The Brooklyn Medical Journal. Vol. II. No. 2. Aug., 1888Various
Science
The Brooklyn Medical Journal. Vol. II. No. 2. Aug., 1888
Various
Medicine -- Periodicals
Her devotion to the sufferers can never be forgotten, she has stood
twenty hours at a time, directing and assisting in the care of the sick
and wounded. Her unfaltering devotion and incessant work undermined her
health; but though sick and feeble, she never left the field of duty
until Turkey was evacuated by the English troops. Major Delafield (who
with Maj. Mordecai and Capt. Geo. B. McClellan, U. S. A., had been sent
to Europe by our government, to study the art of war in the Crimea), in
his report to the War Department, remarks, in speaking of the English
hospital at Scutari, “It was in this well-arranged hospital that that
most estimable lady, Miss Nightingale, exercised her powerful influence
in alleviating the condition of the sick and wounded from the
battle-field. Women as nurses were employed to attend upon the men in
the wards, under the kind and beneficent guardianship of this good lady,
with the many advantages that would naturally follow the most gentle,
painstaking, and cleanly attendance of women as nurses. Miss
Nightingale’s efforts have resulted in the establishing, in connection
with the English army, an office known as the ‘Superintendant General of
Army Nurses,’ the office to be always filled by a woman. She has under
her a corps of female nurses, who take care of the sick in the military
hospitals.” The Sanitary and Christian Commission of our late war was
the outcome of the volunteer nursing in the English war of the Crimea
and the fruit of these efforts in this country are the training schools
for nurses which have sprung up all over this land.
Next to our entrance into this world and our departure from it,
occasions such as the present, when we have completed our education and
are about to enter upon our chosen vocation, are the most important
events in our lives. The calling which you have chosen, while not a new
one, is comparatively new in having special schools, and courses of
study provided for it. Nursing has always been considered peculiarly
woman’s work—more or less adaptation to such work is inborn in woman.
What man can smoothe the pillow of the sick, or soothe an aching brow as
gently and acceptably as one of the gentler sex! Who can move as
quietly, and approach the bed of pain so gently as woman!
I have seen sick men, absent from home and friends, sigh for a mother,
sister, or wife who is not at hand.
Thanks to this school, and others, everyone can now have skilled female
care when sickness and disease are upon them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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