I use the word nursing for want of a better. It has been limited to
signify little more than the administration of medicines and the
application of poultices. It ought to signify the proper use of fresh
air, light, warmth, cleanliness, quiet, and the proper selection and
administration of diet--all at the least expense of vital power to the
patient.

[Sidenote: Nursing the sick little understood.]

It has been said and written scores of times, that every woman makes a
good nurse. I believe, on the contrary, that the very elements of
nursing are all but unknown.

By this I do not mean that the nurse is always to blame. Bad sanitary,
bad architectural, and bad administrative arrangements often make it
impossible to nurse. But the art of nursing ought to include such
arrangements as alone make what I understand by nursing, possible.

The art of nursing, as now practised, seems to be expressly constituted
to unmake what God had made disease to be, viz., a reparative process.

[Sidenote: Nursing ought to assist the reparative process.]

To recur to the first objection. If we are asked, Is such or such a
disease a reparative process? Can such an illness be unaccompanied with
suffering? Will any care prevent such a patient from suffering this or
that?--I humbly say, I do not know. But when you have done away with all
that pain and suffering, which in patients are the symptoms not of their
disease, but of the absence of one or all of the above-mentioned