Notes on Nursing: What It Is, and What It Is Not

[Sidenote: Accidents arising from the nurse's want of observation.] Again, a patient not usually confined to bed, is compelled by an attack of diarrhoea, vomiting, or other accident, to keep his bed for a few days; he gets up for the first time, and the nurse lets him go into another room, without coming in, a few minutes afterwards, to look after him. It never occurs to her that he is quite certain to be faint, or cold, or to want something. She says, as her excuse, Oh, he does not like to be fidgetted after. Yes, he said so some weeks ago; but he never said he did not like to be "fidgetted after," when he is in the state he is in now; and if he did, you ought to make some excuse to go in to him. More patients have been lost in this way than is at all generally known, viz., from relapses brought on by being left for an hour or two faint, or cold, or hungry, after getting up for the first time. [Sidenote: Is the faculty of observing on the decline?] Yet it appears that scarcely any improvement in the faculty of observing is being made. Vast has been the increase of knowledge in pathology-- that science which teaches us the final change produced by disease on the human frame--scarce any in the art of observing the signs of the change while in progress. Or, rather, is it not to be feared that observation, as an essential part of medicine, has been declining?