MODERN NURSING. 785 



to repair the effects of ignorance, the only teacher the public have, and 

 will have, is the trained nurse. Ten or twenty families may enjoy her 

 presence annually, ten or twenty mothers will learn simple and impor- 

 tant truths, knowledge will increase, and prevention of disease will 

 become a possibility. Enjoyable and useful as the service of a trained 

 nurse is in an individual case of sickness, her services to the commu- 

 nity are very much greater, by virtue of her theoretical and practical 

 teaching. May I tell you what a good trained nurse may teach, and 

 can teach ? How to recognize a fever, how to compare the local tem- 

 peratures of the several parts of the body, and how to equalize them ; 

 she knows that ever so many feeble children might have been saved, 

 if but the feet and legs had not been allowed to get cold ; how to 

 bathe, when, and when to stop ; how to regulate the position of the 

 head I remember quite well the case of inflammatory delirium which 

 would always be relieved by propping up the head how to treat in- 

 telligently an attack of fainting; how to render cow's milk digestible 

 by repeated boiling, or lime-water, or table-salt, or farinaceous admix- 

 tures ; how to feed in case of diarrhoea ; how to refuse food in case of 

 vomiting ; how to apply and when to remove cold to the head ; how 

 to ventilate a room without draught ; and a thousand other things. 

 She will also use her knowledge and influence in weaning the public 

 of nostrums, concerning which hardly anything is known except what 

 you have to pay for the promises of the label. She will break the 

 public of the indiscriminate use of quinia, with its dangers possibly 

 for life ; cure you of the tendency of making the diagnosis of malaria 

 the scapegoat of every unfinished or impossible diagnosis ; she will 

 teach you that the frequent and reckless domestic use of chlorate of 

 potassium leads to many a case of ailment, to chronic poisoning, possi- 

 bly in the shape of Bright's disease or to acute poisoning with unavoid- 

 able death. These are but very few of the things she can do, and but 

 a little of the knowledge she can not but distribute. With the aid of 

 the class of women who frequent our training-schools, the public at 

 large must and will gain, in a short time. Let the number of the 

 schools increase, and increase the number of pupils, and every one of 

 them will be a teacher and an apostle of sound information on sanitary 

 and hygienic subjects. And let nobody leave this place to-night with- 

 out intending to aid an institution as helpful as this. 



Will the pupils come ? Certainly they will. There is an increas- 

 ing demand for their services. Many times had I to wait a day or two 

 before any of the schools could accommodate me. There is no fear 

 that there ever will be too many good nurses. There is fear, either, that 

 many persons of inferior intelligence and morals will present themselves 

 for or obtain admission to a school. By attending the suffering, it is 

 true, many a crude or brutal nature is ennobled ; but I should not ad- 

 vise to run the risk of admitting that class at the expense of the sick, 

 or of a rising and beneficent profession. The occasional specimens of 



VOL. XXIII. 50 



