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Nightingale, Florence, 1820-1920

"Notes on Nursing What It Is, and What It Is Not"


Let experience, not theory, decide upon this as upon all other things.
[25] In making coffee, it is absolutely necessary to buy it in the berry
and grind it at home. Otherwise you may reckon upon its containing a
certain amount of chicory, _at least_. This is not a question of the
taste or of the wholesomeness of chicory. It is that chicory has nothing
at all of the properties for which you give coffee. And therefore you
may as well not give it.
Again, all laundresses, mistresses of dairy-farms, head nurses (I speak
of the good old sort only--women who unite a good deal of hard manual
labour with the head-work necessary for arranging the day's business, so
that none of it shall tread upon the heels of something else) set great
value, I have observed, upon having a high-priced tea. This is called
extravagant. But these women are "extravagant" in nothing else. And they
are right in this. Real tea-leaf tea alone contains the restorative they
want; which is not to be found in sloe-leaf tea.
The mistresses of houses, who cannot even go over their own house once a
day, are incapable of judging for these women.


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