Page:Rural Hygiene - Florence Nightingale.pdf/24

 4. (In answer to many questions asked.) —The questions asked have been mainly: How to begin? What is your plan for Health-at-Home instruction and training the Health Missioners to train the cottage mothers in their homes: it is altogether different from nursing disease: it is preventing disease. The answer must needs be somewhat dry:

(1) First and foremost the pivot must be: a rural Medical Officer of Health chosen for fitness and experience by the proper local authority.

(2) The keys to the whole situation are the educated women desirous of becoming Health Missioners, to whom lectures, training in the village itself, are given by the earnest Medical Officer of Health.

(2a) The lectures by the Medical Officer to include elementary physiology: i.e. a simple explanation of the organs of the body—how each affects the health of the body, and how each can be kept in order. This constitutes the science of Hygiene, framed so as to give the practical scientific basis on which popular familiar teaching to village mothers and girls can be given. Other ladies may be admitted to this course of not less than fifteen lectures.

(2b) The Medical Officer of Health gives further instruction in classes to those who wish to qualify as Health Missioners, both by oral instruction and papers.

(2c) The Medical Officer now takes those who have attended the classes into the villages to visit the cottages, and shows them what to observe and how to visit.

If the Medical Officer is himself in touch with the