For the exercise on Friday, I looked at the works of Florence Nightingale. I spent the majority of the time looking at Nightingale's Notes on Nursing, so I am going to focus this blog post only on that text, but I found the text very interesting and feel that it says a lot about Nightingale and what she believed in. Nightingale's collection would be useful to any type of health-related research, for she thoroughly discusses the simple measures of good healthcare that are often overlooked, such as proper household sanitation, dieting, and rest. Nightingale wrote these texts to inform people of how to administer good healthcare both to others and to themselves, not to teach them how to be a nurse, but to offer them useful hints, as she states in the Preface of Notes on Nursing. She organizes her arguments by first giving a general argument that sums up all of her main ideas, and then focusing in on each specific argument in numerical chapters. For example, in Notes on Nursing, she includes an introduction section- "Notes on Nursing: What It Is, and What It Is Not," and then goes on to include chapters focusing on each specific aspect- one on noise, one on sleep, one on lighting, one on personal cleanliness, etc. Distinguishing features of the text include an appendix containing two useful tables, one containing the age distribution of nurses in Great Britain (how many of each age group), and the other the distribution of nurses ages 20 years and upward throughout Great Britain (how many in each area).
Nightingale's larger argument in this text is simple- many people in the 19th century believed that the health of their children, and of all people for that matter, is completely beyond their control, similar to the weather, as Nightingale states in the Introduction section of the text. She is arguing that this is not the case, and that taking simple measures in daily life can make all the difference in your child's health and in your own. Chapter II of the text, "Health of Houses," supports this argument by discussing five principle aspects of a healthy household: 1) Pure air, 2) Pure water, 3) Efficient drainage, 4) Cleanliness, 5) Light. She goes into detail on each of these aspects and explains the ways that these five simple factors contribute greatly to the health of the household's inhabitants. Although something like this may seem insignificant in the larger scope of her project, Nightingale seems to build up her project on health administration by focusing on such simple aspects of healthcare like this.
One question that this text has raised for me and made me curious about is, what was the ultimate goal of Nightingale's whole health administration project, beyond what is evident in her works like Notes on Nursing?
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Cara, I was ble to read Nightingale as well and ironically the same question came to my head. I was only able to read chapter 1 of "Introduction to Female Nursing into Military Hospitals." She actually stated her objective of reforming the military hospitals, which was-"the main object I concieve to be, to improve hospital nursing and to do this by improving or contributing towards the improvement of the class of hospital nurses, whether nurses or head nurses." It is evident that she was very interested in helping others to decrease teh risk of various diseases by doing small things that others would not suspect to help positvely with their health.
ReplyDeleteMaybe she was interested in doing such as in the readings that you went over but within hoseholds as well. But the question still remains what was the larger goal of the whole health administration project.
Yeah, that does seem like a productive question. I guess I had never thought to ask, since Nightingale's immediate context seemed to be making a report for the Secretary of War. But Cara and Ra'Quell, your discussion of the organization of her chapters does seem to point to other purposes and uses for her information--if not for the actual book, then at least the actual categorization of healthcare into domestic topics. Is this pretty consistent among all three of her books? Is it consistent among other healthcare books?
ReplyDelete-Dr. Graban
As I read your post Cara, I became curious as to whether Florence Nightingale had any writings about the Contagious Disease Acts. (These were the ones I read on Friday.) I know that this question does wander away from the texts we were given to read, but it could lead to some interesting interactions between the two topics. I did a quick Google search, and several bios of Nightingale that came up do mention that she strongly opposed the Contagious Disease Acts yet was unwilling to speak publicly against them, preferring to work behind the scenes.
ReplyDeleteDid anyone who read the Nightingale texts find any mention of the CDA’s?
I always find it interesting to read about how one's health is not in control. To some extent we can't control the things that happen to our body, but we can do something with modern medicine. I am interested in knowing when this type of thinking shifted. Is Nightinggale the first to believe this way?
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