Florence Nightingale

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from Morris

	Florence Nightingale Remarkable Understanding

	Quote from Bechamp or Pasteur by E Douglas Hume, pages 148 and 149.

	"Is it not living in a continual mistake, " she said "to look upon
diseases, as we do now, as separate entities, which must exist, like cats
and dogs, instead of looking upon them as conditions, like a dirty and clean
condition, and just as much under our control; or rather as the reactions
of kindly nature against the conditions in which we have placed ourselves? I
was brought up by scientific men and ignorant women distinctly to believe
that smallpox was a thing of which there was one specimen in the world,
which went on propagating itself in a perpetual chain of descent, just as
much as that there was a first dog (or pair of dogs), and that smallpox
would not begin itself any more than a new dog would begin without there
having been a parent dog. Since then I have seen with my eyes and smelt with
my nose smallpox growing up in first specimens either in close rooms or in
overcrowded wards, where it could not by any possibility have been 'caught',
but must have begun. Nay, more, I have seen diseases begin, grow and pass
into one another. Now dogs do not pass into cats. I have seen, for instance,
with a little overcrowding, continued fever grow up, and a little more,
typhoid fever, and with a little more, typhus and all in the same ward or
hut. For disease, as all experience shows, are adjectives, not noun
substantives. "

	She also said. " The specific disease doctrine is the grand refuge of weak,
uncultured, unstable minds, such as now rule in the medical profession.
There are no specific diseases: there are specific disease-conditions."

	Crimean War Experience

	During the Crimean war, more people were dying of the filthy conditions in
the hospital wards than on the battlefield. Then Florence Nightingale came
along, the lady of the lamp. Without antiseptics, without antibiotics, using
clean bandages, hot water and soap so that the beds, linen and wards itself
were kept scrupulously clean she prevented the outbreak of typhus, typhoid
and other so-called infectious diseases. She found that the dirtier the
conditions the more serious these fevers will be. Another reason for her
success was by removing a dead horse from the water supply.