Florence Nightingale's letter to Sir Douglas Galton - page 1

Transcript:

My dear Sir Douglas

I think we must know something more before we can answer the Leeds “Surgeon’s” questions – must we not?

With our present knowledge that “lying-in” is the most infectious thing there is – that the danger to a “lying-in” woman is increased we cannot say how much by being in a lying-in Hospital (compared

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to what it is lying-in alone in the poorest home, where another lying-in will not occur probably within the year & certainly not within say 10 months -) with our present knowledge we can hardly answer his question off hand:

a “Gynaecological” and “Obstrectic” Section complicates the matter still more

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We must know what provision there is for the nurses of cases “going wrong” as it is called, that is, blood poisoning etc

When he says, “every” thing connected with the “Patients x x “will be “absolutely isolated”, I do not quite know what he means.

Surely the Nurse is the “thing” most directly “connected” with the Patient

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We know that Doctors have been miserable all their lives long, because they have carried blood-poisoning from one lying-in Patient to another –

(I always envy that lying-in Hospl at Paris you saw & described to me is where each Patient was in a sort of little Pavilion to herself with Scullery etc) The mortality in the great Lying-in Hospl at Paris, before every thing was changed, was a massacre.

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2.
If a Patient has Pyaemia (or whatever they call it – they have such new-fangled names now) is her
Nurse still to sleep in a common Dormitory?

I am so very sorry for having been so slow in answering you – (I was very much taken up) - & now answering so roughly

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If you will try me again, I will behave better.

Good speed to you always, tho‘ I am not speeding you now – alas!

Yours ever
F. Nightingale


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I would add that you cannot have the same regularity of Day & Night Service in the kind of Hospital we are speaking of as in a General Hospital. Can you?