[Sidenote:  Reckless amateur physicking by women.  Real knowledge of the laws of health alone can check this.]

(1.) It is often said by men, that it is unwise to teach women anything about these laws of health, because they will take to physicking,—­that there is a great deal too much of amateur physicking as it is, which is indeed true.  One eminent physician told me that he had known more calomel given, both at a pinch and for a continuance, by mothers, governesses, and nurses, to children than he had ever heard of a physician prescribing in all his experience.  Another says, that women’s only idea in medicine is calomel and aperients.  This is undeniably too often the case.  There is nothing ever seen in any professional practice like the reckless physicking by amateur females.[39] But this is just what the really experienced and observing nurse does not do; she neither physics herself nor others.  And to cultivate in things pertaining to health observation and experience in women who are mothers, governesses or nurses, is just the way to do away with amateur physicking, and if the doctors did but know it, to make the nurses obedient to them,—­helps to them instead of hindrances.  Such education in women would indeed diminish the doctor’s work—­but no one really believes that doctors wish that there should be more illness, in order to have more work.

[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.