[Sidenote: Unfitness of Nurses for any other work.]
1. It may be safely taken for granted as a rule, with few exceptions,
that a thorough hospital nurse can seldom turn herself to any other
business. Her life and work are altogether peculiar; she acquires
a knowledge and habits which incapacitate her from all ordinary
occupations, grows into fitness for them, and out of fitness for all
others.
[Sidenote: Shortness of their time of capacity for Service.]
2. No less so, that the time during which a hospital nurse can work and
lay by, is short, compared with the average duration of other kinds
of service. Apart from all excess of their own, their work and its
concomitants wear out hospital nurses fast. In every large hospital
you will see many women of 40, whom you would suppose 60, and strength
often decays as prematurely as appearance. Well-ventilated bed-rooms,
more sleep, and better food, would be materially in their favour; but
the work can never be other than one which wears out most constitutions
fast.
[Sidenote: Character of Nurses as a Class.]
3. In the London hospitals there are some women of excellent character
and of great efficiency; many the reverse, in one or both respects;
many between the two classes, who generally end by ranking in the
second.
4. To augment the number of the first class, to reduce the number of
the second, to induce the intermediate eventually to rank with the
first, and not with the second, is the desire of every hospital.
5. It is most important, in all things, in none more than in hospital
matters, to moderate expectations, not to hope too much from any
measure, or set of measures, and to keep well in view the stern prosaic
realities of things. The hospitals of great towns are not asylums where
a few or many selected patients can be received and petted; but great
receptacles of all sick comers. Their foundations lie down and deep in
the human sin and misery for which they in part provide, and the traces
of their purpose and nature must ever remain impressed upon them. They
are also schools for the practical education of a great profession,
important to mankind and dangerous to its members.
Hospital nurses are not women attempting or following “counsels
of perfection,” (whatever incorporation of other elements may be
eventually effected), but some of those many women whom God has
ordained to earn their bread by toil, (and in the large towns of
England honest ways of earning that bread are for women but too scarce
and too overcrowded), and upon whom He has laid the same condition as
on all the souls He has made, to keep the commandments to enter into
life. A very mixed class they must ever remain: to improve the class,
by God’s blessing, would be to effect a great benefit both to the
hospitals and to these immortal souls.
[Sidenote: Probable beneficial results of a prospect of eventual
provision, depending on character.]
6. Among several things which might be done or tried, with the view,
if it please God to prosper the endeavour, of eventually improving the
class of hospital nurses, the establishment of some definite prospect
of eventual provision, dependent upon good character, appears very
important.
7. It would tend to augment the number of steady respectable women, who
are anxious to keep a good moral and require a good business character,
whose aim it is to do their duty, to give satisfaction to their
superiors, to keep their places in the same hospital, and eventually to
end their days out of the workhouse.
8. It would tend to diminish the number of ill-conducted women, who
wander from hospital to hospital; whose wages go in drink or finery,
or both; who would be disgusted at the idea of regularly laying by for
their future support, and who would resent strict investigation into
character.
9. It would tend to induce the intermediate class of women, who
hesitate between good and bad companions, to incline to the former, and
to break off from the latter, by the favourable result of provident and
economical habits on their actual conduct; and by the effect which the
prospect of a decent support in their age, dependent upon these habits,
would produce.