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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![experience alone can give, are often wanted in the sudden dangers amongst the terrible illnesses that fill our wards. I need not pass from this part of my subject without pointing out that if my suggestion of schools for higher nursing at small hospitals and dispensaries be adopted, the greatest benefit can at the same time be conferred on a class of the sick poor which is sadly neglected by charitable persons—I mean the sick poor of our parish infirmaries. Without saying that the nursing of the sick in the parish infirmary is ever so revolting as that which Miss Lonsdale's fancy sketches ascribe to Guy's Hospital, there is no doubt that much good may be done in raising the tone and efficiency of the nursing furnished for the sick poor of our parish infirmaries. I say this without desiring to throw any asper- sion on these institutions, many of which I know to be well conducted. And thus in the end some good may arise out of the unfortunate publicity given to this subject; if, as a result of it, we see means obtained for the teaching of a far higher class of nurses than are now supplied. In short, something between nurse and medical woman, educated in numbers at the smaller hospitals and parish infirmaries. But, in the meantime, Miss Lonsdale's paper makes it abundantly clear that her new system for Guy's Hospital, which has not a word of kindness for the patients, turns its eye towards the improvement of the doctors and students. She asks :— Are not practices and experiments indulged in by the medical men, and permitted by them to the members of medical schools, which it is understood had better not be mentioned beyond the walls of the hospital ? If, however, such things should be talked of by the class of women who are employed as nurse3 under the old system, their character is such that little credence can be given to their word. The description here used might be from notes taken at a criminal- lunatic asylum. The practices here referred to, are evidently some- thing beyond faults of manners, and matters amenable to moral influence. For she says :— Further and quire apart from this . . . Under the old system, doctors and students alike were at no trouble to consider either their own manners or the feelings of the nurses—[observe! notofthe patients!]—and there was little occasion. They became accustomed, therefore, to behave in the wards exactly as their natural disposition prompted them. That the actual results of such liberty are notdesirable either for nurses—[observe! nurses first!]—or patients, may easily be. imagined. The presence of refined, intelligent women in the wards, imposes a kind of moral restraint upon the words and ways of both doctors and students, which some of them desire to get rid of, and I have no hesitation in saying, that it is against this, as much as anything else, that they are now at Guy's Hospital resisting with all the might they possess. And she speaks of our wards as remarkable for their low tone of morality. Upon this point the Superintendent writes:— This paragraph contains a gratuitous and foul aspersion on the conduct and character of leading members of the medical profession, which can only be refuted by members of their own profession and by gentlemen having the management of hospitals. It has always been the boast of the authorities of the hospital that the students seldom, if ever, abuse the privileges they enjoy. The](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22303686_0020.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
