WHAT IS A NURSE?

This book takes away all the poetry of nursing, it will be said, and makes it the most prosaic of human things. My dear sister, there is nothing in the world, except perhaps education, so much the reverse of prosaic—or which requires so much power of throwing yourself into others' feelings which you have never felt,—and if you have none of this power, you had better let nursing alone. The very alphabet of a nurse is to be able to interpret every change which comes over a patient's countenance, without causing him the exertion of saying what he feels. What would many a nurse do otherwise than she does, if her patient were a valuable piece of furniture or a sick cow? I do not know. Yet a nurse must be something more than a lift or a broom. A patient is not merely a piece of furniture, to be kept clean and ranged against the wall, and saved from injury or breakage—though to judge from what many a nurse does and does not do you would say he was. But watch a good old-fashioned monthly nurse with the infant; she is firmly convinced, not only that she understands everything it “says,” and that no one else can understand it, but also that it understands everything she says, and understands no one else.