Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Miss Lonsdale on Guy's Hospital. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.
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![tions given by the doctor. I need not tell anyone who knows Guy's, that all this has been done, and well done, and increasingly well done, at that hospital. The sisters of our wards were trained in and brought up to all this, and no person was admitted as under nurse until she had had six months' practice in all this as a probationer, and had acquitted herself to the satisfaction of the experienced sister and of the matron. To deny the name of nursing to these duties,—to teach nurses to claim to be superior to waiting upon the junior medical office-holders of the hospital according to the spirit of Miss Lonsdale's complaint, viz.,— Unnecessary annoyances which thoughtless young men constantly inflict upon the more refined class of nurses—[observe! not of patients /]—he looks upon them as mainly there to answer his questions, to prepare his dressings, to wait upon him while he performs his duties to the patients, and finally to set right any disorder, and to clear away any mess that he may choose to make in the per- formance of these duties. This last mentioned task is by no means inconsiderable, all this must set such women above their proper duties as hospital nurses. There may be nurses who are of too refined a class to prepare dressings and clear away after the students. But Miss Wood's advice as thus expressed, only let her leave her fine-ladyism at home; do not let her come fancying hospital work is a pleasant dilettantism, * may be of use to such more refined class of nurses. At any rate their place is not at Guy's Hospital. Their place is at some hospitals where there are no students or few students, and where the nurses themselves can perform the duties in question, and if possible have other persons to wait upon them. At Guy's, nurses have always willingly done the more menial work which is and must continue to be their proper service so long as we have 450 students to obtain practice from the cases of 600 patients. If we took away these duties from the students and gave them to the nurses, there might come a time when doctors would perchance know as little about nursing as Miss Lonsdale erroneously supposes them now to do. But we cannot at Guy's give the higher nursing up to the nurses. It is essential to the existence of the medical school that the higher nursing should be done by the students. We may here find some explanation of Miss Lonsdale's paper which would bring it within the borderland of rational productions, in spite of its spirit of violent pique. If so, the lady did try to mean something, although she must have grown so angry and dangerous to herself, and in a less degree to others, as not to see the point in question. To properly recognise this point will clear up the whole present crisis at Guy's Hospital. That sweet illusion, the repudiation of which by the medical officers so much disturbs Miss Lonsdale, the dream that at some not distant day the ideal nurse of Miss Lees' book would be trained at Guy's under happy, high-born, radiant sisters, whose sidelong influence on the now unspeakable students and doctors would gradually raise them from their present incredible habits ;—that sweet illusion she must see fade further from her vision.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22303686_0016.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
