¶ … Nursing and the Calling of Katie Makanya:
The longing for the lost pastoral and the longing for change
Florence Nightingale's seminal text Notes on Nursing was written after the author's experiences nursing during the Crimean War, and was part of her efforts to establish nursing as a unique profession of respect and dignity. During her wartime service, Nightingale had seen the horrific consequences of modern, industrialized warfare. Thus her perspective of the dangers and unhealthiness of city life were inevitably colored by her witnessing of the consequences. "The most frequent and fatal cause of all is sleeping, for even a few hours, much more for weeks and months, in foul air, a condition which, more than any other condition, disturbs the respiratory process, and tends to produce 'accidental' death in disease'" (Nightingale, Conclusion). For Nightingale, the unwholesome nature of city life was literally poisonous.
Nightingale had witnessed the shift to urban life from country life as one in which human beings were able to live relatively 'at one' with nature, in relatively pleasant and open surroundings vs. The cramped urban conditions in which disease was rampant. Given the relatively minimal knowledge about the state of public health at the time, few precautions were taken to minimize the transmission of diseases. Nightingale saw the shift away from the old ways as something entirely negative, despite her status as a 'woman of science' and an advocate for the nursing profession.
In fact, in Nightingale's perspective, clearly many of the old, intelligent ways of dealing with sickness were lost and were replaced with so-called modern notions that defied common sense, in terms of how sick people should be treated. The first chapter of her book entitled "Ventilation" illustrates this fact in which she speaks about "the extraordinary confusion between cold and ventilation, even in the minds of well-educated people…To make a room cold is by no means necessarily to ventilate it. Nor is it at all necessary, in order to ventilate a room,...
religious themes of the three works mentioned, those being Les Miserables, Notes on Nursing and the Calling of Katie Makanya, are all fairly easy to see. A major fact about Les Miserables is that Jean Valjean spends a lot of time in jail for doing something relatively minor, stealing food to feed a starving family, and then this gets compounded three to four times over when Valjean tries to
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