Applied Psychology for Nurses - Mary F. Porter

The nurse of the future will not be merely a handmaiden to care for the sick body by deftly carrying out the doctor’s orders. She will do this almost automatically as a matter of course, and skilfully; but it will be the merest beginning of her mission. That mission itself will be to eliminate the causes of disease; to teach the ways of health, to supervise the sanitary conditions of city, town, and country. Practical ways and the wise means to this end will be taught in her hospital, which will become a community center with clinics, teaching through its doctors and nurses the way to health, instead of merely treating and advising the cases as they come. But the greatest contribution of the nurse of the future will be a wide-spread desire for health and will to health, rather than a desire and will to avoid discomfort and pain and danger of death. This will to health will doom in the sane mind the disease-accepting attitude. It will do all that common sense and applied medical science can do to strengthen the body; then it will take what life brings in the way of unavoidable disease and weakness and inability, with an uncringing mind. It will hold the mind’s attitude to serenity and poise and accomplishment within the necessary limits of its disordered body. It will be master of its dwelling and make the most of the little the body can give, and force all bearable weakness and pain to be stepping-stones to endurance and will-strength and cheer. It will not accept physical limitations as final things. If life must be lived in a prison-house it will be its own jailer, and fill the rooms with flowers, music, friends, and happiness.

No nurse is competent to help her patient to overcome any curable physical weakness, and keep the mind serene in the face of the incurable, until she herself has learned that the will to health is capable of transforming disease of body, from disaster, into health of mind and soul.

The nurse of the future will know the laws of mind as she knows the course of disease; she will be dedicated to such wise care of existing disease as will lead to prevention of future disease; and she will be a sworn, trained ally of the health-accepting mind.

INDEX

Absent-mindedness, [64]
Absolutes, [54]
Abstract concept, [52]
- object concepts, [53]
- quality concepts, [53]
Accuracy of perception, [141]
Action cannot be separated from feeling, [68]
Acts, compulsive, [106]
Adaptability, [79]
- necessity of, [80]
Amnesia, [103]
Anesthesia, [101]
Aphasia, [103]
Apperception, [54]
Association of ideas, [143]
Attention, [79]
- of interest, [112]
- of reason and will, [118]
- root of disease or health attitude, [112]
Autosuggestion, [84]
Awareness, [15]

Bad habits, [91]
Beginning of reason, [69]
Body and mind, relation of, [40]
Borderland disorders, [107]
Brain, [33]
- hind, [43]

Censor, [31]
Central and peripheral nervous systems in action, [35]
Cerebellum, [43]
Cerebrum, [43]
- functions of, [45]
Clear thinking, steps to, [140]
Compulsive acts, [106]
- ideas, [103]
Concentration, [146]
Concepts, [52]
- abstract, [52]
- object, [53]
- quality, [53]
- concrete, [52]
Concrete concepts, [52]
Consciousness, [15], [20], [21]
- definition, [15]
- flow of, [47]
- in delirium, [32]
- in sleep, [31]
- is complex, [29]
- organs of, [34]
- personal, [57]

Delirium, consciousness in, [32]
Deluded patient, [133]
- nursing of, [135]
Delusion, [104]
- nihilistic, [104]
- of reference, [104]
- somatic, [104]
Determination, [18]
Development of reason and will, [71]
Disease attitude, attention, root of, [112]
Disorders, [95]
- borderland, [107]
- of emotion, [99]
- of functions of intellect, [96]
- of ideation, [97]
- of judgment, [99]
- of memory, [98]
- of perception, [96]
- of reason, [98]
- of sensation, [96]
- of will, [99]
Disorientation, [103]
Distractibility, [105]