NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

College of Allied Health

Department of Nursing

SEM/A. Y.
NAME : DATE : RATING:
YR/SEC : GROUP: AREA :

WORKSHEET NO. 3

HISTORY OF PUBLIC HEALTH NURSING

WHAT’S MY LINE?

DIRECTIONS: Read the stories of three significant leaders in Public Health Nursing. As you
listen, take note of their contributions as well as quotations describing their belief in the practice
of nursing. Below are series of statements made by them. Identify which public health nursing
leader stated the following quotations.

MARY BRECKINRIDGE LILLIAN WALD FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE

1) “Nurse should be near the people in the community and set good examples.”
________________________________________

2) “Without cleanliness, within and without your home, ventilation is comparatively useless.
In certain foul districts of London, poor people used to object to open their windows and
doors because of the foul smells that came in. Rich people like to have their stables and
dunghill near their houses. But does it ever occur to them that many arrangements of
this kind it would be safer to keep the windows shut than open? You cannot have the air
of the house pure with dung heaps under the windows.” _________________________

3) But the health of the population is in itself an essential factor in upholding an economy
and both public and private measures need to be taken to assure it. There is confusion
in the minds of professional as well as lay people as to wherein lies the difference

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 NATIONAL UNIVERSITY
College of Allied Health
Department of Nursing
between public and private measures, for example, the work of a district nurse-midwife
like ours and that of a county public health nurse…In the rural community where the milk
comes from a thousand separate cows, many of them with Bang’s disease, where the
water supply comes from a thousand wells and springs, many of them infected, and
where there is almost no sanitary disposal of excreta-in such a county, the health
department, with at least one county nurse attached to it as needed as a health
department in a city.” ___________________________________________

4) The very elements of what constitutes good nursing are as little understood for the well
as for the sick. The same laws of health or of nursing for in reality they are the same,
obtain among the well as among the sick. The breaking of them produces only a less
violent consequence among the former than among the latter-and this sometimes not
always.” _________________________________________

5) With regard to the health of houses were there is a sick person, it often happens that the
sick room is made a ventilating shaft for the rest of the house. For while the house is
kept as close, unaired and as dirty as usual, the window of the sick room is kept a little
open always and the door occasionally. Now there are certain sacrifices which a house
with one sick person in it does make to that sick person: it ties up its knocker; it lays
straw before it in street. Why can’t it keep itself thoroughly clean and unusually well
aired, in deference to the sick person?” ___________________________________

6) Except during and immediately after the war we have never run out of nurse applicants
for our work. The wish that lies in the hands if a true nurse to deliver her service to
those who need it most, couples with the desire in many young women for adventure
and hardship, brings nurses of a fine caliber to us when, in the world beyond mountains,
they could get double and treble the salaries we are able to pay. My own longing for
adventure and hardship when I was young, my own choice of nursing as the field in
which I felt I can the most service, enable me to understand the motives that lead most
of my young associates to the Frontier Nursing Service for at least two or three years of
their buoyant lives.” ___________________________________________

7) “I cannot efface from my memory the picture of a little 8 year old girl whom I once found
standing on a chair to reach a washtub, trying with her tiny hands to cleanse some bed
linen which have been a task for an older person. Every few minutes the child got down
from her chair to peer into the next room where her mother and the newborn bay lay, all

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 NATIONAL UNIVERSITY
College of Allied Health
Department of Nursing
her little mind intent upon giving relief and comfort. She had been alone with her mother
when the baby was born and terror was on her face.” ___________________________

8) “The very elements of what constitutes good nursing are as little understood by the well
as well as for the sick. The same laws of health or of nursing, for in reality they are the
same, obtain among the well as among the sick. The breaking of them produces a less
violent consequence among the former than among the latter, and this sometimes, not
always.”______________________________________________________________

9) “The very first canon of nursing, the first and last thing which a nurse’s attention must be
fixed, the first essential to the patient, without which all the rest you can do for him is
nothing, with which I had almost said you may leave all the rest alone is this: TO KEEP
ALL THE AIR HE BREATHES AS PURE AS THE EXTERNAL AIR, WITHOUT
CHILLING HIM.” _______________________________________

10) “Infant mortality is also a social disease- poverty and ignorance the twin roots from which
this evil springs. There is a large measure of preventable ignorance, and in the efforts of
preventing infant mortality the intelligent reaction of the tenement, has been remarkably
evidenced. In the last analysis babies of the poor are kept alive through the intelligence
of their mothers. _______________________________________

11) A dark house is always an unhealthy house, always an ill-aired house, always a dirty
house. Want of light stops growth, and promotes scrofula and rickets among children. “
__________________________________________

12) “It is difficult to see inequality in health care especially inaccessible health services
especially for the poor of the community.”_____________________________________

13) “After the death of my son, I decided to serve disadvantaged families specially women
and children. I thought that the best was to go to the mountains of Kentucky to be a
community health nurse and serve the health needs of the poor people. I helped build
up the first health center in Kentucky.”______________________________________

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