Lectures on medical diseases for nurses / by David Forsyth.

  • David Forsyth
Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Lectures on medical diseases for nurses / by David Forsyth. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    available for her. True, one or two of the more enlight- ened training-schools have, to their credit, taken steps to remove this reproach, but, so far as the needs of the average trained nurse are concerned, post-graduate teaching simply does not exist. In all probability the nurse, with the intention of bridging over this gap, provides herself with a textbook of medicine, resolving to make herself mistress of its contents. But with what success ? The book, she finds, has been written for medical men, and not only is she a stranger to the philosophic system underlying the whole of modern medicine, but the very terms are as uncouth in her ears as a foreign tongue. Within a few weeks the book is probably relegated to the bottom of her travelling-trunk, where its repose is rarely, if ever, disturbed. It is, surely, in this lack of opportunity rather than in any lukewarm interest in their work that we can find the explanation of the curiously limited medical knowledge of so many nurses, even the most capable and experienced. Thus, I have known a nurse, expert enough in tending a patient with transverse myelitis, frankly confess herself at a loss to say what transverse myelitis really is. Another, unremitting in her care of a patient with ulcerative colitis, was nevertheless hard put to explain the rationale of the very nursing acts she performed so well. And, of course, many a nurse will be regular as clockwork in administering her four-hourly medicines, without, however, understand- ing why the particular drug has been ordered, how it acts, or by what means it will control the disease. But some may say these are matters for doctors, not for nurses, whose province lies in another direction. It may be asked how (since nursing is the handmaid of medicine— serving, waiting, helping) can it benefit a patient for both his physician and his nurse to be acquainted with the cir- cumstances of his disease ? Will not this mean confusions)