Making Appointments

Those who have been called upon to bear the responsibility of the Nursing in a severe case of Innutrition, Sickness, Fever, Inflammation, Surgical Operation, or the like, will have a vivid recollection of the difficulties they encountered in carrying out the various Medical Orders, upon the punctual attendance to which, through anxious days and nights, the patient's life depended.

How to arrange the hours for Nutriment, for Medicine, for Wine, for Brandy, for dressing wounds, for external applications, for Sleep, etc., etc., without one important item clashing with another, is often a most puzzling question, requiring the details to be carefully considered and arranged in writing, before it is practicable to work them out.

Not unfrequently the various orders left by the doctor are misunderstood, or found to be impracticable when they come to be put together and arranged according to time - the hours for dressing wounds or taking Medicine clashing with those for Food, the hours for Wine coming upon those for Brandy, or interfering with the necessary sleep, and so forth. When the doctor has gone, and, perhaps, as in country houses, or at night, cannot possibly be consulted again for many hours, it is difficult to overstate the distress of friends and nurses on discovering that orders, which have been impressed on them with all the weight of questions of life and death, cannot be implicitly carried out from want of a consistent arrangement of their details.

Happily for the sick, and for the doctors, nursing is is now passing into the hands of educated and well trained women, competent to understand and to perform with intelligence that systematic nursing to which the enlightened practical Medicine of the present day attaches such vital importance. And the introduction of the Clinical Thermometer and similar appliances into the sick room, makes it necessary in private houses (where there are no clinical assistants or house-surgeons as in hospitals) to entrust the nurse with the task of keeping a register of the temperature, the rate of pulse and respiration, etc., at hours when the doctor cannot he in attendance.

The doctor who believes in the importance of his own orders will be strict in requiring at each visit an accurate report of how they have been obeyed. The nurse, who intends to obey them faithfully, will not be satisfied unless she sees that they are both intelligible and practicable before the doctor leaves the house, and she should write them down directly he is gone.

An Appointment Dial should be used in all Fevers, Inflammations, Surgical Cases, and other Acute Illnesses.