Notes on Nursing for the Labouring Classes |
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Common terms and phrases
Arnott's baby bedroom beef tea better breathing careful nurse careless nurse charge child chill chimney chimney-breast chink cholera clean cleanliness close cold common convalescence cottages course damp danger death diarrhoea diet dirty disease doctor door drainage drained draught effluvia English patient expectoration feet feet washed fire floor foul air fresh air friends give habit hard water hospitals inmates invalid keep kind known laws light living matter measles medicine minute mothers musty necessary never think night NOTES ON NURSING observe open the windows open window papered walls patient's room perhaps poor prevent private house pulse question requires rinsed sash saturated scarlet fever scrofula seen sewer air shut sick person sick room sink skin sleep smell suffer tell things towns unhealthy utensil ventilation walls warm washing water-closet whole woman women workhouse
Popular passages
Page 1 - What air can we breathe at night but night air? The choice is between pure night air from without and foul night air from within. Most people prefer the latter. An unaccountable choice. What will they say if it is proved to be true that fully one-half of all the disease we suffer from is occasioned by people sleeping with their windows shut?
Page 8 - II. The very elements of what constitutes good nursing are as little understood for the well as for the sick. The same laws of health or of nursing, for they are in reality the same, obtain among the well as among the sick.
Page 8 - Every careful observer of the sick will agree in this that thousands of patients are annually starved in the midst of plenty, from want of attention to the ways which alone make it possible for them to take food.
Page 5 - 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 higher place.
Page 8 - Unnecessary noise, then, is the most cruel absence of care which can be inflicted either on sick or well. For, in all these remarks, the sick are only mentioned as suffering in a greater proportion than the well from precisely the same causes. Unnecessary (although slight) noise injures a sick person much more than necessary noise (of a much greater amount).
Page 31 - It seems a commonly received idea among men and even among women themselves that it requires nothing but a disappointment in love, the want of an object, a general disgust, or incapacity for other things, to turn a woman into a good nurse. This reminds one of the parish where a stupid old man was set to be schoolmaster because he was
Page 1 - One of our highest medical authorities on Consumption and Climate has told me that the air in London is never so good as after ten o'clock at night. Always air your room, then, from the outside air, if possible.
Page 8 - ... to see that the dress of women is daily more and more unfitting them for any "mission," or usefulness at all. It is equally unfitted for all poetic and all domestic purposes. A man is now a more handy and far less objectionable being in a sick room than a woman.
Page 7 - In watching diseases, both in private houses and in disease, dis- public hospitals, the thing which strikes the experienced ways the ohserver most forcibly is this, that the symptoms or the sufferings generally considered to be inevitable and incident to the disease are very often not symptoms of the disease at all, but of something quite different — of the want of fresh air, or of light, or of warmth, or of quiet, or of cleanliness, or of punctuality and care in the administration of diet, of...
Page 10 - With a proper supply of windows, and a proper supply of fuel in open fire places, fresh air is comparatively easy to secure when your patient or patients are in bed. Never be afraid of open windows then. People don't catch cold in bed. This is a popular fallacy. With proper bed-clothes and hot bottles, if necessary, you can always keep a patient warm in bed, and well...