Henry Baird Favill, AB, MD, LL.D., 1860-1916, a ... - University Library

356 HENRY BAIRD FAVILL
Delivered, Twenty-fifth Anniversary of the Founding of the Boston Instructive
District Nursing Association, Boston, April 25, 191 1.
Printed, American Journal of Nursing, October, 191 1.
IT
PROBLEMS OF VISITING NURSES
is a privilege to come here and participate in these
proceedings, really a very great privilege. I had the
temerity to come here and serve upon this program
without asking anybody what I was to say, which is always
a risky thing to do, both for me and for the management.
On the other hand, it leaves me free to say about what I
want to say, and what I want to say is merely an epitome
of a lot of experiences in which I have been involved in connection
with the visiting nurses' work directly and indirectly.
I have never been able to feel, and I do not feel,
that in itself it is a great misfortune to be poor, but I do feel
and I shall feel more and more as the years go on, I know,
that it is a very great misfortune to be sick, and you know
and I know that with all the wonderful facilities that there
are in the world for the amelioration of suffering,
they are
not, up to this time, for the poor, and inasmuch as they are
not for the poor, they are really not for the world. The
inception of this visiting nursing work is love, tenderness,
sympathy — there can be no doubt about it. The significance
in the touch of these workers is help, hope, encouragement.
district nurse.
Spiritual uplift is in the very initial touch of the
I need hardly go into a description of what that is, since
Dr. Worcester has pointed out to you what the district
nurse does, in her indescribably irregular routine. She
meets the situation as she finds it, goes into a house and
finds it squalid, dirty, careless, ignorant, and hopeless, and
instantly measures her forces. In five minutes there is
not an individual in this house who is able to do something
that is not doing something. The house is cleaned, the bed