Cleanliness

Cleanliness is a big theme with Florence Nightingale. In each of her main points in the book, she stresses cleanliness. Clean air, clean food and a clean body. This emphasis on cleanliness comes from her many years of experience as a war nurse, where conditions were deplorable, to a house nurse where laziness or ineptitude certainly caused death. After seeing so much death caused by such preventable oversights, Florence Nightingale lost her tolerance for laziness and ineptitude. She says, "Patience and resignation in her (the nurse) are but other words for carelessness or indifference - contemptible, if in regard to herself; culpable, if in regard to her sick." To her there was little to no excuse for neglecting the patient, except education. That is why, shortly after publishing this book, she opened the Nightingale Training School of Nurses at St. Thomas' Hospital in London. She stresses the point...