The Purpose and Practice of Medicine

Abstract

Nursing is well worth reading today. A great many people who have undertaken the mission of teaching nurses have forgotten the wisdom, insight, and great administrative capacity of Florence Nightingale. She brought nursing almost at a stroke out of the gutter into the parlor, and this was done because of a clear insight into the care that well-trained and well-motivated nurses provide. Here her thwarted maternal instinct, her love and devotion, her abhorrence of pain, misery, filth, and mismanagement, powerfully prod¬ ding emotions, marshalled by her fine intelligence produced an excellent statement of the scope and meaning of nursing. If the nurses no longer read it, more is the pity. I recommend it to physicians too for its valuable concrete and simple statements of What nursing is and what it is not. Ambition, rigid Victorian scruples, a stultifying cloying domination by a matriarch who overdid the mother hen role, curious attachments to some of the ladies among her friends and relatives, and a supreme confi¬ dence in her God-given mission led to the torments of passionate self-reproach and despair but also to exaltation. She was well