Subsidiary Notes as to the Introduction of Female Nursing into Military Hospitals in Peace and War

by Florence Nightingale

Their Advantages.

5. Great and undoubted advantages as to character, decorum, order, absence of scandal, protection against calumny, together with, generally speaking, security for some amount of religious fear, love, and self-sacrifice, are found in the system of female Religious Orders.

Advantages of Hired Labour.

6. On the other hand, the majority of women in all European countries are, by God’s providence, compelled to work for their bread, and are without vocation for Orders.

In England the channels of female labour are few, narrow, and over-crowded. In London and in all large towns, there are accordingly a large number of women who avowedly live by their shame; a larger number who occupy a hideous border-land, working by day and sinning by night; and a large number, whether larger or smaller than the latter class is a doubtful problem, who preserve their chastity, and struggle through their lives as they can, on precarious work and insufficient wages. Vicious propensities are in many cases the cause, remediless by the efforts of others, of the two first classes: want of work, insufficient wages, the absence of protection and restraint, are the cause in many more.

Perhaps the work most needed now is rather to aim at alleviating the misery, and lessening the opportunities and the temptations to gross sin, of the many; than at promoting the spiritual elevation of the few, always supposing that this latter object is best effected in an Order.

At any rate, to promote the honest employment, the decent maintenance and provision, to protect and to restrain, to elevate in purifying, so far as may be permitted, a number, more or less, of poor and virtuous women, is a definite and large object of useful aim, whether success be granted to it or not.

The Orders remain for the reception of those women who either are or believe themselves drawn to enter them, or who experience their need of them.

Main Object of Hospitals: Distinct Functions of Hospital Clergy and Hospital Nurses.

7. The care of the sick is the main object of hospitals. The care of their souls is the great province of the clergy of hospitals. The care of their bodies is the duty of the nurses. Possibly this duty might be better fulfilled by religious nurses than by Sisters of any Order; because the careful, skilful, and frequent performance of certain coarse, servile, personal offices is of momentous consequence in many forms of severe illness and severe injury, and prudery, a thing which appears incidental, though not necessarily so, to Female Orders, is adverse to or incompatible with this.