Florence Nightingale

“ As if a woman could undertake hospital management, or the management of a single ward—in which, more than in anything else, hundreds, or even thousands, of lives are involved—without having learnt anything about it, any more than a man can undertake to be, for example, professor of mathematics without having learnt mathematics! ”

“ Why are there so few of you? We hear so much of "idle hands and unsatisfied hearts," and nowhere more than in England. All England is ringing with the cry for "Woman's Work" and Woman's Mission." Why are there so few to do the "work"? We used to hear of people giving their blood for their country. ”

“ Let us add living flowers to her grave, "lilies with full hands,"—not fleeting primroses, not dying flowers. Let us bring the work of our hands, and our heads, and hearts, to finish her work which God has so blessed. ”

“ If anything ought to nerve the official crowd of the Poor-Law Board, and us women on the non-official side, to resolve on fighting this holy crusade until all the sick poor of these kingdoms are cared for as children of God, it is surely the fact that so precious a life has been sacrificed in discharging a duty which, if the country had recognized it as a duty, ought to have been unnecessary after three centuries of a Poor Law. ”

“ Unless a superintendent herself knows what the nurses she has to superintend ought to do, she is always at a loss. She is never sure of her work. She must be herself the measure of their work. In a work-house, she said, this must be preëminently the case—more even than in a hospital—because on a work-house infirmary matron fall many more of the decisions as to petty medical matters than on a London hospital matron, where the medical and surgical staff are much more numerous and constant. ”

“ We do not say, as was said to women in my day, Look about you, and see if you can catch painfully a few straws of practical experience or knowledge in the wind. We are not now inviting women to a life, without being able to show—Here is the training all ready, if you choose to have it; here is an independent and well-paid calling waiting to receive you when you leave your training, if only you have fitted yourselves for it. I might say more than this; I might say we are beset with offers of places for trained nurses and trained superintendents, and we cannot fill them. ”

“ But there have been martyrs in it. The founders and pioneers of almost everything that is best must be martyrs. But these are the last ever to think themselves so. And for all there must be constant self-sacrifice for the good of all. But the distinction is this—the life is not a sacrifice; it is the engaging in an occupation the happiest of any. But the strong, the healthy wills in any life must determine to pursue the common good at any personal cost—at daily sacrifice. ”

“ To answer the calls upon us for trained matrons or superintendents, as well as for trained nurses, for hospitals, and nursing institutions of all kinds, we can scarcely obtain anything like sufficient living materials. By all who have really labored in these and similar fields the same tale is told. People cry out and deplore the unremunerative employment for women. The true want is the other way. Women really trained, and capable for good work, can command any wages or salaries. ”

“ I have seen somewhere in print, that nursing is a profession to be followed by the "lower middle-class." Shall we say that painting or sculpture is a profession to be followed by the "lower middle-class"? ”

“ Nothing but the feeling that it is God's work more than ours—that we are seeking His success and not our success—and that we have trained and fitted ourselves by every means which He has granted us to carry out His work, will enable us to go on.
Three fourths of the whole mischief in women's lives arises from their excepting themselves from the rules of training considered needful for men. ”

“ We now have in England this most extraordinary state of things—England, who is, or thinks herself the most religious and the most commercial country in the world. New hospitals, new asylums, new nurses' homes, and societies for nursing the sick poor at home, are rising everywhere. People are always willing to give their money for these. The Poor-Law Board, the Boards of Guardians, are willing, or compelled, to spend money for separate asylums for work-house sick. ”

“ Let the religious motive be so strong that it will enable you to train yourself so as to earn the highest pay for the best work. The pay is offered; it is the trained workers we cannot find to be paid.
Thirty years ago, if a girl wished for training, there was none to be had. I can truly say there was no training to be had to fit a woman thoroughly for any life whatever. Now the training is offered, there are but few to take it. ”

“ For the efficiency, comfort, and success of a nursing staff thus sent out it is, of course, essential that the trained nurses should not go without the trained superintendent, nor the trained superintendent without the trained nurses.
There are two requisites in a superintendent: 1. Character and business capacity. 2. Training and knowledge. Without the second, the first is of little avail. Without the first, the second is only partially useful; for we can't bring out of a person what is not in her. We can only become responsible for the training. ”

“ If by amateurs in art or in nursing are meant those who take it up for play, it is not art at all, it is not nursing at all. You never yet made an artist by paying him well. But—an artist ought to be well paid. ”

“ Thomas' Hospital Training School—subject to the judgment of the matron, and subject to certain conditions being accepted or fulfilled by the probationer—a limited number of probationers to be trained as nurses for the sick poor. Hitherto we have been compelled to confine ourselves to sending out staffs of nurses to hospitals or work-houses, with a view to their becoming, in their turn, centres of training, because the applications we receive for trained nurses are far more numerous and urgent than we have power to answer. ”

“ If the lady, in training for a superintendent, can pay for her own board, it is, of course, right that she should do so (everything else is, in all cases, given free) . At the present time we are able to admit a few gentlewomen free of all expense, and with the small salary above mentioned during the year of training. We have applications from institutions in want of trained superintendents (or matrons) , and trained head nurses for hospitals in India and in England, and for a large work-house infirmary. ”

“ Or shall we say that God is only to be served in his sick by the "lower middle-class"? The poorest child without shoes, the most highly-born, have alike followed all these professions with success, have alike had to undergo the hardest work, if for success. ”

“ May we not hope that in this country our Lord, were He to come again, would say, instead of "Ye cannot serve God and Mammon,"—Ye can by serving God command that mammon necessary for the workers who must also eat—themselves and their families. ”

“ This Act, although miserably inadequate, still inaugurates a new order of things, namely, that the work-house sick shall not be work-house inmates, not be cared for as mere work-house inmates, but that they shall be poor sick, cared for as sick who are to be cured, if possible, and treated as becomes a Christian country, if they cannot be cured. ”

“ All the old folks went out to meet her—old men and women of near ninety years of age who could scarcely move on crutches. The young men who had been her own scholars in her big boys' evening class, went a distance to meet the funeral, and carried in the coffin themselves. ”