Notes on Nursing: What It Is and What It Is Not

Notes on Nursing: What it is, and What it is not By Florence Nightingale Contents Ventilation and Warming Health of Houses Petty Management Noise Variety Taking Food What Food? Bed and Bedding Light Cleanliness of Rooms and Walls Personal Cleanliness Chattering Hopes and Advices Observation of the Sick Preface The following notes are by no means intended as a rule of thought by which nurses can teach themselves to nurse, still less as a manual to teach nurses to nurse. They are meant simply to give hints for thought to women who have personal charge of the health of others. Every woman, or at least almost every woman, in England has, at one time or another of her life, charge of the personal health of somebody, whether child or invalid, --in other words, every woman is a nurse. Every day sanitary knowledge, or the knowledge of nursing, or in other words, of how to put the constitution in such a state as that it will have no disease, or that it can recover from disease, takes a