“New methods of nursing as well as of surgery had to contend with tremendous difficulties in the way of bad buildings, bad ventilation, old-fashioned furniture, and lack of apparatus.
“The utensils, which in the hospitals of today are of white earthenware or enamel, were of exceedingly battered tin, almost entirely denuded of their original covering of black japan, and it was absolutely impossible to keep some of them clean and sweet. Smells abounded. I have seen a visiting surgeon run through a ward to escape them, and during my first week I was much puzzled by the existence of a horrible smell in one corner of the children’s ward. I privately investigated the floor and under the beds, but could find nothing to account for it, but discovered at last that it came from a patient—a child with a diseased bone of the face, a case which nowadays would be antiseptically treated and probably isolated.
“Under the old regime the nurses had, as a rule, no uniform dress, and cooked their own meals, which they bought for themselves, in the ward kitchens or scullery, and these conditions did not at once pass away.
“The antiseptic treatment of wounds was coming into general use, and the particular method of the moment, which had been advocated by Dr. Lister, was a sort of model steam-engine, which could be carried about and placed on a table or stand by the side of a patient’s bed. When a wound was to be attended to, before the dressings were removed a lamp in this apparatus was lighted. A strong spray of diluted carbolic acid then played over the wound the whole time it was being dressed, much to the discomfort of the doctors and nurses, whose hands would be stiff with the carbolic and their ears dulled with the constant hissing and fizzing of the machine. Everything was saturated with carbolic at that time, wool, bandages, lint, gauze, etc., but in the course of a few years this treatment was entirely superseded.
“Operations were comparatively free and easy performances. We nurses wore our ordinary dresses, and were kept busy washing sponges, which were used again and again, though they were boiled between the operation days. In the medical wards enteric cases were indiscriminately mixed with others, and tuberculosis patients stalked about and expectorated freely.”
Nurses of today, in common with the rest of the world, owe a greater debt of gratitude than most of them realize to Lord Lister who, by his surgical experiments, and his demand for trained nurses, helped so much in laying the foundations for the trained nursing of today. Other workers in the realm of bacteriology were aiding greatly in the remarkable developments which medicine and surgery were making in that period.
THE SPIRIT OF VOCATION.
An English writer, Miss Margaret Fox, in an address to nurses has called attention to the great need of the spirit of vocation in the nurses of today. “Look at it what way you will,” she states, “the fact remains that nursing is work demanding something more than mere business qualities, more than an active intelligence, more than even sympathy and kindness of heart. The latter, precious though it is, may be worn very threadbare in the constant daily contact with all sorts of unlovely natures suffering from every variety of trying ailment. Patients are not all grateful, or appreciative, and you will find some of them by no means ready to kiss your shadow as you pass on your rounds. Sometimes they are inclined to grumble because they do not immediately get all they want. Their disease may make them irritable, captious even, sometimes, repulsive. These people need more than ordinary everyday good qualities in a nurse. They need one who, over and above her professional ability, looks upon her work as a vocation, ‘a calling by the will of God.’ It was that spirit which made the best of the pioneers of other days what they were. Nursing was undertaken by them as a definite life-work. It cost them so much to enter upon it, that they were unlikely to throw it up without some very cogent reason. Work was not then considered so much a means to an end. It was the ultimate achievement. Nursing is a mission; and wherever it is done, it needs the same spirit of true vocation to do it well, and to persevere in spite of difficulties.
“There would be fewer restless, discontented nurses, if each possessed the spirit of vocation. It is a spirit that gives one the calm, quiet feeling of being in the only possible place and doing the only possible work. It stirs in one a large-hearted charity towards all such as be sorrowful, sick or poor. It makes one feel, ‘Well, whoever fails, I must not.’ It helps wonderfully when things are crooked and the work is hard, or uninteresting. One simply can’t help making things look nice, or doing the little extra bit which just makes all the difference.”
The motives which influence an individual to undertake a task are tremendously important factors in real and full success, and it is well, in such work as nursing, that all who enter on it analyze carefully their own motives in so doing.