is--Would you do nothing, then, in cholera, fever, &c.?--so deep-rooted
and universal is the conviction that to give medicine is to be doing
something, or rather everything; to give air, warmth, cleanliness, &c.,
is to do nothing. The reply is, that in these and many other similar
diseases the exact value of particular remedies and modes of treatment
is by no means ascertained, while there is universal experience as to
the extreme importance of careful nursing in determining the issue of
the disease.

[Sidenote: Nursing the well.]

II. The very elements of what constitutes good nursing are as little
understood for the well as for the sick. The same laws of health or of
nursing, for they are in reality the same, obtain among the well as
among the sick. The breaking of them produces only a less violent
consequence among the former than among the latter,--and this sometimes,
not always.

It is constantly objected,--"But how can I obtain this medical
knowledge? I am not a doctor. I must leave this to doctors."

[Sidenote: Little understood.]

Oh, mothers of families! You who say this, do you know that one in every
seven infants in this civilized land of England perishes before it is
one year old? That, in London, two in every five die before they are
five years old? And, in the other great cities of England, nearly one
out of two?[1] "The life duration of tender babies" (as some Saturn,
turned analytical chemist, says) "is the most delicate test" of sanitary
conditions. Is all this premature suffering and death necessary? Or did
Nature intend mothers to be always accompanied by doctors? Or is it
better to learn the piano-forte than to learn the laws which subserve
the preservation of offspring?

Macaulay somewhere says, that it is extraordinary that, whereas the laws
of the motions of the heavenly bodies, far removed as they are from us,
are perfectly well understood, the laws of the human mind, which are
under our observation all day and every day, are no better understood
than they were two thousand years ago.

But how much more extraordinary is it that, whereas what we might call
the coxcombries of education--e.g., the elements of astronomy--are now
taught to every school-girl, neither mothers of families of any class,
nor school-mistresses of any class, nor nurses of children, nor nurses
of hospitals, are taught anything about those laws which God has
assigned to the relations of our bodies with the world in wh