Do not meet or overtake a patient who is moving about in order to speak to him or to give him any message or letter. You might just as well give him a box on the ear. I have seen a patient fall flat on the ground who was standing when his nurse came into the room.
Category Archive: Florence Nightingale
I think one’s feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.
I have lived and slept in the same bed with English countesses and Prussian farm women… no woman has excited passions among women more than I have.
God spoke to me and called me to His Service. What form this service was to take the voice did not say.
A dark house is always an unhealthy house, always an ill-aired house, always a dirty house. Want of light stops growth and promotes scrofula, rickets, etc., among the children. People lose their health in a dark house, and if they get ill, they cannot get well again in it.
How very little can be done under the spirit of fear.
Never speak to an invalid from behind, nor from the door, nor from any distance from him, nor when he is doing anything. The official politeness of servants in these things is so grateful to invalids, that many prefer, without knowing why, having none but servants about them.
I have learned to know God. I have recast my social belief… All my admirers are married; most of my friends are dead; and I stand with all the world before me, where to choose a path to make in it.
If I could give you information of my life, it would be to show how a woman of very ordinary ability has been led by God in strange and unaccustomed paths to do In His service what He has done in her. And if I could tell you all, you would see how God has done all, and I nothing.
It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very first requirement in a hospital that it should do the sick no harm.