadays about nursing as a profess sion," she said, but the question of each nurse is. }Am living up to my
 professionY The nurses life Is. above
 all, a moral and practical life-a life
 not of show, but of practical action"