Mary F. Porter

“ My consciousness is mere awareness—a pleasant awareness of uncomplicated existence. In another moment or two it is a consciousness of a day’s work or pleasure ahead, the necessity of rising, dressing, planning the day, the alert reaction of pleasure or displeasure to what it is to bring, the effort to recall the dreams of sleep—the complicated consciousness of the mature man or woman. But I started the day with a mental condition close to pure sensation, a vague feeling of something different than what was just before. ”

“ When she can accept hardship, drudgery, weariness of mind and body and perhaps of soul, the nagging of unco-operative patients, and the demands on her sympathies of the suffering; when she can meet these as challenges to develop a strong will—a will not only to endure, but to find happiness and give service through it all—then the nurse has learned the art of making every circumstance a stepping-stone to mastery and achievement. ”

“ The irresponsibly happy ones are too often crushed and broken when life proves to bring loss and failure and disappointment; the morbid probably will cease some day to enjoy their melancholic moods, and be unable to find their way out of them. If both had learned to control attention, they might have been saved. The happy, care-free child of the light is at desperate loss when the sun he loves is obscured, if he has not learned to look upon the far side of the clouds to find that there they glow golden with the rays temporarily shut from him. ”

“ But there is another class whose attention also follows in the ways of least resistance; and life for them is a wallowing in the morbid and unwholesome. In them feeling is perverted, they seem to see life habitually through dark glasses; they passively attend to the sad, the distressing, sometimes the gruesome and the horrible with a sort of pallid joy in their own discolored images. The first group puts joy in all they see, because they are brimming full of joy themselves. These others find only the unwholesome in life because their minds are storehouses of it. ”

“ If it is a pleasant unex pected, we are plus in our enthusiasm, and people applaud; if the unpleasant unexpected, we fall short, and people deplore our weakness. If we learn our lesson of self-control and adaptability, and gain in beauty of character through experience, it has served a purpose. But the nurse deals with the average of human nature, and she finds their reaction faulty. Very often, if she is observant, she will discover that a patient responds in a very different way to some other nurse, who somehow finds that “trying” sick woman charming or thoughtful, likable or sweet. ”

“ The happiest baby you know is not sweet and winning to please you, but because he feels comfortable and happy and cannot keep from expressing it. His universe is his own little self and you exist only in your relation to him. If you give him pleasure he likes you; if pain, he does not want you. His mother often fails to please him, but satisfies him so much more frequently than anybody else that he loves her best. Then comes nurse or father—if he proves the satisfactory kind of father, or she a nurse he can love. To the baby whatever he happens to want is good. What is not desirable is bad. ”

“ We sometimes speak of one woman as a born nurse, and say of another, “She’s a good nurse, thoroughly conscientious, but not a natural one like Miss X.” It only means that Miss X’s main purpose in life has always been caring for the sick, while Miss Y’s secondary concern is that. There is a third, however, who may be sidetracked into nursing, but whose chiefest interest and attention in life has not been so much a certain profession or accomplishment, but a passion for people, with an ability to enter into their lives understandingly. She may not care for nursing in itself. ”

“ The green of the foliage, the blue of the sky, the arousing tang of the air, the birds, the sense of freedom—all go to the head like new wine. The abandon of joy is a normal response under the circumstances, now. It would hardly be normal to one whose habit it is to visit this same bit of woods every day, to one who loved it, but for whom it had lost the force of newness. ”

“ Her attitude is as sick as her body. How could it be otherwise?
Look about you from an aching mind and body, after days of suffering and sleeplessness, and unless you are a rare person and have a soul that sees the sunshine back of everything—you will find the world a place of torture. Look out from despair and loss of the ones you love best, or from failure of will to meet disaster, and everybody may be involved in bringing about your suffering, or in effecting your disgrace. ”

“ The patient’s attitude, when he is at all suggestible, is largely in the nurse’s hands, and she can make his illness a calamity by dishonest, fear-breeding, or suspicion-forming suggestion. After all, the whole question here is one of the normality of the nurse’s own outlook on life and people. The happier, truer, and more wholesome it is, the more really can she help her patient to both bodily and mental health. Of one thing let the overzealous nurse beware. Do not irritate your patient by a patent, blatant, hollow cheerfulness that any one of any sense knows is assumed for his benefit. ”

“ There is no better opportunity for will-training than the hospital affords the nurse. The constant necessity of acting against desire, of doing tasks which in themselves cannot be agreeable, calls for a developed will, while it gives it constant exercise. Moods of discouragement and depression cannot be indulged. The nurse must do her work no matter how tired or blue or “frazzled” she feels, if she is not too sick to be on duty; for all time lost, she knows, is to be made up to the hospital before training is completed. ”

“ That big, broken-arm case on the ward cursed you yesterday because you would not loosen his splints. And you rushed from the room angry and humiliated, wishing you could quit nursing forever, and asked to be moved because you had been insulted. But that man cannot harm you. He has never known a real lady in his life before. His training from childhood has been to regard women as chattels to do man’s bidding; his experience in life is that they usually do what he asks—women of his kind. Moreover, he has never had a serious pain before, and it is not to be endured. ”

“ But, while reason and judgment teach us to control the expression of certain feelings, they urge that this control be exercised in transforming those feelings into helpful ones and giving them an adequate outlet. Such a substitution has been suggested above. Let us not forget that nothing in existence is of personal value until it gives some one an emotion; that feeling is the beauty of life; that living, without the happy, wholesome affective glow, would not be worth the effort; that beauty and strength and sweetness of feeling make for a worthy self. ”

“ Look out on the world from the eyes of the immigrant who has lost all his illusions of the land where dollars grow on the street and where everyone has an equal chance to be president, and if you do not cringe in abject humility, you are not unlikely to be insufferably self-asserting, considering that the world has robbed you and that now it is your turn to get all that is coming to you. So you make loud demands in a rude, ordering voice. The nurse is there to wait upon you—and finally you will have your innings. ”

“ A new word which serves our purpose well has come into common use these last years, and we describe sleep as a state of rest of the conscious mind made possible as weariness overpowers the censor, and this guard at the gate naps. The censor is merely that mental activity which forces the mind to keen, alert, constructive attention during our waking hours, a guard who censors whatever enters the conscious mind and compares it with reality, forcing back all that is not of immediate use, or that is undesirable, or that contradicts established modes of life or thought. ”

“ But man only approximates the normal. The perfectly balanced man or woman is so rare as to be a marked person. The average intelligent individual only in general approximates this standard. He goes beyond it in spurts of untrammeled genius, to wrench lightning from the heavens, and to send his trains through the air; or he allows his feelings to dictate to his reason, and much of the time so exaggerates or depreciates the simple facts of life that the results of his reasoning no longer conform sufficiently to reality as to be thoroughly dependable. ”

“ We forget details we have intrusted to others as not a part of our responsibility. We forget the things which in no way concern us, in which we have no interest and about which we have no curiosity. And it is well that we do so. If it were not for the ability to forget, our minds would be like a room in which we have lived a lifetime, where we have left everything that has been brought into it since our birth. ”

“ But our tendency is to grow tired of calling back our wandering thoughts again and again to the thing that is hard, dry, or stupid. And we need more incentive than just the doing of the duty because it is to be done. We need a compelling interest in the goal to encourage our wills to concentration on the less interesting. Let us first think out the why of knowing anatomy if we are to be nurses. And if the profession of nursing is the goal, let anatomy become just the next stretch of the road that leads to it. ”

“ If the pessimistic, morbid one had looked away from the shadow to the sun it hid he, too, in the end might have seen with sane eyes and lived so wholesomely as to find all the good there was in life. Willed attention, rather than spineless feeling distractibility, might have saved him.
When thinking can be forced to follow where trained reason directs, and can be kept in that direction, the greatest problem of physical and nervous well being is solved. To the nurse there is no other principle of psychology so important. But no child ever had his attention diverted by reasoning alone. ”

“ Thinking is mind. Feeling is mind. Willing is mind. But for the sake of clearness we speak of feeling, thinking, and willing as being functions of mind. Mind acts by using these powers. But to what end does it act? What purpose does it serve? For these functions are not the reasons of being for the mind, even as motion —while the immediate purpose of the locomotive—is not its chief end. The steam engine may stand in the same spot while its wheels revolve madly; it may move along the tracks alone, and accomplish nothing ”

“ The Lord is just waiting to save this dejected victim of alcohol from his hateful enemy who has made him what he is at this hour, and will forgive all his sottishness, his sins. He will be respected; he can command the love of his family again. He will no longer be a slave, but a free man. Right now, respect of the world and love of family and friends, and cleanness, and the forgiveness of a good God are infinitely more interesting than this splitting headache, this horrible sick feeling. ”

“ If we would help ourselves or our patients whose memories are faulty, and who make them worse by their continual fretting over their disability, we must train ourselves to be willing to forget all that does not in the least concern our interests or those of the people about us, and does not add anything desirable to our knowledge. Thus we may avoid overcrowding the mind. But when we would remember let us give our whole active attention at the moment of presentation of the new stimulus, and immediately tie it up with something in past experience ”

“ The nurse can only sense the strength of the influence of heredity and environment and habit of thought, which would give the explanation of many things in her patient’s attitude. Nor can she realize just what shade of meaning certain phrases and words have for her charge. To the nervously overwrought person the most innocent reference—father, sister, wife, home—may bring concepts that are unbearable. The association of the word may make for deep unhappiness, of which the nurse knows nothing. ”

“ Mind, we found, is born in the form of consciousness when the outside world impresses itself upon the brain-cells by way of the senses. This consciousness, observation and experiment prove, is first a feeling one, later a feeling-thinking-willing one. The mind, then, is really the activity of the brain as it feels, as it thinks, as it wills. We express this in descriptive terms when we speak of mind as the flow of consciousness, the sum of all mental associations, conscious and unconscious. For mind is never a final thing. ”