for the audience and the occasion: ‘Above all, be the heroine of your own life'.
Then a good woman should be thorough. Thoroughness in a nurse is a matter of life and death to the patient.
Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale
Statistician, social reformer and founder of modern nursing
B: 12 May 1820, Florence, Italy
D: 13 August 1910, London, England, United Kingdom
What makes a good nurse
When: May 1881
Where: A letter
Audience: Trainee nurses at St Thomas' Hospital
The ‘Lady with the Lamp' — Florence Nightingale — is a symbol of care and compassion, making the rounds of wounded soldiers during the Crimean War.
In 1860 she established a secular school for nursing at St Thomas' Hospital in London and set about professionalising the role of the nurse for women. Her legacy continues in the profession with the Nightingale Pledge and the Florence Nightingale Medal.
In 1881, in a letter to trainee nurses at St Thomas' Hospital — women typically as young as sixteen — Nightingale set down her advice. Only snippets of her recorded voice remain, so you will have to use your imagination to bring her words to life. Access your best Downtown Abbey–inspired English aristocratic accent, pitch your voice quite high, clip your vowels a little and you've got it. Now imagine yourself in a room full of fresh-faced new recruits — all young women. Florence is at the front, the master-trainer, sharing her wisdom.
Extracts from her advice are included here. Reading this advice today is at once challenging, amusing and infuriating. Parts of this address are likely off-putting — especially all the talk about obedience and what makes a good woman. But if you can contextualise that, and look beyond the anachronistic nature of the language, there is much to recommend Florence Nightingale's advice to young nurses.
WHAT SHE SAID
To our beginners, good courage
… To be a good nurse one must be a good woman, here we shall all agree. It is the old, old story. But some of us are new to the start.
What is it to be ‘like a woman'? ‘Like a woman' — ‘a very woman' is sometimes laid as a word of contempt; sometimes as a word of tender admiration.
What makes a good woman is the better or higher of their nature:
Quietness
Gentleness
Patience
Endurance
Forbearance
With:
Her patients
Her fellow workers
Her supervisors
Her equals.
We need above all to remember that we come to learn, to be taught. Hence we come to obey.
No one ever was able to govern who was not able to obey.
No one ever was able to teach who was not able to learn.
The best scholars make the best teachers — those who obey best, the best rulers.
… You are here to be trained for nurses — attending on the wants of the sick — helpers in carrying out doctor's orders (not medical students, though theory is very helpful when carried out by practice). Theory without practice is ruinous to nurses.
Then a good woman should be thorough. Thoroughness in a nurse is a matter of life and death to the patient.
Or, rather, without it she is no nurse. Especially thoroughness in the unseen work. Do that well and the other will be done well too. Be as careful in the cleaning of the used poultice basin as in your attendance at an antiseptic dressing. Don't care more about what meets the eye and gains attention.
‘How do you know you have grace?' said a minister to a housemaid.
‘Because I clean under the mats' was the excellent reply.
If a housemaid said that, how much more should a nurse, all whose vessels mean patients.
***
Now what does ‘like a woman' mean when it is said in contempt?
Does it not mean what is petty, little selfishnesses, small meannesses; envy; jealousy; foolish talking; unkind gossip; love of praise.
Now while we try to be ‘like women' in the noble sense of the word, let us fight as bravely against all such womanly weaknesses.
Let us be anxious to do well, not for selfish praise, but to honour and advance the cause, the work we have taken up.
Let us value our training, not as it makes us cleverer or superior to others, but inasmuch as it enables us to be more useful and helpful to our fellow creatures, the sick, who most want our help.
Let it be our ambition, good nurses, and never let us be ashamed of the name of ‘nurse'.
***
This to our beginners, I had almost said. But those who have finished their year's training be the first to tell us they are only beginners — they have just learnt how to learn and how to teach.
When they are put into the responsibility of nurse or sister, then they know how to learn and how to teach something every day a year, which, without their thorough training, they would not know.
This is what they tell me.
Then their battle cry is ‘be not weary in well-doing'. We will not forget that once we were ignorant, tiresome probationers.
We will not laugh at the mistakes of beginners, but it shall be our pride to help all who come under our influence to be better women, more thorough nurses.
What is influence? The most mighty, the most unseen engine we know.
The importance of one year or two in the work, over one month in the work is more mighty, altho' narrow than the influence of statesmen or sovereigns. The influences of a good woman and thorough nurse with all the new probationers who come under her care is untold.
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