[Sidenote:  What a confidential nurse should be.]

And remember every nurse should be one who is to be depended upon, in other words, capable of being a “confidential” nurse.  She does not know how soon she may find herself placed in such a situation; she must be no gossip, no vain talker; she should never answer questions about her sick except to those who have a right to ask them; she must, I need not say, be strictly sober and honest; but more than this, she must be a religious and devoted woman; she must have a respect for her own calling, because God’s precious gift of life is often literally placed in her hands; she must be a sound, and close, and quick observer; and she must be a woman of delicate and decent feeling.

[Sidenote:  Observation is for practical purposes.]

To return to the question of what observation is for:—­It would really seem as if some had considered it as its own end, as if detection, not cure, was their business; nay more, in a recent celebrated trial, three medical men, according to their own account, suspected poison, prescribed for dysentery, and left the patient to the poisoner.  This is an extreme case.  But in a small way, the same manner of acting falls under the cognizance of us all.  How often the attendants of a case have stated that they knew perfectly well that the patient could not get well in such an air, in such a room, or under such circumstances, yet have gone on dosing him with medicine, and making no effort to remove the poison from him, or him from the poison which they knew was killing him; nay, more, have sometimes not so much as mentioned their conviction in the right quarter—­that is, to the only person who could act in the matter.

CONCLUSION.

[Sidenote:  Sanitary nursing as essential in surgical as in medical cases, but not to supersede surgical nursing.]

The whole of the preceding remarks apply even more to children and to puerperal women than to patients in general.  They also apply to the nursing of surgical, quite as much as to that of medical cases.  Indeed, if it be possible, cases of external injury require such care even more than sick.  In surgical wards, one duty of every nurse certainly is prevention.  Fever, or hospital gangrene, or pyaemia, or purulent discharge of some kind may else supervene.  Has she a case of compound fracture, of amputation, or of erysipelas, it may depend very much on how she looks upon the things enumerated in these notes, whether one or other of these hospital diseases attacks her patient or not.  If she allows her ward to become filled with the peculiar close foetid smell, so apt to be produced among surgical cases, especially where there is great suppuration and discharge, she may see a vigorous patient in the prime of life gradually sink and die where, according to all human probability, he ought to have recovered.  The surgical nurse must be ever on the watch, ever on her guard, against want of cleanliness, foul air, want of light, and of warmth.