To the probationer-nurses of the Nightingale Fund School at St. Thomas's Hospital / Florence Nightingale, New Year's Day, 1886.

  • Nightingale, Florence, 1820-1910.
Date:
[1886]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: To the probationer-nurses of the Nightingale Fund School at St. Thomas's Hospital / Florence Nightingale, New Year's Day, 1886. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    even better to the use of us Nurses.] I cannot tell it you half as well as in his own words. So here they are, as well as I can remember :— After saying that “ our ” business must be with the diseased body, he goes on : “ This body must be our study and our continual care, —our active, willing, earnest care. Nothing must make us shrink from it. In its weakness and infirmities, in the dishonours of its corruption, we must still value it, still stay by it, to mark its hunger and thirst, its sleeping and waking, its heat and its cold, to hear its complaints, to register its groans. “ And is it possible to feel an interest in all this ? Ay, indeed it is, a greater, far greater interest than ever painter or sculptor took in the form and beauties of its health.” Then he asks, “ Whence comes this interest ? At first, perhaps, it seldom comes naturally.”' And he goes on to urge the scientific aspect and interest, winding up with, “But does the interest of nursing the sick stop here?” and pressing the “moral motive” of “humanity,” the spiritual motive of “religion,” till he concludes, “Why, then, indeed happy is he whose mind, whose moral nature, and wrhose spiritual being are all harmoniously engaged in the daily business of his life ; with whom the same act has become his own happiness, a dispensation of mercy to his fellow creatures, and a worship of God.”