Florence Nightingale
(12 May 1820 - 13 Aug 1910)
British nurse and statistician who pioneered the improvement of nursing practices in Crimean War, and continued to raise respect for nurses as medical professionals.
In a 1852 letter, Nightingale records the opinion of a young surgeon:
The account he gives of nurses beats everything that even I know of. This young prophet says that they are all drunkards, without exception, Sisters and all, and that there are but two whom the surgeon can trust to give the patients their medicines.
— Florence Nightingale
Letter to Miss H. Bonham Carter (8 Jan 1852), quoted in Edward Tyas Cook, The Life of Florence Nightingale (1914), Vol. 1, 116.
For it may safely be said, not that the habit of ready and correct observation will by itself make us useful nurses, but that without it we shall be useless with all our devotion.
— Florence Nightingale
Notes on Nursing: What it is and what it is not (1860), 160.
Go into a room where the shutters are always shut (in a sick-room or a bed-room there should never be shutters shut), and though the room be uninhabited—though the air has never been polluted by the breathing of human beings, you will observe a close, musty smell of corrupt air—of air unpurified by the effect of the sun's rays.
— Florence Nightingale
Notes on Nursing: What it is and what it is not (1860), 120.
I use the word nursing for want of a better. It has been limited to signify little more than the administration of medicines and the application of poultices. It ought to signify the proper use of fresh air, light, warmth, cleanliness, quiet, and the proper selection and administration of diet—all at the least expense of vital power to the patient.
— Florence Nightingale
Notes on Nursing: What it is and what it is not (1860), 2.
It is the unqualified result of all my experience with the sick that, second only to their need of fresh air, is their need of light; that, after a close room, what hurts them most is a dark room and that it is not only light but direct sunlight they want.
— Florence Nightingale
Notes on Nursing: What it is and what it is not (1860), 120.
It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very first requirement in a Hospital that it should do the sick no harm.
— Florence Nightingale
First sentence of Preface to Notes on Hospitals (1859, 3rd. Ed.,1863), iii.
Let people who have to observe sickness and death look back and try to register in their observation the appearances which have preceded relapse, attack or death, and not assert that there were none, or that there were not the right ones. A want of the habit of observing conditions and an inveterate habit of taking averages are each of them often equally misleading.
— Florence Nightingale
Notes on Nursing: What it is, and What it is Not (1860), 67.
No man, not even a doctor, ever gives any other definition of what a nurse should be than this—'devoted and obedient.' This definition would do just as well for a porter. It might even do for a horse. It would not do for a policeman.
— Florence Nightingale
Notes on Nursing: what it is and what it is not (1860), 200.
People say the effect is only on the mind. It is no such thing. The effect is on the body, too. Little as we know about the way in which we are affected by form, by color, and light, we do know this, that they have an actual physical effect. Variety of form and brilliancy of color in the objects presented to patients, are actual means of recovery.
— Florence Nightingale
Notes on Nursing: What it is and what it is not (1860), 84.
The first possibility of rural cleanliness lies in water supply.
— Florence Nightingale
Letter to the Medical Officer of Health (Nov 1891)
The only English patients I have ever known refuse tea, have been typhus cases; and the first sign of their getting better was their craving again for tea.
— Florence Nightingale
'Tea, Coffee, and Cocoa for the Sick', Scientific American New Series, 3, 1, p. 3 (2 Jul 1860)
The very elements of what constitutes good nursing are as little understood for the well as for the sick. The same laws of health, or of nursing, for they are in reality the same, obtain among the well as among the sick.
— Florence Nightingale
Notes on Nursing: What it is and what it is not (1860), 4.
To understand God's thoughts one must study statistics ... the measure of his purpose.
— Florence Nightingale
In Edward Tyas Cook and Rosalind Nightingale Nash, A Short Life of Florence Nightingale (1936). Also in David T. Mauger and Gordon L. Kauffman, Jr., 'Statistical Analysis—Specific Statistical Tests: Indications For Use'. In Wiley W. Souba (ed.), Douglas Wayne Wilmore (ed.), Surgical Research (2001), 1201.
When you see the natural and almost universal craving in English sick for their 'tea,' you cannot but feel that nature knows what she is about. ... [A] little tea or coffee restores them. ... [T]here is nothing yet discovered which is a substitute to the English patient for his cup of tea.
— Florence Nightingale
'Tea, Coffee, and Cocoa for the Sick', Scientific American New Series, 3, 1, p. 3 (2 Jul 1860)
Source : http://www.todayinsci.com/N/Nightingale_Florence/NightingaleFlorence-Quotations.htm
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