By this I do not mean that the nurse is always to blame.  Bad sanitary, bad architectural, and bad administrative arrangements often make it impossible to nurse.  But the art of nursing ought to include such arrangements as alone make what I understand by nursing, possible.

The art of nursing, as now practised, seems to be expressly constituted to unmake what God had made disease to be, viz., a reparative process.

[Sidenote:  Nursing ought to assist the reparative process.]

To recur to the first objection.  If we are asked, Is such or such a disease a reparative process?  Can such an illness be unaccompanied with suffering?  Will any care prevent such a patient from suffering this or that?—­I humbly say, I do not know.  But when you have done away with all that pain and suffering, which in patients are the symptoms not of their disease, but of the absence of one or all of the above-mentioned essentials to the success of Nature’s reparative processes, we shall then know what are the symptoms of and the sufferings inseparable from the disease.

Another and the commonest exclamation which will be instantly made is—­Would you do nothing, then, in cholera, fever, &c.?—­so deep-rooted and universal is the conviction that to give medicine is to be doing something, or rather everything; to give air, warmth, cleanliness, &c., is to do nothing.  The reply is, that in these and many other similar diseases the exact value of particular remedies and modes of treatment is by no means ascertained, while there is universal experience as to the extreme importance of careful nursing in determining the issue of the disease.

[Sidenote:  Nursing the well.]

II.  The very elements of what constitutes good nursing are as little understood for the well as for the sick.  The same laws of health or of nursing, for they are in reality the same, obtain among the well as among the sick.  The breaking of them produces only a less violent consequence among the former than among the latter,—­and this sometimes, not always.

It is constantly objected,—­“But how can I obtain this medical knowledge?  I am not a doctor.  I must leave this to doctors.”

[Sidenote:  Little understood.]

Oh, mothers of families!  You who say this, do you know that one in every seven infants in this civilized land of England perishes before it is one year old?  That, in London, two in every five die before they are five years old?  And, in the other great cities of England, nearly one out of two?[1] “The life duration of tender babies” (as some Saturn, turned analytical chemist, says) “is the most delicate test” of sanitary conditions.  Is all this premature suffering and death necessary?  Or did Nature intend mothers to be always accompanied by doctors?  Or is it better to learn the piano-forte than to learn the laws which subserve the preservation of offspring?

Macaulay somewhere says, that it is extraordinary that, whereas the laws of the motions of the heavenly bodies, far removed as they are from us, are perfectly well understood, the laws of the human mind, which are under our observation all day and every day, are no better understood than they were two thousand years ago.