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Nightingale, Florence, 1820-1920

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


[36]
[Sidenote: English women have great capacity of but little practice in
close observation.]
It may be too broad an assertion, and it certainly sounds like a
paradox. But I think that in no country are women to be found so
deficient in ready and sound observation as in England, while peculiarly
capable of being trained to it. The French or Irish woman is too quick
of perception to be so sound an observer--the Teuton is too slow to be
so ready an observer as the English woman might be. Yet English women
lay themselves open to the charge so often made against them by men,
viz., that they are not to be trusted in handicrafts to which their
strength is quite equal, for want of a practised and steady observation.
In countries where women (with average intelligence certainly not
superior to that of Englishwomen) are employed, e.g., in dispensing,
men responsible for what these women do (not theorizing about man's and
woman's "missions"), have stated that they preferred the service of
women to that of men, as being more exact, more careful, and incurring
fewer mistakes of inadvertence.


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