Notes on Nursing: What It Is, and What It Is NotNightingale, Florence
Science
Notes on Nursing: What It Is, and What It Is Not
Nightingale, Florence
Nursing
To a nurse I would add, take care that you always put the same things in
the same places; you don't know how suddenly you may be called on some
day to find something, and may not be able to remember in your haste
where you yourself had put it, if your memory is not in the habit of
seeing the thing there always.
[5]
[Sidenote: Approach of death, paleness by no means an invariable
effect, as we find in novels.]
It falls to few ever to have had the opportunity of observing the
different aspects which the human face puts on at the sudden approach of
certain forms of death by violence; and as it is a knowledge of little
use, I only mention it here as being the most startling example of what
I mean. In the nervous temperament the face becomes pale (this is the
only _recognised_ effect); in the sanguine temperament purple; in the
bilious yellow, or every manner of colour in patches. Now, it is
generally supposed that paleness is the one indication of almost any
violent change in the human being, whether from terror, disease, or
anything else. There can be no more false observation. Granted, it is
the one recognised livery, as I have said--_de rigueur_ in novels, but
nowhere else.
[6]
I have known two cases, the one of a man who intentionally and
repeatedly displaced a dislocation, and was kept and petted by all the
surgeons; the other of one who was pronounced to have nothing the matter
with him, there being no organic change perceptible, but who died within
the week. In both these cases, it was the nurse who, by accurately
pointing out what she had accurately observed, to the doctors, saved the
one case from persevering in a fraud, the other from being discharged
when actually in a dying state.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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