SAIREY GAMP AND DORA COPPERFIELD
A wholesome corrective for the impatience with which we are wont to regard the lack of progress made in regard to all matters which concern the house and home was found at a recent International Health Exposition held in New York City. In one section was arranged an old-time sick-room, presided over by Sairey Gamp. The clock on the mantel pointed to the hour of midnight, and the patient was presumably sleeping, but on a feather bed, under heavy comfortables, with thick draperies hanging about the large high-post bedstead. On a table by the bedside were the remedies administered,—paregoric, salts, castor-oil, goose-grease, and other tradition-honored medicines. Another table bore the remains of the patient’s supper,—fried ham, bread and butter, cucumbers, and milk. Saireyherself reposed in an armchair, flanked, on one side, by the empty gin-bottle, and, on the other, by a pot of tea.
In a neighboring booth was found a motley collection of old-time remedies. It comprised elderberry flowers for pleurisy, honey for insomnia, hornet’s-nest tea for colds, baking-soda for the stomach and for bee-stings, cold potatoes for burns, and hot potatoes for ear-aches, cobwebs for hemorrhage, a cat’s skin for pneumonia, to be applied while the animal was still warm, and bags of camphor and assafœtida to be worn around the neck for protection against disease. All of these remedies are within the recollection of most persons who have not yet passed middle life.
These two booths were the text from which the silent sermon of comparison was preached by the eighty booths containing the educational exhibits of the training-schools for nurses and of many modern hospitals. The old-time sick-room has given place to one not only attractive to theeye, but furnished with every scientific appliance for the prevention as well as for the cure of disease. In place of Mrs. Gamp is the trained nurse of to-day, attractive in dress, agreeable in manner, intelligent in mind, scientific in methods of work, a friend and a companion, as well as a staff and a dependence. The contrast could not be more world-wide. Yet the time required to revolutionize methods of caring for the sick has been scarcely more than thirty years. The exhibit shown of a ward in Bellevue Hospital, in 1872, is almost as far removed from a modern hospital ward of to-day as it is from Mrs. Gamp.
What is the explanation of the transformation of Mrs. Gamp into the trained nurse, and of the evolution of the modern hospital and the modern sick-chamber from the old-time crude, semi-barbarous methods of treatment?
The secret of it all lies in the one word,—investigation. Investigation is the productof training, of education, of an eager and absorbing desire for knowledge, of minds open to conviction and ready to hold the judgment in suspense until it can be based on facts. The steps in the process of the evolution are equally clear. Given an investigating spirit, it follows that every investigator must work with singleness of purpose, in his search for facts, that is, for truth; and that this truth, when found, is to be held, not as a personal acquisition, but as a good to be shared with all. Thus progress is made, not through the individual efforts of isolated investigators, who are working along parallel lines, but it is made by geometrical progression, because each investigator is able to take, as a starting-point, the goal reached by his predecessor, and because he knows that he is coöperating with all other investigators to secure the same end. Everywhere to-day scientists appreciate the fact that progress in science is conditioned on scientific investigation. They also appreciate the fact that this progresscan be made only as each investigator shares in the results obtained by every other investigator. Every scientific discovery made by one scientist becomes the common property of all. In this apparently simple fact lies the explanation of the disappearance of Sairey Gamp.
“Martin Chuzzlewit” was published six years before the first part of “David Copperfield” was issued. But while Mrs. Gamp has become but a name, Dora Copperfield is still with us, and he would be a rash prophet who would venture to predict the times and the seasons that wait upon her going.
Why does Dora Copperfield still tarry? Again the explanation is not far to seek. The household has not yet become a field for investigation. It resents intrusion into its domain and regards investigators as Paul Prys. It is sensitive to criticism, and it considers a suggestion of change as an unwarrantable interference with its affairs, and as an attack on it by outsiders. It doesnot take kindly to new ideas, and it often rejects them ona priorigrounds, not because experiment has proved them wrong. Clothed in a mantle of virtue, it feels itself above criticism, because the home is of divine origin.
Yet although intuition and instinct have so long been made to play the part in the household that ought to be taken by scientific investigation, it is not unreasonable to believe that a change must in time come. It is not many years since illness was attributed to divine interposition, which to-day is known to be the result of impure water, defective drainage, insufficient nourishment, or lack of ventilation. We must in time, although the specific time cannot be predicted, come to believe that women’s minds have been given them to use, and that nowhere can they be used more effectively than in the organization and management of a household.
This comparison has been suggested, because the question is so often asked:Why can we not have trained domestics as we have trained nurses? The answer must be that, in the present condition of affairs, the resemblance between nurses and domestics is only superficial. The trained nurse is the product, not of the family that has suffered from the lack of such trained service, but of the discovery by the medical profession that its labors must be ineffectual if orders are not carried out by those who understand the reasons why these orders are given. The more rapid the advance in scientific investigation made in the medical world, the more rapid the advance made in all grades of service connected with the medical profession. Pressure is exerted from above and works downwards. More and more the subject of health becomes one of the prevention, rather than of the cure, of ill health. The distance between physician and nurse and nurse and patient grows less as each understands better the function each has to perform in securing good health.
Some parts of the household have already been put on a scientific basis. It is to-day protected from impure water-supply, from defective drainage, from poisonous foods, from contagious diseases, but not through the efforts of the household itself. These benefits it has reaped through the labors of scientific experts who, through unwearied investigation, have discovered the means of preventing certain large classes of diseases. Sanitary engineering and sanitary chemistry have become professions through the work of scientific investigators. When housekeepers, through scientific investigation, have made a profession of housekeeping, then, and not till then, will trained service in the household be possible.
It is very easy to see why progress in the household has up to this time been so slow, and why it has, for the most part, been made through forces exerted from without rather than from within. But the Chinese wall that has so long surrounded it is giving way, and the signs of the times point toanother international exposition, when, side by side with Mrs. Gamp and the trained nurse, will be found Dora Copperfield and the new home,—the product of the trained minds of scientific investigators.