5
another den of dirt, Miss Lees, the 'head nurse' was proceeding, after the other most necessary operations, to wash a little puny boy, when he exclaimed: 'Willie don't like to be bathed. Oo may bath de Debil if oo like.' Such was Willie's opinion of the extraordinary powers of this new nurse: she could wash black white.[1]
How has the tone and state of hospital nurses been raised?
By, more than anything else, making the hospital such a home as good young women—educated young women—can live and nurse in; and, secondly, by raising hospital nursing into such a profession as these can earn an honourable livelihood in.
If this is the case for hospitals, how much more so for district nursing, where the nurses have to be out in all weathers, and not in cab or 'bus, and where must be created, for there is not now, the esprit de corps which inspires the nurses of a good hospital and training-school as it does the soldiers of a regiment of many battles and well-worn colours whose glory has to be kept untarnished.
Even now, except in some remarkable instances, the hospital nurse wants more and gets less of the helps, moral, material, and spiritual, than the woman in a good home or service.
The district nurse wants yet more than the hospital nurse, for her life is harder and more exposed: and gets none.
Woman cannot stand alone (though for that matter, still less can men).
- ↑ To patients living up five or six pairs of stairs in Soho and St. Giles's the district nurse has often to go; the water tap is below the pavement in a celler; the dustheap in the basement, and sometimes below it; no dustpan or tins for fetching water. This is the room the nurse has to clean and purify. And she does it. These are the very triumphs of her art.
