Glimpses into History

I am a nerd. Or I'm like the Elephant's Child - full of "satiable curiostity"

I just finished reading Florence Nightingale's Notes on Nursing
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Fact: (The year Nightingale is referring to is not mentioned, but I am guessing 1851.) "A curious fact will be shown by Table A, viz.,that 18,122 out of 39,139, or nearly one-half of the nurses, in domestic service, are between 5 and 20 years of age."

Imagine hiring a five year old.
Imagine a five year old as a nurse, in charge of a sick person.
Imagine sending your five year old to a stranger's house to work.


On a lighter note, she condemns crinolines, which were then fashionable. I think crinolines are hoop skirts. Nightingale deplores nurses wearing crinolines because it is hard for the nurse to move about the room without knocking something over and disturbing the patient, or the skirts could brush against a flame and catch fire.

She continues:
"I wish, too, that people could see the indecency of their own dress as other people see it. A respectable elderly woman stepping forward, invested in crinoline, exposes as much of her own person to the patient lying in the room as any opera dancer does on the stage. But no one will ever tell her this unpleasant truth."

In other words, ladies, when you bend over wearing hoops, the hoops turn up and reveal your backsides to the world, and most of you don't wear underwear.

Not a pretty sight.
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