Notes On Nursing : What It Is, And What It Is Not.

Notes On Nursing : What It Is, And What It Is Not.

Author: Florence Nightingale

Year: 1859

Notes On Nursing : What It Is, And What It Is Not , by Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), published by Harrison, 59, Pall Mall, London, 1859. "Is it not living in a continual mistake to look upon diseases, as we do now, as separate entities, which must exist, like cats and dogs ? instead of looking upon them as conditions, like a dirty and a clean condition, and just as much under our own control ; or rather as the reactions of kindly nature, against the conditions in which we have placed ourselves. I was brought up, both by scientific men and ignorant women, distinctively to believe that small-pox, for instance, was a thing of which there was once a first specimen in the world, which went on propagating itself, in a perpetual chain of descent, just as much as that there was a first dog, (or a first pair of dogs), and that small-pox would not begin itself any more than a new dog would begin without there having been a parent dog. Since then I have seen with my eyes and smelt with my nose small-pox growing up in first specimens, either in close rooms or in overcrowded wards, where it could not by any possibility have been " caught," but must have begun. Nay, more, I have seen disease