Notes on Nursing: What It Is and What It Is Not: The Original Book on Nursing - Softcover

Nightingale's influential Notes on Nursing was required reading at her nursing school and a popular success. Emphasising the need for nurses to observe, ventilate, clean, and monitor diet, her book remains popular even today. It is also hailed for its sensitive instructions on interacting with the sick.

Preface

The following notes are by no means intended as a rule of thought by which nurses can teach themselves to nurse, still less as a manual to teach nurses to nurse. They are meant simply to give hints for thought to women who have personal charge of the health of others.

Every woman, or at least almost every woman in England, has, at one time or another of her life, charge of the personal health of somebody, whether child or invalid - in other words, every woman is a nurse.  Every day sanitary knowledge, or the knowledge of nursing - or in other words, of how to put the constitution in such a state as that it will have no disease, or that it can recover from disease, takes a higher place.  It is recognized as the knowledge which every one ought to have - distinct from medical knowledge, which only a profession
can have.

If, then, every woman must at some time or other of her life, become a nurse, i.e., have charge of somebody's health, how immense and how valuable would be the produce of her united experience if every woman would think how to nurse.

I do not pretend to teach her how, I ask her to teach herself, and for this purpose I venture to give her some hints.

Florence Nightingale
London, 1898 --Editor