Organization of nursing : an account of the Liverpool Nurses' Training School, its foundation, progress, and operation in hospital, district, and private nursing.

  • Liverpool. Royal Infirmary. Training School and Home for Nurses.
Date:
1865
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Organization of nursing : an account of the Liverpool Nurses' Training School, its foundation, progress, and operation in hospital, district, and private nursing. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material is part of the Elmer Belt Florence Nightingale collection. The original may be consulted at University of California Libraries.

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    No doubt religious sisterhoods have an advantage in this kind of work, tending, as they do, to merge all personal action and avoid anything like individual prominence. But such sisterhoods are regarded with deep and unreasoning mistrust by the great majority of Protestant Englishmen, and will probably remain subject to such mistrust until some one as perfectly free from sectarian bias or religious extravagance — as able, energetic, and discreet as Pastor Fliedner, and as remarkable for that tact in which some of the promoters of English sisterhoods have been so unhappily deficient, shall undertake their organization. It is most desirable that in an office like that of nursing, where a sense of duty, not a hope of praise, must be the moving principle ; where, *' in quietness and in confidence must be the strength of the labourer, everything that tends to give prominence to the individuality of those who undertake work should be studiously avoided. It will be observed that in the reports, in all accounts of individual cases, and in everything except the mere statistics of districts, we have never mentioned the names either of the writers or the subjects of the examj^les we have cited. The Society is obliged to publish the names of the Committee, and of the Ladies Superintendent of districts, together with details of the work done, in order to keep up the public interest and the confidence of subscribers. But I believe that most of those engaged in the work would be glad if such parade could be avoided, and if it could be carried on vi silence and unnoticed; would wish it to be impersonal as regards the public, and personal only in the relations between those who confer and those who receive its benefits. The profusion of flattery which attends the philanthropic efforts of the present day demoralises all whom it does not disgust.