I
LONDON, _May, 1872_.
For us who Nurse, our Nursing is a thing, which, unless in it we are
making _progress_ every year, every month, every week, take my word for
it we are going _back_.
The more experience we gain, the more progress we can make. The progress
you make in your year’s training with us is as nothing to what you must
make every year _after_ your year’s training is over.
A woman who thinks in herself: “Now I am a ‘full’ Nurse, a ‘skilled’
Nurse, I have learnt all that there is to be learnt”: take my word for
it, she does not know _what a Nurse is_, and she never _will_ know; she
is _gone_ back already.
Conceit and Nursing cannot exist in the same person, any more than new
patches on an old garment.
Every year of her service a good Nurse will say: “I learn something
every day.”
I have had more experience in all countries and in different ways of
Hospitals than almost any one ever had before (there were no
opportunities for learning in _my_ youth such as you have had); but if I
could recover strength so much as to walk about, I would begin all over
again. I would come for a year’s training to St. Thomas’ Hospital under
your admirable Matron (and I venture to add that she would find me the
closest in obedience to all our rules), sure that I should learn every
day, learn all the more for my past experience.
And then I would try to be learning every day to the last hour of my
life. “And when his legs were cuttit off, He fought upon his stumps,”
says the ballad; so, when I could no longer learn by nursing others, I
would learn by being nursed, by seeing Nurses practise upon _me_. It is
all experience.
Agnes Jones, who died as Matron of the Liverpool Workhouse Infirmary
(whom you may have heard of as “Una”), wrote from the Workhouse in the
last year of her life: “I mean to stay at this post forty years, God
willing; but I must come back to St. Thomas’ as soon as I have a
holiday; I shall learn so much more” (she had been a year at St.
Thomas’) “now that I have more experience.”
When I was a child, I remember reading that Sir Isaac Newton, who was,
as you know, perhaps the greatest discoverer among the Stars and the
Earth’s wonders who ever lived, said in his last hours: “I seem to
myself like a child who has been playing with a few pebbles on the
sea-shore, leaving unsearched all the wonders of the great Ocean
beyond.”
By the side of this put a Nurse leaving her Training School and
reckoning up what she has learnt, ending with--“The only wonder is that
one head can contain it all.” (What a small head it must be then!)