Making Good on Private Duty: Practical Hints to Graduate NursesLounsbery, Harriet Camp
Science
Making Good on Private Duty: Practical Hints to Graduate Nurses
Lounsbery, Harriet Camp
Private duty nursing
Let us glance at some of the other professions, and see how the
members of each regard their chosen work. What is the prevailing
theme of the religious newspapers? Is it complaints from the
ministers that they are not appreciated, or that their life wears
on their nerves? Not that surely, but we read of more and more
work to be done; more and more need of the gospel to be preached
and lived, that all may be attracted to it. What do we read in the
medical journals? Not how often Dr. Jones or Dr. Smith has been
called up at night, or how often they have been dismissed or
maligned by ungrateful patients; neither do they talk of such
things. Do they complain that they are kept from the presence of
"Society?" Not so, and why? Their enthusiasm is such that these
matters are accepted as part of the inevitable, and the higher,
nobler aim is so real that the lower and meaner consideration of
personal comfort sinks into insignificance. What is the soldier's
favorite tale? Not that all through the war he had to drink his
coffee without cream, that he did not have sheets on his bed, and
that he ate from a tin plate. Would he ever speak of such things,
except to show that a man can for a noble aim accept inconvenience,
and laugh over it? Yet the soldier has probably been used
to these comforts and many more all of his life in his home;
but viewed in the light of his enthusiasm for the country he
is striving to save, and seen by the side of her peril, such
inconveniences sink into their merited nothingness.
Now the profession we have entered is, we are told, a noble one.
We have been ranked shoulder to shoulder with the doctors, we have
been compared to soldiers, we have been assured that our
opportunities for doing good to souls are second only to those of
the ministers. What more do we want? We want this, and we want it
very much. We want the courage to accept our trials which must
come if we are to have any glory. It is all very fine to be called
a ministering angel, but it is pleasanter to minister to those who
are appreciative. We _can_ be heroic, in an emergency, but if
we are not properly thanked, we do like to growl a little. It is
gratifying to our vanity to be ranked with our masculine
associates, but when it comes to the hard, thankless tasks which
they accept without a murmur, then we proceed to show that we know
what is what, and that our refined tastes cannot be so inconsiderately
treated.
The trouble with these fretful nurses is that they _are_
nurses. If they are not satisfied with the profession they have
chosen, why do they not make a change and enter some other? Do
they not know when they enter the work that it is hard, do they
not hear on every side that it is exacting and confining? They
knew it perfectly well before they began, why then do they
complain? Why not say candidly, "I cannot have such enthusiasm for
my fellow-men that I can forget myself," and then do something
that is easier?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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