Prev | Current Page 198 | Next

Nightingale, Florence, 1820-1920

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

The latter will always be musty, even
with all the windows open.
[30]
[Sidenote: How to keep your wall clean at the expense of your clothes.]
If you like to wipe your dirty door, or some portion of your dirty wall,
by hanging up your clean gown or shawl against it on a peg, this is one
way certainly, and the most usual way, and generally the only way of
cleaning either door or wall in a bed-room!
[31]
[Sidenote: Absurd statistical comparisons made in common conversation by
the most sensible people for the benefit of the sick.]
There are, of course cases, as in first confinements, when an assurance
from the doctor or experienced nurse to the frightened suffering woman
that there is nothing unusual in her case, that she has nothing to fear
but a few hours' pain, may cheer her most effectually. This is advice of
quite another order. It is the advice of experience to utter
inexperience. But the advice we have been referring to is the advice of
inexperience to bitter experience; and, in general, amounts to nothing
more than this, that _you_ think _I_ shall recover from consumption,
because somebody knows somebody somewhere who has recovered from fever.


Pages:
186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210