2. The economy, and guarantee of genuineness, afforded by the culture and pharmaceutic preparation of medicinal herbs.
3. The unison of action, by fulfilment of sanitary functions by members of their own body.
"It was admitted on all sides in England, when investigations were held on the office of hospital nursing, that the general management of our hospitals and charitable institutions exhibited the want of female aid such as exists in the hospitals abroad— the want of a moral, religious, intelligent, sympathizing influence combined with the physical cares of a common nurse. Some inquiry was made into the general character of hospital nurses, and the qualifications desired, and what were these qualifications? Obedience, presence of mind, cheerfulness, sobriety, forbearance, patience, judgment, kindness of heart, a light, delicate hand, a gentle voice, a quick eye; these were the qualities enumerated as not merely desirable, but necessary in a good and efficient nurse—virtues not easily to be purchased for £14 10S. per year! (or hired at $14 a month in New York [Footnote 11])—qualifications, indeed, which, in their union, would form an admirable woman in any class of life, and fit her for any sphere of duty, from the highest to the lowest. In general, however, the requirements of our medical men are much more limited; they consider themselves fortunate if they can ensure obedience and sobriety, even without education, tenderness, religious feeling, or any high principle of duty. On the whole, the testimony brought before us is sickening. Drunkenness, profligacy, violence of temper, horribly coarse and brutal language—these are common, albeit the reverse of the picture is generally true. The toil is great, the duties disgusting, the pecuniary remuneration small, so that there is nothing to invite the co-operation of a better class of nurses but the highest motives which can influence a true Christian. At one moment the selfishness and irritability of the sufferers require a strong control; at another time their dejection and weakness require the utmost tenderness, sympathy, and judgment. To rebuke the self-righteous, to bind up the broken-hearted, to strengthen, to comfort the feeble, to drop the words of peace into the disturbed or softened mind just at the right moment; there are few nurses who could be entrusted with such a charge, or be brought to regard it as a part of their duty. To this social function corresponds the Sister of Charity, as defined by St. Vincent de Paul, an ideal so often fulfilled in life and action.
[Footnote 11: This is the salary of orderlies at Bellevue Hospital, where the duties are often so arduous that one attendant would be quite inadequate to the care of twenty beds but for the aid rendered by patients to each other. The night-watch passes but once in two hours.]
"Can any one doubt that the element of power, disunited from that of Christian love, must, in the long run, become a hard, cold, cruel machine, and that this must of necessity be the result where the masculine energy acts independently of the feminine sympathies?
"All to whom I have spoken, without one exception, bear witness to the salutary influence exercised by the lady nurses in the Crimea over the men. In the most violent attacks of fever and delirium, when the orderlies could not hold them down in their beds, the mere presence of one of these ladies, instead of exciting, had the effect of instantly calming the spirits and subduing the most refractory. It is allowed, also, that these ladies had the power to repress swearing and coarse language, to prevent the smuggling of brandy and raka into the wards, to open the hearts of the sullen and desperate to contrition and responsive kindness. 'Even when in an apparently dying state,' writes one of these illustrious nurses, 'they would look up in our faces and smile.'"
Dr. H. R. Storer, of Boston, has recently put forth a little book entitled Nurses and Nursing, etc., abounding in suggestions which may some day be utilized in a hospital more liberally endowed and more elaborately organized than anything which now exists, and in which he mentions, with the highest regard, the Hospital of the Sisters of St. Francis, in Boston, 28 Sansom street. The doctor does well to dedicate his humane aspirations for a perfect system of nursing to the sisterhood. From what zeal less earnest, less intelligent, less refined, or less holy, can we ever expect to find music and flowers, birds, landscape views, the varied resources of luxury in nature and society, made tributary to the service of the sick?
A worthy servant of our Master, Mr. Bost, of Dordogne, the founder and administrator of several important charitable institutions, having among them departments for the hygienic treatment of epilepsy, scrofula, consumption, and idiocy, one of whose cures we have cited, remarks: