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Workhouse Nursing: The story of a successful experiment

Chapter 2: Footnotes
By Florence Nightingale
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Health & MedicineHistory - BritishHistory - Modern (1750+)

About This Book

The work documents a municipal experiment to introduce trained nurses into a workhouse infirmary, presenting the reasons for reform, the administrative arrangements proposed, and the results observed. It outlines deficiencies in relying on untrained pauper attendants, argues that better nursing is both humane and economical, and describes how guardians, medical officers, and a superintendent with a nursing staff were organized to implement change. The text reproduces supportive correspondence from leading public-health and nursing authorities, reports improved patient care and ward management, and offers practical guidance for applying the approach elsewhere.

Footnotes

[1]Liverpool is a seaport, and a receptacle where the poverty and vice of Great Britain and Ireland seem to accumulate; and it is probably on this account that the able-bodied female paupers are peculiarly vicious and worthless.
[2]Among the replies of the London medical officers, one which seemed especially to impress the Sub-Committee was given by the senior honorary medical officer of St. Thomas’s. Mr. Hagger asked him, “If you had to cure the sick by contract at so much a head, and had to choose between unpaid pauper nurses allotted to you gratis, or paying yourself for skilled nurses, which would you choose?” “To pay for skilled nurses, certainly,” was the unhesitating answer.
[3]In the opinion of the medical men of the Liverpool Workhouse Hospital, 647 of its present number of patients would be admissible to an ordinary hospital, and
Men—Medical 40
” Surgical 80
Women—Medical 40
” Surgical 60
220 would not be admissible.
[4]In a training school for superior nurses, it will never be desirable to employ pauper under-nurses, as they interfere with the efficiency of the probationers, who are being trained as superior nurses. The latter are apt to delegate to the paupers much of the hard but most instructive part of their work. In ordinary workhouse hospitals, when there are no probationers, a certain number of pauper assistants may perhaps be useful in aiding thoroughly trained nurses.

LONDON: R. CLAY, SON, AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS.

Transcriber’s Notes

  • Retained publication information from the printed exemplar (this eBook is in the public domain in the country of publication.)
  • Only in the text versions, delimited italicized text with _underscores_.
  • Silently corrected several typos.