In the last ten years, thank God, numerous Training Schools for Nurses have grown up, resolved to unite in putting a stop to such a thing as drunken, immoral, and inefficient Nursing. But all make the same complaint; while the outcry of “employment for women” continues, why does not this most womanly employment for all good women become more sought after? I hope to hear that my old friends in St. Thomas’ have each done their part; and I feel quite sure that if it is once placed before them, as a thing they ought to do, they will be found in the front.
You who are assembled in this room, and who are each connected with some circle, directly or indirectly, may do a good work for the civilisation of the Workhouses and Hospitals of the world. If you inform yourselves on the subject, and if you set yourselves to work, to deal with it, as we do with any other great evil that tortures helpless people, you will be able to act directly upon your friends outside, and ultimately get up an amount of public opinion among women capable of becoming Nurses, which will be of the greatest possible aid to our efforts in improving Hospital and Workhouse Nursing. Every one can help—every one—better than if she were a “newspaper,” better than if she were a “public meeting.” I believe that within a few years you can make it a thing that will be a disgrace to any Hospital or even Workhouse to be suspected of bad Nursing, or to any district (in towns, at any rate) not to have a good District Nurse to nurse the sick poor at home.
Those who have made the right use of all the training that came in their way in this School, if they would write to their own homes for the information of their friends outside, an immense help on its way could be given to the work we have all so much at heart. And I look upon it as a certainty that you will each be able, in one way or another, whether purposely or almost unconsciously, to take a great part in reforming the Hospital and Workhouse Nursing systems of our country, perhaps of our colonies and dependencies, and perhaps of the world.
IV
May I pay ourselves even the least little compliment, as to our being a little less conceited than last year? Were we not as conceited in 1872 as it was possible to be? You shall tell. Are we, in 1873, rather less so? And, without having any one particularly in my head—for what I am going to ask is in fact a truism—is not our conceit always in exact proportion to our ignorance? For those who really know something know how little it is.
Would that this could be a “secret” among us! But, unfortunately, is not our name “up” and “abroad” for conceit? And has it not even been said (“tell it not in Gath”): “And these conceited ‘Nightingale’ women scarcely know how to read and write?”
Now let no one look to see our blushes. But shall we not get rid of this which makes us ridiculous as fast as we can?
But enough of this joke; let us be serious, remembering that the greatest trust which is committed to any woman of us all is, herself; and that she is living in the presence of God as well as of her fellow-women.
To know whether we know our Nursing business or not is a great result of training; and to think that we know it when we do not is as great a proof of want of training.
The world, more especially the Hospital world, is in such a hurry, is moving so fast, that it is too easy to slide into bad habits before we are aware. And it is easier still to let our year’s training slip away without forming any real plan of training ourselves.