[Sidenote:  What pathology teaches.  What observation alone teaches.  What medicine does.  What nature alone does.]

(2.) It is often said by women, that they cannot know anything of the laws of health, or what to do to preserve their children’s health, because they can know nothing of “Pathology,” or cannot “dissect,”—­a confusion of ideas which it is hard to attempt to disentangle.

Pathology teaches the harm that disease has done.  But it teaches nothing more.  We know nothing of the principle of health, the positive of which pathology is the negative, except from observation and experience.  And nothing but observation and experience will teach us the ways to maintain or to bring back the state of health.  It is often thought that medicine is the curative process.  It is no such thing; medicine is the surgery of functions, as surgery proper is that of limbs and organs.  Neither can do anything but remove obstructions; neither can cure; nature alone cures.  Surgery removes the bullet out of the limb, which is an obstruction to cure, but nature heals the wound.  So it is with medicine; the function of an organ becomes obstructed; medicine, so far as we know, assists nature to remove the obstruction, but does nothing more.  And what nursing has to do in either case, is to put the patient in the best condition for nature to act upon him.  Generally, just the contrary is done.  You think fresh air, and quiet and cleanliness extravagant, perhaps dangerous, luxuries, which should be given to the patient only when quite convenient, and medicine the sine qua non, the panacea.  If I have succeeded in any measure in dispelling this illusion, and in showing what true nursing is, and what it is not, my object will have been answered.

Now for the caution:—­

(3.) It seems a commonly received idea among men and even among women themselves that it requires nothing but a disappointment in love, the want of an object, a general disgust, or incapacity for other things, to turn a woman into a good nurse.

This reminds one of the parish where a stupid old man was set to be schoolmaster because he was “past keeping the pigs.”

Apply the above receipt for making a good nurse to making a good servant.  And the receipt will be found to fail.

Yet popular novelists of recent days have invented ladies disappointed in love or fresh out of the drawing-room turning into the war-hospitals to find their wounded lovers, and when found, forthwith abandoning their sick-ward for their lover, as might be expected.  Yet in the estimation of the authors, these ladies were none the worse for that, but on the contrary were heroines of nursing.

What cruel mistakes are sometimes made by benevolent men and women in matters of business about which they can know nothing and think they know a great deal.