1. It may be safely taken for granted as a rule, with few exceptions, that a thorough hospital nurse can seldom turn herself to any other business. Her life and work are altogether peculiar; she acquires a knowledge and habits which incapacitate her from all ordinary occupations, grows into fitness for them, and out of fitness for all others.
Shortness of their time of capacity for Service.
2. No less so, that the time during which a hospital nurse can work and lay by, is short, compared with the average duration of other kinds of service. Apart from all excess of their own, their work and its concomitants wear out hospital nurses fast. In every large hospital you will see many women of 40, whom you would suppose 60, and strength often decays as prematurely as appearance. Well-ventilated bed-rooms, more sleep, and better food, would be materially in their favour; but the work can never be other than one which wears out most constitutions fast.
Character of Nurses as a Class.
3. In the London hospitals there are some women of excellent character and of great efficiency; many the reverse, in one or both respects; many between the two classes, who generally end by ranking in the second.
4. To augment the number of the first class, to reduce the number of the second, to induce the intermediate eventually to rank with the first, and not with the second, is the desire of every hospital.
5. It is most important, in all things, in none more than in hospital matters, to moderate expectations, not to hope too much from any measure, or set of measures, and to keep well in view the stern prosaic realities of things. The hospitals of great towns are not asylums where a few or many selected patients can be received and petted; but great receptacles of all sick comers. Their foundations lie down and deep in the human sin and misery for which they in part provide, and the traces of their purpose and nature must ever remain impressed upon them. They are also schools for the practical education of a great profession, important to mankind and dangerous to its members.
Hospital nurses are not women attempting or following “counsels of perfection,” (whatever incorporation of other elements may be eventually effected), but some of those many women whom God has ordained to earn their bread by toil, (and in the large towns of England honest ways of earning that bread are for women but too scarce and too overcrowded), and upon whom He has laid the same condition as on all the souls He has made, to keep the commandments to enter into life. A very mixed class they must ever remain: to improve the class, by God’s blessing, would be to effect a great benefit both to the hospitals and to these immortal souls.
Probable beneficial results of a prospect of eventual provision, depending on character.
6. Among several things which might be done or tried, with the view, if it please God to prosper the endeavour, of eventually improving the class of hospital nurses, the establishment of some definite prospect of eventual provision, dependent upon good character, appears very important.