Notes on Nursing

The intent of this work isn’t to provide a comprehensive manual of nursing but to help guide those who pursue the vocation. For example, children are “more susceptible than grown people to all noxious influences. They are affected by the same things, but much more quickly and seriously” (93). Even so, much child mortality is attributable to accidental death that need not have followed a child’s illness; in many instances, the death results from the child’s exposure to unclean air and, particularly, sleeping in unhealthy conditions.

While medicine is of great value in providing relief and remedy from illness, it’s capable of such remedies not because it cures disease but because it removes obstacles from the healing process. Just as surgery can remove foreign elements from the human body, so medicine can remove obstacles to the body’s natural healing powers. Nursing is the art of assisting patients to remain in as ideal a situation as possible so that the natural healing process can take effect.

The vocation of nursing requires complete dedication—so much so that Nightingale proposes that if one is unwilling to commit in this radical way, one shouldn’t pursue the job of nursing.