LONDON, _May 16, 1888_.
MY DEAR FRIENDS,--Here, one year more, is my very best love and
heart-felt “good speed” to the work.
To each and to all I wish the very highest success, in the widest
meaning of the word, in the life’s work you have chosen.
And I am more sorry than for anything else that my illness, more than
usually serious, has let me know personally so little of you, except
through our dear Matron and dear Home Sister.
You are going steadily and devotedly on in preparing yourselves for
future work. Accept my heartiest sympathy and thanks.
* * * * *
We hear much of “Associations” now. It is impossible indeed to live in
isolation: we are dependent upon others for the supply of all our wants,
and others upon us.
Every Hospital is an “Association” in itself. _We_ of this School are
an Association in the deepest sense, regulated--at least we strive
towards it--on high and generous principles; through organisation
working at once for our own and our fellow Nurses’ success. For, to make
progress possible, we must make this interdependence a source of good:
not a means of standing still.
There is no magic in the word “Association,” but there is a secret, a
mighty call in it, _if_ we will but listen to the “still small voice” in
it, calling upon each of us to do our best.
It calls upon our dear heads, and they answer. It calls upon each of us.
We must never forget that the “Individual” makes the Association. What
the Association _is_ depends upon each of its members. A Nurses’
Association can never be a substitute for the individual Nurse. It is
she who must, each in her measure, give life to the Association, while
the Association helps _her_.
We _have_ our dear heads. Thank God for them! Let us each one of us be a
living member, according to her several ability. It is the individual
that signifies--rather than the law or the rule.
Has not every one who has experience of the world been struck by this:
you may have the most admirable circumstances and organisations and
examinations and certificates, yet, if the individual allows herself to
sink to a lower level, it is all but a “tinkling cymbal” for her. It is
how the circumstances are worked that signifies. Circumstances are
opportunities.
Rules may become a dead letter. It is the spirit of them that “giveth
life.” It is the individual, inside, that counts, the level she is upon
which tells. The rest is only the outward shell or envelope. She must
become a “rule of thought” to herself through the Ruler.
And on the other hand, it strikes you often, as a great man has said, if
the individual finds herself afterwards in less admirable circumstances,
but keeps her high level, and rises to a higher and a higher level
still--if she makes of her difficulties, her opportunities--steps to
ascend--she commands her circumstances; she is capable of the best
Nursing work and spirit, capable of the best influence over her
Patients.
It is again, what the individual Nurse _is_ and can do during her
_living_ training and _living_ work that signifies, not what she is
certified for, like a steam-boiler, which is certified to stand so much
pressure of work.
She may have gone through a first-rate course, plenty of examinations,
and we may find nothing inside. It may be the difference between a Nurse
nursing, and a Nurse reading a book on Nursing. Unless it bear fruit, it
is all gilding and veneering: the reality is not there, growing, growing
every year. Every Nurse must grow. No Nurse can stand still. She must go
forward or she will go backward every year.
And how can a Certificate or public Register show this? Rather, she
ought to have a moral “Clinical” Thermometer in herself. Our stature
does not grow every year after we are “grown up.” Neither does it grow
down. It is otherwise with our moral stature and our Nursing stature. We
grow down, if we don’t grow up, every year.
At the present time, when there are so many Associations, when
periodicals and publicity are so much the fashion, when there is such a
dragging of everything before the public, there is some danger of our
forgetting that any true Nursing work must be quiet work--an individual
work. Anything else is contrary to the whole realness of the work.
_Where_ am _I_, the individual, in my inmost soul? _What_ am _I_, the
inner woman called “I”? That is the question.
This “I” must be quiet yet quick; quick without hurry; gentle without
slowness, discreet without self-importance. “In quietness and in
confidence must be her strength.”
I must be trustworthy, to carry out directions intelligently and
perfectly, _unseen_ as well as seen; “unto the Lord” _as well as_ unto
men; no mere eye service. (How can this be if she is a mere Association
Nurse, and not an individual Nurse?)
I must have moral influence over my Patients. And I _can_ only have this
by _being_ what I appear, especially now that everybody is educated, so
that Patients become my keen critics and judges. My Patients are
watching me. They know what my profession, my calling is: to devote
myself to the good of the sick. They are asking themselves: does that
Nurse act up to her profession? This is no supposition. It is a fact. It
is a call to us, to each individual Nurse, to act up to her profession.
We hear a good deal nowadays about Nursing being made a “profession.”
Rather, is it not the question for _me_: _am I_ living up to my
“profession”?
But I must not crave for the Patient to be always recognising my
services. On the contrary: the best service I can give is that the
Patient shall scarcely be aware of any--shall recognise my presence most
by recognising that he has _no_ wants.
(Shakespeare tells me that to be “nurse like” is to be to the Patient--
So kind, so duteous, diligent,
So tender over his occasions, true,
So feat.)
I must be thorough--a work, not a word--a Nurse, not a book, not an
answer, not a certificate, not a mechanism, a mere piece of a mechanism
or Association.
At the same time, in as far as Associations really give help and pledges
for progress, are not mere crutches, stereotypes for standing still, let
us bid them “God speed” with our whole hearts.
We all know what “parasites” are, plants or animals which live upon
others and don’t work for their own food, and so degenerate. For the
work to get food is quite as necessary as the food itself for healthy
active life and development.
Now, there is a danger in the air of becoming Parasites in Nursing (and
also Midwifery)--of our becoming Nurses (and Midwives) by deputy, a
danger now when there is so great an inclination to make school and
college education, all sorts of Sciences and Arts, even Nursing and
Midwifery, a book and examination business, a profession in the low, not
in the high sense of the word. And the danger is that we shall be
content to let the book and the theory and the words do for us. One of
the most religious of men says that we let the going to Church and the
clergyman do for us _instead of_ the learning and the practice, if we
have the Parasite tendency, and that even the better the service and the
better the sermon and the theory and the teaching, the more danger there
is that we may let it do. He says that we may become satisfied to be
prayed for instead of praying--to have our work for Christ done by a
paid deputy--to be fed by a deputy who gives us our supply for a
week--to substitute for thought what is meant as a stimulus to thought
and practice. This is the parasite of the pew he says (as the literary
parasite thinks he knows everything because he has a “good library”). He
enjoys his weekly, perhaps his daily worship, while character and life,
will and practice are not only not making progress, but are actually
deteriorating.
Do you remember Tennyson’s farmer, who says of the clergyman:
I ’eärd ’um a bummin’ awaäy ... ower my ’eäd, ...
An’ I thowt a said whot a owt to ’a said an’ I coom’d awaäy.
We laugh at that. But is the Parasite much better than that?
Now the Ambulance Classes, the Registration, the Certificates of Nursing
and of Nurses (and of midwifery), especially any which may demand the
minimum of _practice_, which may _substitute_ for _personal_ progress in
active proficiency, mere literary or word progress, instead of making it
the material for growth in correct knowledge and practice, all such like
things may tend this way.
It is not the certificate which makes the Nurse or the Midwife. It may
_un-make_ her. The danger is lest she let the certificate be _instead
of_ herself, _instead of_ her own never ceasing going up higher as a
woman and a Nurse.
This is the “day” of Examinations in the turn that
Education--Elementary, the Higher Education, Professional
Education--seems taking. And it is a great step which has substituted
this for what used to be called “interest.” Only let us never allow it
to encroach upon what cannot be tested by examinations. Only let the
“day” of _Practice_, the development of each individual’s thought and
practice, character and dutifulness, keep up, through the materials
given us for growth and for correct knowledge, with the “day of
examinations” in the Nurse’s life, which is above all a moral and
practical life, a life not of show, but of faithful action.
But above all, dear comrades, let each one of us, each individual of us,
not only bid “God speed” in her heart to this, our own School (or
Association--call it so if you will), but _strive_ to _speed_ it with
all the best that is in her, even as your “Association” and its dear
heads strive to speed each one of you.
Let each one of us take the abundant and excellent food for the mind
which is offered us, in our training, our classes, our lectures, our
examinations and reading--not as “Parasites,” no, none of you will ever
do that--but as bright and vigorous fellow-workers, working out the
better way every day to the end of life.
Once more, my heartiest sympathy, my dearest love to each and to all of
you,
from your ever faithful old comrade,