that doctors wish that there should be more illness, in order
to have more work.

[Sidenote: What pathology teaches. What observation alone teaches. What
medicine does. What nature alone does.]

(2.) It is often said by women, that they cannot know anything of the
laws of health, or what to do to preserve their children's health,
because they can know nothing of "Pathology," or cannot "dissect,"--a
confusion of ideas which it is hard to attempt to disentangle.

Pathology teaches the harm that disease has done. But it teaches nothing
more. We know nothing of the principle of health, the positive of which
pathology is the negative, except from observation and experience. And
nothing but observation and experience will teach us the ways to
maintain or to bring back the state of health. It is often thought that
medicine is the curative process. It is no such thing; medicine is the
surgery of functions, as surgery proper is that of limbs and organs.
Neither can do anything but remove obstructions; neither can cure;
nature alone cures. Surgery removes the bullet out of the limb, which is
an obstruction to cure, but nature heals the wound. So it is with
medicine; the function of an organ becomes obstructed; medicine, so far
as we know, assists nature to remove the obstruction, but does nothing
more. And what nursing has to do in either case, is to put the patient
in the best condition for nature to act upon him. Generally, just the
contrary is done. You think fresh air, and quiet and cleanliness
extravagant, perhaps dangerous, luxuries, which should be given to the
patient only when quite convenient, and medicine the _sine qua non_, the
panacea. If I have succeeded in any measure in dispelling this illusion,
and in showing what true nursing is, and what it is not, my object will
have been answered.

Now for the caution:--

(3.) It seems a commonly received idea among men and even among women
themselves that it requires nothing but a disappointment in love, the
want of an object, a general disgust, or incapacity for other things, to
turn a woman into a good nurse.

This reminds one of the parish where a stupid old man was set to be
schoolmaster because he was "past keeping the pigs."

Apply the above receipt for making a good nurse to making a good
servant. And the receipt will be found to fail.

Yet popular novelists of recent days have invented ladies disappointed
in love or fresh out of the drawing-room turning i