Florence Nightingale
"There are no specific diseases only specific disease conditions"---Florence Nightingale.
Miss Florence Nightingale, in her Notes of Nursing, observes :—.-" True nursing ignores infection, except to prevent it. Cleanliness, fresh air from open windows, are the only defence a true nurse either asks or needs." [1882] THE FABLE OF THE SMALL-POX HOSPITAL NURSES SAVED FROM SMALL-POX BY RE-VACCINATION
She said of 'infection':
Diseases are not individuals
arranged in classes, like cats and dogs, but conditions growing out of one
another.
Is it not living in a continual
mistake to look upon diseases as we do now, as separate entities, which must
exist, like cats and dogs, instead of looking upon them as conditions, like
a dirty and a clean condition, and just as much under our control; or rather
as the reactions of kindly nature, against the conditions in which we have
placed ourselves?
I was brought up to believe
that smallpox, for instance, was a thing of which there was once a first
specimen in the world, which went on propagating itself, in a perpetual
chain of descent, just as there was a first dog, (or a first pair of dogs)
and that smallpox would not begin itself, any more than a new dog would
begin without there having been a parent dog.
Since then I have seen with my own eyes and smelled
with my own nose smallpox growing up in first specimens, either in closed
rooms or in overcrowded wards, where it could not by any possibility have
been 'caught', but must have begun.
I have seen diseases begin, grow up, and pass into one
another. Now, dogs do not pass into cats.
I have seen, for instance, with a little overcrowding,
continued fever grow up; and with a little more, typhoid fever; and with a
little more, typhus, and all in the same ward or hut.
Would it not be far better, truer, and more practical,
if we looked upon disease in this light (for diseases, as all experience
shows, are adjectives, not noun-substantives):
- True nursing ignores infection, except to prevent
it. Cleanliness and fresh air from open windows, with unremitting attention
to the patient, are the only defence a true nurse either asks or needs.
- Wise and humane management of the patient is the
best safeguard against infection. The greater part of nursing consists of
preserving cleanliness.
- The specific disease doctrine is the grand refuge of
weak, uncultured, unstable minds, such as now rule in the medical
profession. There are no specific diseases; there are specific disease
conditions.
Here you have Florence
Nightingale, one of the most famous nurses in history, after life-long
experience with infection, contagion and epidemics, challenging the germ theory
17 years before Pasteur put it forward as his own discovery! (See Ch.8, p.61).
She clearly understood it and its utter fallacy better before 1860 than
Pasteur did, either in 1878 or later! [1940] The Dream & Lie of Louis Pasteur
by R. B. Pearson (originally Pasteur, Plagiarist, Imposter)
NB: The above words in italics can't be found in Notes on Nursing, 1860.
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