Page:Address to the Mary Adelaide Nurses.djvu/9

 at it rightly, that a peculiar interest attaches to vour work from the very fact of its being, as I said before, pioneer work—trying to overcome obstacles, to remedy evils, to show and to bring home to others the best way of doing what has hitherto been too often done badly or inefficiently. Surely you will feel that this view throws upon you a responsibility which you will not be unwilling to accept, but which will rather stimulate and help you to exert your best energies, to maintain a high and careful standard both as to technical details of nursing and as to general character, and to guard watchfully against any indiscretion, slovenliness, or insubordination, which might injure your own influence and jeopardize the good name of the body to which you belong.

I will now turn to my second point, your work in its aspect towards your patients. We know, as I said just now, that as a rule the ailments treated in Workhouse Infirmaries present less variety and interest, medically speaking, than those in ordinary hospitals. There are fewer acute illnesses, fewer accident cases, and the diseases are probably, on the whole, of a more chronic and monotonous type. But do they therefore need less the benefit and comfort of trained nursing? Does the helpless paralytic, or the victim to confirmed rheumatism, or the incurable cripple, or even the sufferer from the inevitable infirmities of feeble old age, call for less of your skilled and kindly care than if each was laid on his bed by a dangerous fever or a violent injury? I think not—and I am sure that no one of us who has had personal experience of illness will deny that at times of weary restlessness or languor, or under the irritation of chronic discomforts, the firm and gentle hand and the ready resource of the trained nurse are as gratefully welcomed as in moments of sharpest pain or most imminent peril. But let me say more than this, my friends—when you are tempted, as you often may be, to brood in a repining or discontented spirit over the difficulties of your work, to meet impatience with sharp words, to treat harshly the unreasonable or selfish fancies