Billeder på siden
PDF
ePub
[graphic][subsumed][merged small]

giene and Demography, in which eugenics plays an important part. Among private charities the McCormick Foundation of Chicago and the Russell Sage Foundation of New York City are devoting their funds and best workers to the study of mortality and infant welfare. The death rate of infants has been cut in two in some enlightened communities by instruction in hygiene, and public supervision. If enlightenment can save half the babies and ignorance kill the other half, is there not encouragement for the reminder of the work?

I hope the time will soon come when it will be considered a crime to allow any mother the care of a child unless she has been thoroughly instructed, and when in cases of these illegitimate babies the mother be given a chance to nurse and care for the child instead of turning it adrift, a waif and a charge of the state.

It is an incontestable fact that the aver

age illegitimate baby is stronger and a more perfect specimen physically than his less handicapped brother. Is it because, like Ishmael, his hand must be strong to fight? The basis of the matter lies in a simple physiological fact, he is the first born of a young, vigorous mother, the first fruit of an overwhelming desire. To save the child thus socially handicapped is the aim of the Open Door Department. One means toward this end is to keep a nursing mother with her child. If the mother can give her child milk for the first six months of its life, the child is ten times likelier to live than a bottle fed baby. The crux of the matter lies in providing shelter and support for the mother during this period.

Every mother and child is a potential family unit. Where it can be done with a reasonable degree of happiness, a marriage between the parents is effected. Often a deserter is compelled by law to

[graphic][merged small]

support his child. In the case of a girl too young to marry, her family is urged to assume the responsibility that really belongs to it in caring for both the mother and the child. When all these methods fail the mother is given an opportunity to earn a living. The most satisfactory openings at present are in domestic service, where the scarcity of workers has created a demand resulting in a fair living wage. By careful investigation by our Social Service Department, really helpful homes are found for both mother and child, sometimes as wet nurse, more often on a farm. If the mother can be provided with the necessities of life during this period, she is pretty sure to want to keep the child, and so a service is rendered not only to humanity, but to the state, in decreasing the number of dependent children.

The aim of the work is simple-wherever possible to bring about a marriage between the parents or to compel the father to support his child. Where this is not possible, and unfortunately this forms the

majority of the cases, it seeks to develop the mother into a self-respecting, selfsupporting member of society. Most of all it seeks to save to the state the babies that are too often sacrificed to ignorance or false pride. "It is not the babies born but the babies saved that count."

"A MAN has two powerful instincts which govern his whole life and give the first impulse to ali his actions; the instinct. of self-preservation and the instinct of racepreservation."

"ALL men are naturally virtuous; that is to say, that when they derive no pleasure nor benefit from vice, virtue is more delightful to them than vice."

"A VAST and deep river is not rendered turbid by throwing into it a stone. That religious man who can be vexed at an injury is as yet a shallow brook."

SOME HINTS ON NURSING.

THE apartments of the invalids must be kept scrupulously clean-purity must breathe in the atmosphere. The bed must be immaculate, and the patient must be frequently bathed and rubbed, so as to keep the skin in a healthy condition. Some persons seem to think that soap and water are sure death to a sick person, while in reality there are few diseases where such is the case. We do not mean that we should plunge a desperately ill person into the bath, but when the intensity of the illness is passed, to sponge the patient every day in warm water without removing the bedclothes, thus protecting them from cold, strengthens and refreshes them.

When persons are ill a long time, they naturally become tired of seeing just the same piece of bric-a-brac in the same identical spot week in and week out, and the too familiar pictures hanging on to their nails forever. Now, the nurse has it in her power to relieve to a large extent, this horrible monotony of view by occasionally taking the pictures down and

replacing them with others from various parts of the house. Remove the bric-abrac, which becomes wearisome after a time and put in its place vases of sweet, bright flowers. Bring the bird in for a while if the patient is not suffering from headache, and so direct the attention to things cheerful and pleasant.

Try to entertain the suffering ones; banish all thoughts of business, and let no care of any kind enter the sick room. Read some pleasant paragraph that is not long enough to be tiresome. When the patient is convalescing, be slow to read those things which would tire and fatigue him. It is important to us all that we should be capable of nursing at least the inmates of our own homes. We daughters, sisters and mothers, however, should not depend upon the profession but should train ourselves, for with our superior education and intelligence, we should be quick to recognize what is best to do for our loved ones when they are prostrated by illness.

THE WOMAN OF THE FUTURE.

Nor as a rival to man, but as his inspirer, will the woman of the future take her place in the order of things. Having learned precisely what her limitations are, she will move easily along those paths where they hamper the movements least. In this way she will gradually find out her true work. What that work will be may be partly guessed at from what she has already done in the past. Her heaven-sent instinct for nursing, her talent as a physician, and her genius for training the young, are merely various forms of development arising out of her mother-nature, and in these she will greatly excel. At first sight the field may seem somewhat limited and a level plain at that. But are there no improvements to be made in nursing, no alleviations of pain to be discovered? Are insane patients nursed in the best possible way? As for medicine alone

-the professon is full of boundless possibilities. Let women bring into it their keen powers of observation, their care for minute details, above all, their shrewd common sense and their faith in simple and natural remedies. Here alone there is work, and to spare, for them. But when we approach the training of the young we come to the most important work in the world. Not statesmen, or kings and queens, have a task requiring such forethought, such eternal vigilance or such delicate manipulation as that which falls to the woman who charges herself with the making or marring of the soul of a little child. Work of this kind may not advertise the worker or place her on a pinnacle of fame, but is none the less sublime. It is a toiling, not for time, but for eternity. And this shall be the woman's part in the days to come.

NURSING ETHICS.*

BY E. MARGARET FOX, Matron, Prince of Wales's Hospital, Tottenham.

I Do not know whether you will agree with me or not in thinking that at the present time the ethics of nursing are rather in danger of being overlooked. Yet they are to the profession what the Capitol was to Rome--what the girdle of sea is to England-at once a defense and a safeguard. Take them away, and what becomes of the science and art of nursing? From being akin with Heaven, it descends to grovel in the dust, its white wings weighted with sordid ambitions, soiled from contact with baser things, drooping, pinioned and helpless, instead of strongly soaring aloft, bearing others as well to purer heights.

An American writer has recently said: "I wonder if we are not in danger of losing out of the very heart of nursing something which ennobled the lives of the nurses of the past; something which made them beautiful and greatly to be desired! Sometimes I have wondered if we are not in danger of over-emphasizing technical skill and curriculum, of minimizing the personal qualities, and of losing what we cannot afford to lose the spirit of vocation, the spirit of hearty devotion. to duty, the spirit which impels us to go to those who need us most-the spirit of the Great Healer Himself. We live in a commercial age, when everything almost is spoken of and reckoned in terms of money. Let us be careful how we deal with the commercial side of our work. Let us be careful, also, lest the increasing interest in the scientific aspect of nursing warp in us the true nursing instinct."

This seems to me all very true. Theory is excellent; practice is good; systems, models, books, lectures, clinics-all the paraphernalia of modern hospital training schools have each their own appointed task in the shaping of the nurse; but unless surrounded on all sides by the sterner ethics

[blocks in formation]

of our profession, they are rather like rich furniture, left unprotected in the street, instead of being stored in some suitable building; like precious jewels thrown into a child's play-box, instead of being placed in a casket specially designed for them; like cunningly made and delicate instruments given into a boy's hands for him to fashion a rough toy with them, instead of being used by the expert surgeon's trained fingers for the salvation of the body. Such protection-such a setting-such care and safeguarding does our profession need today to preserve it in its high integrity and hand it on to our successors untarnished and unspoiled. The ethics of nursing must surround all our work as with a wall, high and unscalable, no small gaps being left or overlooked through which may enter anything to spoil or disturb.

And what are these ethics? We know that every profession has its own system of moral principles by which it is governed; its science of morals, or of conduct as right and wrong, and this, not apart or differing from the universal moral law as embodied in the Ten Commandments, but rather as a closer application of those laws to the peculiar circumstances in the lives of those occupied in these professions. In addition, too, there is always found a certain recognized code of manners, customs and etiquette, inattention to or ignorance of which marks the delinquent at once as an outsider.

Take, for example, the profession so closely bound up with our own-that of medicine and let us notice the high ideals. of life and conduct laid down for its members in the ancient Hippocratic Oath. In the Toronto Training School that oath is administered to the nurse on graduation. I do not know whether this is customary in other American schools. I have not heard of any British hospital where it is done; but I think it could not fail to be beneficial

to probationers to have the oath read over to them once at least during their training, and its provisions held up as an ideal for imitation. What applies to the medical profession almost always applies to nurses as well, for the two are on the same ethical level.

The oath deals with the vow of loyalty. The person taking it promises solemnly to be "loyal to the patients entrusted to her care, and to the physicians under whom she shall serve." What is it to be loyal? It is to be "faithful in allegiance to those over one; true to plighted faith or duty." Many important things are left to the judgment and faithfulness of the nurse to carry out unseen, unknown by any except her own conscience. The truly loyal nurse will never try to cover her own sings, negligences and ignorance with specious words or untruthful silence; she will not undermine her patient's confidence in the doctor by expressing doubt as to the efficacy of his treatment, or by an assumption of superior knowledge, which she does not possess. But she will uphold her physician to the patient and the patient's friends, and will carry out his instructions, not only in the spirit, but in the letter, thus gaining the confidence of both. She will find excuses for his little infirmities of temper-those trifling lapses of memory, his trying mannerisms, perhaps, his little eccentricities of speech that tempt her possibly to be witty at his expense. Loyalty is not servility. "True loyalty to orders cannot be without the independent sense or energy of responsibility which alone secures real trustworthiness."

I am not saying it is always easy to be loyal to the doctor; indeed, some doctors make it very hard for the nurse to be so; they being human and the nurse being human, too, both are liable to err. There are doctors and doctors, just as there are nurses and nurses, and it is unlikely a trained, intelligent nurse will never find anything to criticise in his methods and

manners.

Such criticism must, however, in the interests of ethics, be strictly con

fined to her own thoughts; it must not appear in her manner or her speech to the patient or his friends, but she should endeavor to remain professional, without being in any way insincere. To suggest that an operation should have been performed sooner, or not performed at all; to hint that a patient was not sent into hospital in time to save his life; to speak slightingly of the patient's own medical attendant, but in a superlatively adulatory manner of the specialist called in to consult with him; to wonder audibly why such-and-such a treatment or medicine has not been tried, or certain symptoms remarked, is to be guilty of what the General Medical Council calls "infamous conduct in a professional sense," where doctors are concerned. It is contrary to all true nursing ethics. Nurses may well copy the medical profession in this matter. It is a rare thing indeed to hear one doctor run down another's meth

ods or treatment; as a rule, whatever their private opinion may be, they usually stand shoulder to shoulder by the members of their own profession, and a big proof of this solidarity has lately been given in the way they have rallied, thousands strong, to the call of the opposers of the insurance biil.

Not only to the medical, but to her own profession, is the loyalty of the nurse due; the oath goes on to state that she promises to be "just and generous to them, aiding them whenever they shall need aid." But often nurses will run one another down. Some, while being strictly loyal to all those trained in the same school as themselves, have not a good word for others trained elsewhere. To be "perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment" is as difficult at the present day as in the early Christian Church, when the members brought their disputes to the apostle to settle, some contending that they were of Paul, others of Apollos, and again others of Cephas. Do not let us forget that those trained in the school of Cephas are as likely to be just as good as those of

« ForrigeFortsæt »