Workhouse Nursing: The story of a successful experimentNightingale, Florence
History
Workhouse Nursing: The story of a successful experiment
Nightingale, Florence
Nursing; Poor -- Medical care
Such, and so entirely satisfactory to the Guardians, were the
results of the experiment of nursing by trained nurses, as tried for
two years in the Male Wards of the Liverpool Workhouse Infirmary. It
is in order to render those results, the experience acquired in this
initiatory attempt, available for the assistance and encouragement
of others, that they have been thus briefly recorded. Much more
might have been said; but what is here set down is sufficient to
explain all that practical men would wish to know, and it would be
presumption to waste the time of such men with comments and
inferences which they are perfectly able to make for themselves.
One suggestion, in conclusion, I may be permitted to offer. In all
unions or parishes where additional accommodation may be required,
whether for patients or for healthy paupers, it is eminently
desirable that in providing it regard should be had to the entire
separation, at once or at a future time, of the sick and infirm from
the able-bodied, as will be the case, at least partially, under the
new régime introduced in the Metropolis by Mr. Gathorne Hardy’s
Bill. Miss Nightingale has from the first held and expressed a
strong opinion in favour of the separation of the hospital and
workhouse administrations. The Governor of the Liverpool Workhouse,
Mr. Carr, expressed himself decidedly in the same sense; and the
Chairman of the Workhouse Committee and of the Sub-Committee
appointed to superintend the Hospital, has been induced by practical
experience warmly to advocate the absolute separation of the
Workhouse and the Infirmary. So large a proportion of the
able-bodied inmates of the workhouse are drunken, lazy, and vicious,
that, if the poor-law relief is not to become a temptation and an
injury to the honest and struggling poor, the discipline must be
almost of a penal character. The paramount object must be to make
the workhouse, if not absolutely unpleasant, less agreeable than the
condition of laborious and striving poverty. On the other hand, in a
hospital the paramount and almost the only object is to promote
recovery and to mitigate suffering; all other considerations yield
to this, and consequently the treatment must necessarily be liberal
in spirit and indulgent in fact. The modes of treatment necessary
for the good management of the hospital patient and of the
able-bodied pauper, respectively, are distinct—almost opposite: the
infirmary and the workhouse must be controlled on divergent, and
even contrary principles; and by bringing the two together under one
roof and one administration, they injure each other. The indulgence
of the infirmary creeps into the workhouse, or the sternness of
workhouse rules cripples the benevolent energy which should rule the
infirmary. And the treatment of the able-bodied pauper becomes too
lax, or he is tempted to scheme, and does scheme, to get himself
transferred to the more comfortable quarters close at hand; a desire
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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