Page:On Trained Nursing for the Sick Poor.pdf/8

6 Everybody knows how easy it is to sink to the lowest—'it is all the way down hill,' as I heard an old man say—how hard to rise to the highest!

A first beginning has been made to the district London nurse the real help and the real home which are the secret of the success of active religious sisterhoods abroad—together with hethe [sic] real independence, enterprise, indomitable pluck, self reliance, capability of training all the powers to the best efficiency, which are the secret of the success of the highest British character, and all of which are wanted in the crusade against dirt and fever nests—the crusade to let light and air and cleanliness into the worst rooms of the worst places of sick London.

To set these poor sick people going again, with a sound and clean house, as well as with a sound body and mind, is about as great benefit as can be given them—worth acres of gifts and relief.

This is depauperising them.

But to train and provide such District Nurses and such District Homes costs money.

What a District Nurse is to do.

A nurse is, first, to nurse.

Secondly, to nurse the room as well as the patient—to put the room into nursing order. That is, to make the room such as a patient can recover in; to bring care and cleanliness into it, and to teach the inmates to keep up that care and cleanliness.

Thirdly, to bring such sanitary defects as produce sickness and death, and which can only be remedied by the public officer, to the notice of the public whom it concerns.

A nurse cannot be a cook (though 'sweet Jack Falstaff' says she is), a relieving-officer, district-visitor, letter-writer,