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Perhaps sickness is sent for this very end; and you frustrate it.
The present Association wants to foster the spirit of work (not relief) in the district nurse, and for her to foster the same in her sick poor.
Nor are these District Nurses without hearing and receiving evidence that this spirit is now becoming really understood among their sick.
One poor old woman was heard saying to her younger neighbour: 'Them nurses is real blessings; now husbands and fathers did ought to pay a penny a week, as ud' give us a right to call upon they nurses when we wants they.'
This is the real spirit of the thing.
So nothing is given but the nursing, and some day, let us hope that the old woman's sensible plan will be carried out. In the meantime, nurses are nurses—not cooks, nor yet almoners, nor relieving officers. But if needed, they are procured from the proper agencies, and sick comforts made as well as given by these agencies.
(1) A District Nurse must first nurse. She must be of a yet higher class and of a yet fuller training than a hospital nurse because she has not the docter always at hand; because she has no hospital appliances at hand at all; and because she has to take notes of the case for the doctor, who has no one but her to report to him. She is his staff of clinical clerks, dressers, and nurses.
These District Nurses—and it is the first time it has ever been done—keep records of the patient's state, including pulse, temperature, &c., for the doctor. One doctor stated that he knew when an operation ought to be performed by reading the nurse's report on the case; another, that by hearing the nurse's history of the case, he found patients to be suffering from typhoid fever who had been reported as consumptive.
