The Finest Women's Art

Every country that depends on tourism and summering as one of its important resources must give special care to matters of health and what is connected with them: securing public cleanliness, teaching the modern scientific principles of the art of preparing food and of managing homes and hotels, and readying the means of prevention, nursing, disinfection, and first aid. And no one is worthier than women to undertake such work.

Our women talk a great deal on the subject of voting and elections, and demand their political rights, besides the right to enter public work so that the field of social service outside their homes may open before them. It behooves us to ask each of these women demanding their rights: What is the work you do well? What is the measure of your preparation for the social service you demand? What is the number of our women specialized in sociology, or in social service, or in the civic sciences and similar qualifications for work outside the home? Indeed, what is the number of women who have mastered the work inside the home — I mean household management and the practical arts it includes, such as the art of preparing food, sewing, the science of hygiene, and the arrangement of furniture?

Everyone concedes that our country needs women specialists to train our women in the various works and arts I have mentioned, before we cast them into the field of elections and politics. But there is one work within reach of all women, for in our country there are a number of institutions fully equipped to teach it; and yet the demand for it among our women remains small. I mean the art of nursing, which I call the ideal women's art, because it opens before women the widest field of service inside their homes and outside them. It is regrettable that the scarcity of interest in it should be due, for the most part, to our ignorance of its possibilities and of its standing in the present age. There are other reasons, of which I mention our contempt for manual work and our desire to move tongues rather than hands — though the latter is better than the former and more useful. Among them, too, is our misunderstanding of the demands of this art and its duties, and our mistaken belief that it is a kind of cleaning and wiping, whereas the courses given to nurses require of them, before embarking on its study, the completion of secondary education and the obtaining of its certificate; for, on the model of medicine, it comprises theoretical and practical lessons in the following sciences: anatomy and physiology, chemistry, drugs, nutrition, bacteriology, pathology or the science of diseases and their symptoms, women's nursing and obstetrics, psychology, first aid, cleansing and disinfection, public health, surgery, the nursing of the mentally ill, the nursing of children... and so on. They have rightly called the nurse the physician's right arm; and she is, beyond that, the cornerstone of public health, and no country can boast of the height of its health standard unless the number of its nurses is great and most of its women have some acquaintance with the art of nursing.

Nursing is not only among the most honorable and most useful of women's works, but also among the oldest works women have practiced in history. The chronicles and biographies dwell at length on the Arab women who accompanied their men in the wars to serve the sick and tend the wounded. From ancient times, nursing — the care of the wounded and the sick — was counted a noble work, whose source is mercy and human compassion, practiced by noblewomen and by the most virtuous of women; hence we have seen the princesses of the present age — Carmen Sylva of Romania, Queen Marie, the princesses of Italy, and others — enroll in the ranks of nurses to help the wounded of war.

In the Middle Ages nursing became the affair of nuns and of the monks of the monasteries; later the Sisters of Charity and the Franciscans became famous for it, and then the Evangelical sisters, the Deaconesses, in Germany. But it was not organized as a lay women's profession until the nineteenth century — that is, in the age of Florence Nightingale of England, who was known from her childhood for her compassion for the sick, her gentleness with animals, and her consoling of the weak and suffering. Florence came of a noble family and had gained an ample share of learning; and although nursing was not, in her day, a lay profession, nor a work worthy of the attention of educated women, she studied it in Germany with the Deaconess sisters and devoted herself to practicing it in her own city, and then in the Crimean War, and won such success as made her name famous throughout Europe. Queen Victoria bestowed on her the highest title granted to the women of England, and the English people presented her with the sum of 50 thousand pounds, which she spent on building a hospital in her name. Through Florence Nightingale the value of the art of nursing rose, and people came to look upon it no longer as a work of pity and mercy but as a profession founded on science and long training. From the end of the last century the organization of this profession began in Europe, when a council of nursing matrons was formed in England and the foundation was laid for an international union of nurses. Local societies spread which took up the problems of nurses and sought to regulate their wages, to fix the length of their studies, the subjects of study, and their hours of work, and the question of their social insurance in cases of sickness and disability. Today, in most

Western countries, there are government certificates for nurses, and she who holds one is called a Registered Nurse, R.N.

What are the works the nurse can undertake, and what doors stand open before her?

First: in her home — she can live a healthy life and secure such a life for her family, for her husband, for her children, and for all who surround her. The presence of a nurse in the home, like the presence of a physician, is such as to guarantee the household good prevention and good treatment, suitable food and sufficient cleanliness, healthy clothing and an orderly life, protection from germs, filth, flies, mosquitoes, and the other carriers of disease.

Second: the nurse can be of use in the quarter where she lives, and can help raise the standard of health by giving her neighbors and friends whatever guidance she can concerning the methods of prevention and treatment and the raising of children. In this respect she is of use in every place where she settles and to every family with which she comes in contact.

Third: the need for nurses in public work grows with the growing number of hospitals, the advance of the sciences of medicine and health, and mankind's increasing concern with fighting disease, prolonging life, and raising the health standard in every milieu — in the working class as in the privileged classes.

For this reason the work of the nurse enrolled in the ranks of social service has become a ramified, many-sided work. Sometimes she is a worker in the hospital or the sanatorium, where her presence is as necessary as the physician's. At times she is a government employee assisting the district physician in securing the means of prevention and treatment. Or an employee in the hotels, schools, companies, and other centers of collective work whose owners have seen that employing a physician and a nurse to watch over the health of students and workers, to raise their health standard, to vaccinate them against diseases, and to supply them with the means of prevention and first aid — all this is bound to increase their production and to improve it in quality and in quantity; and that the material and moral profit which employers reap from improving the health of their workers repays them for the cost of keeping a permanent physician and nurse at their places of work.

People wrongly suppose that any woman who can sterilize a needle and give a patient an injection has become a nurse. In fact nurses are of different grades. Among them is she who received no scientific education worth mentioning, but picked up some practical knowledge thanks to practice and training. The difference is vast between her and the one who entered nursing school after graduating from a secondary school, obtained her certificate after three years of study or more, and then became a registered nurse — that is, a holder of a government certificate in this art. Above her in grade stands the one who took a degree from one of the colleges and then entered nursing school to specialize in one of the branches of the art; and the one who continued her studies in certain sciences after obtaining the nursing certificate, and gained the higher degrees that qualify her for teaching, or for administration, or for heading one of the hospital's departments and supervising some of the important technical operations.

Here is a list of the most important posts and works that a holder of the nursing certificate can fill in the Arab countries, according to her preparation and her specialty: administration; teaching; technical work; social work; employment in the departments of public health; sanitary inspection in prisons and public houses; preventive work in schools and children's homes; the care of the insane and of the disabled; prevention and first-aid work in factories, in industrial companies, in life-insurance companies, to watch over the health of the insured; in the army and national defense; in the departments of child welfare; in transport and travel companies, to attend to the health of passengers and travelers.

In view of the growing importance of this art in the present age, the ramification of its branches, and the intensity of the need for it in our country and in other lands, it behooves us to encourage the largest possible number of girls to study it. It is essential that the government take an interest in encouraging it by regulating the conditions of nurses, laying down a special law for them, and instituting a government certificate for them on the model of physicians; thus one may distinguish between a nurse trained by practice and another who holds an official certificate recognized by the international body of nurses.

And if we recall that the material rewards reaped from the practice of this art may become, thanks to its ramification and its growing possibilities, more tempting than what any other women's profession yields, and that it allows a woman to practice it in her home and outside it, then we can name no art or profession that elevates woman personally and keeps pace with her renaissance and her economic and social progress more than the art of nursing; for it accustoms her to activity, precision, and order, and awakens in her the feeling of concern for others, the desire to help them, and to share with man — an effective sharing — in the building of a better world.

If the nurse can accomplish but one single work — to teach those around her the principles of modern cleanliness — she has accomplished one of the noblest of works.