At the end of the year, from among those who were placed on the register, six received appointments at St. Thomas’s and two took work in infirmaries. There was special need of good nurses in workhouse infirmaries, and there was also throughout the whole country a crying need for nurses carefully trained in midwifery: lack of knowledge, for instance, had greatly increased the danger of puerperal fever, a scourge against which Miss Nightingale was one of the first to contend; and it had been wisely decided that while two-thirds of the fund should go to the work at St. Thomas’s, one-third should be used for special training of nurses in these branches at King’s College.
“How has the tone and state of hospital nurses been raised?” Miss Nightingale asks in her little book on “Trained Nursing for the Sick Poor,” published in 1876.
“By, more than anything else, making the hospital such a home as good young women—educated young women—can live and nurse in; and, secondly, by raising hospital nursing into such a profession as these can earn an honourable livelihood in.”
In her “Notes on Hospitals,” published in 1859, she pointed out what she considered the four radical defects in hospital construction—namely:—
1. The agglomeration of a large number of sick under the same roof.
2. Deficiency of space.
3. Deficiency of ventilation.
4. Deficiency of light.
How magnificently builders have since learned to remedy such defects may be seen in the Nightingale Wing of St. Thomas’s Hospital.