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34 pages 1 hour read

Florence Nightingale

Notes on Nursing

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1860

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Themes

The Vocation of Nursing

Nursing is important because it concerns not only “the administration of medicines and the application” (5) but also “the proper use of fresh air, light, warmth, cleanliness, quiet, and the proper selection and administration of diet” (5). Everything that contributes to health and wellbeing is a nurse’s duty. Nothing that helps a patient recover falls outside the definition of nursing. Nightingale writes, “If a nurse declines to do these kinds of things for her patient ‘because it is not her business,’ I should say that nursing was not her calling” (17).

This calling is essential to Nightingale and is the only thing that can keep the nurse from quitting the profession—and the only thing that can make a truly excellent nurse: “What is it to feel a calling for any thing? Is it not to do your work in it to satisfy your own high idea of what is the right, the best, and not because you will be ‘found out’ if you don’t do it?” (99). Excellence in nursing can’t be coaxed into being; it must simply be doing what’s best in and of itself.

When nurses feel that they’ve hit a wall in their profession and have nothing else to give, they must ask if they pursued the art of nursing as a job or as a calling. In many instances, of course, nursing is just that: a job. In these instances, it’s impossible to tell if the job is worth pushing forward with. When one pursues nursing as a calling, it stops being a job and becomes an art—the outpouring of the nurse whose only desire is the excellent care and recovery of a patient.

Human Flourishing

Related to Nightingale’s view of nursing as a vocation is her insistence that nursing is dedicated solely to human flourishing. As she says, nursing is more than the administration of medicine and the like but concerns everything that helps make someone healthy and well: The nurse’s priority should be all things that help the patient recover.

For example, the essentials of human living are central: fresh air, pure water, and clean living conditions. While these things might seem common, they’re the most essential elements of human health and happiness. In many cases, the lack of these simple factors causes a patient’s illness. Rather than seeing maladies as symptoms of a diagnosed illness, they can often be traced to a lack of the necessities of wellbeing.

As these necessities are fundamental to human health, the nurse’s duty is to ensure that the patient recovers in an environment conducive to health. All things in this environment are the nurse’s domain. In fact, “it is the invariable sign of a bad nurse and manager when her excuse that such a person was neglected or such a thing was left undone, is, that she was ‘out of the way’” (33). A patient’s best life being at stake is why the nurse performs her duty in the first place.

The Importance of Mental Health in Recovery

Related both to the reality of nursing as a vocation and the concern for human flourishing is the insistence on viewing patients in the entirety of their humanity—as someone who needs care and nursing back to health. Insisting that nursing is more than just applying medical remedies, Nightingale holds that the nurse is responsible for the care of the patient as a whole and that this is a human right and not merely what’s desirable for a diagnosis.

Fresh air, pure water, a clean, warm room, and a fresh bed are essential. In addition, conditions must support mental health: natural sunlight, peace and quiet, and the absence of visitors who might put unnecessary stress and anxiety on a patient. Nightingale observes: “Put the pale withering plant and human being into the sun, and, if not too far gone, each will recover health and spirit” (64). She points out that all patients instinctively lie or sit with their faces toward the sun, as though it’s deeply necessary to experience as much as possible.

Additionally, Nightingale addresses the problem of visitors who might disturb the patient. She notes that patients always wish to avoid troublesome conversations (in which visitors express hope) and that many patients prefer genuine dialogue about their condition rather than empty platitudes: “He feels what a convenience it would be,” she says, “if there were any single person to whom he could speak simply and openly, without pulling the string upon himself of this shower-bath of silly hopes and encouragements; to whom he could express his wishes and directions […]” (72). Far ahead of her time, Nightingale consistently posits that a patient’s mental wellbeing is crucial to recovery, insisting that the mental aspect of healing from illness is just as important as the physical aspect and that health simply won’t return without care for this aspect of the patient’s condition.

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