Page:On Trained Nursing for the Sick Poor.pdf/5

3 twenty years ago was a paradox, twenty years hence will be a commonplace.

If a nurse has to 'find herself,' to cook for herself, when she comes home 'dog tired' from her patients, to do everything for herself, she cannot do real nursing; for nursing requires the most undivided attention of anything I know, and all the health and strength both of mind and body.

If, then, she has to provide for herself, she can only be half a nurse, and one of two things happens. Either she is of the level of her patients, or she sinks to the level of her patients, and actually makes apologies for their dirt and disorderliness, instead of remedying these, and instead of their making apologies to her, and being anxious for these to be remedied. Nay, as the old hospital nurse did thirty years ago, she may even come to prey upon what is provided for her patients.

There is a third alternative: that she breaks her heart.

But the thing which always does happen is, that no woman really fit for the work will do it, or ought to do it.

To have a person fit to live in a home—and who would have any other?—and to create homes for the poor, for it is nothing less, you must have a home fit for her to live in.

If you give nurses a bad home, or no home at all, you will have only nurses who will live in a bad home, or no home at all.

They forget what a home is.

How, then, can they reform and recreate, as it were, the homes of the sick poor?

The very thing that we find in these poor sick is, that they lose the feeling of what it is to be clean. The district nurse has to show them their room clean for once; in other words, to do it herself, to sweep and dust away, to empty and wash out all the appalling dirt and foulness; to air and disinfect, rub the windows, sweep the fireplace, carry out and shake the