“Always sit within the patient’s view, so that when you speak to him he has not painfully to turn his head round in order to look at you. Everybody involuntarily looks at the person speaking. If you make this act a wearisome one on the part of the patient, you are doing him harm.”
“Volumes are now written and spoken upon the effect of the mind upon the body. Much of it is true. But I wish a little more was thought of the effect of the body on the mind. * * * A patient can just as much move his leg when it is fractured, as change his thoughts when no external help from variety is given him. * * * It is an ever-recurring wonder to see educated people who call themselves nurses, acting thus. They vary their own objects, their own employments, many times a day; and while nursing (?) some bedridden sufferer they let him lie there staring at a dead wall, without any change of object to enable him to vary his thoughts; and it never occurs to them, at least to move his bed so that he can look out of the window.”
“It is often thought that medicine is the curative process. It is no such thing; medicine is the surgery of functions, as surgery proper is that of limbs and organs. Neither can do anything but remove obstructions; neither can cure. Nature alone cures.”
“A celebrated man has told us that one of the main objects in the education of his son, was to give him a ready habit of accurate observation, a certainty of perception and that for this purpose one of his means was a month’s course as follows: He took the boy rapidly past a toy-shop; the father and son then described to each other as many of the objects as they could, which they had seen in passing the windows, noting them down with pencil and paper and returning afterward to verify their own accuracy. I have often thought how wise a piece of education this would be for higher objects; and in our calling of nurses the thing itself is essential. For it may safely be said not that the habit of ready and correct observation will by itself make us useful nurses, but that without it we shall be useless with all our devotion.”
“It seems a commonly received idea among men and even among women themselves that it requires nothing but a disappointment in love, the want of an object, a general disgust, or incapacity for other things, to turn a woman into a good nurse. This reminds one of the parish where a stupid old man was sent to be schoolmaster because he ‘was past keeping the pigs’.”