Florence Nightingale - Sick Quotes

10 Sourced Quotes

View all Florence Nightingale Quotes
Hospitals are only an intermediate stage of civilization, never intended at all even to take in the whole sick population.

Florence Nightingale
It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very first requirement in a hospital that it should do the sick no harm.

Florence Nightingale
The craving for 'the return of the day', which the sick so constantly evince, is generally nothing but the desire for light.

Florence Nightingale
I cannot remember the time when I have not longed for death.... for years and years I used to watch for death as no sick man ever watched for the morning.

Florence Nightingale
When you see the natural and almost universal craving in English sick for their 'tea,' you cannot but feel that nature knows what she is about.... A little tea or coffee restores them.... There is nothing yet discovered which is a substitute to the English patient for his cup of tea.

Florence Nightingale
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.

Florence Nightingale
People often say to me, You don't know what a wife and mother feels. No, I say, I don't and I'm very glad I don't. And they don't know what I feel. … I am sick with indignation at what wives and mothers will do of the most egregious selfishness. And people call it all maternal or conjugal affection, and think it pretty to say so. No, no, let each person tell the truth from his own experience.

Florence Nightingale
If a patient is cold, if a patient is feverish, if a patient is faint, if he is sick after taking food, if he has a bed-sore, it is generally the fault not of the disease, but of the nursing.

Florence Nightingale
Go into a room where the shutters are always shut (in a sick-room or a bed-room there should never be shutters shut), and though the room be uninhabited — though the air has never been polluted by the breathing of human beings, you will observe a close, musty smell of corrupt air — of air unpurified by the effect of the sun's rays.

Florence Nightingale
It is the unqualified result of all my experience with the sick that, second only to their need of fresh air, is their need of light; that, after a close room, what hurts them most is a dark room and that it is not only light but direct sunlight they want.

Florence Nightingale