APPEAL TO NURSES.

Timaru Herald, Volume XIIC, Issue 13874, 10 April 1909, Page 2 (Supplement)

APPEAL TO NURSES.

According to a Sydney paper the tipping system, which is one of the most objectionable systems of the times, is said to be spreading its insidious roots into the nursing profession, not in the form of hard rash, of course, but in the nature of handsome presents from grateful patients. Some people declare that the .already expensive luxury of sickness is being'made harder and harder to hear by the knowledge that in addition to fees there will be more money to spend on a gift to the nurse. In some of the Sydney public hospitals rules are printed' absolutely forbidding patients to offer gifts to members of the staff: but it is in the private hospitals aiid private nursing that the habit of present-making is said to be increasing, and it is alleged to be quite a common custom amoncrst some nurses to display the handsome handes, brooches, "and silverware which have been given to them by former patients. a gentle reminder which the present patient cannot ignore. But no one who has ever come into close contact with nurses will believe that this is the. rule: there are no doubt some nurses who arc not altogether beyond suspicion in this matter, but that the majority could descend to such tricks is impossible, to believe. The nursing profession is one that is held in highest respect by most of us. and it is a great nitv that a few foolish girls should, by their vanity and greed, make such a charge against the sisterhood possible. Tn an able Kider on the subject in the " Australasian Nurses' Journal." the writer appeals "to the self-respect of each of our members to prevent her from taking any share in introducing this pernicious system. Each nurse who enters a private house is looked to by her fellows to show that household that nursing is a skilled profession, and that the nurses have long since ceased to he on the same level as the domestic servants of U"' establishment." SHAKE OF THE HAND. A. professor has recently made the disconcerting discovery that we all reveal our true characters by the way we shake hands, which leads an Enn-lish contemporary to observe that those who Visit'-to dissimulate should adopt the foreign habit of bowing instead of proffering the fingers of friendship; for it is by the way we grasp each other, and the amount of pressure we put into the greeting, that the true inwardness of our character and temperament is sure to lie betrayed. Yet hand -shaking is chiefly a matter of the moment, and, like another kind of salutation —which is said to be out of favour when the gorse. is out-of bloom •"•o would imagine.it to be largely an affair of. the two persons concerned. Some people, however, never change their peculiar style of greeting; and we hnye most of us suffered, at one

time or'.'another, from the ' "honest John'' who grasps you in an iron vise; the individual -who treats your hand like a. pump-handle, the woman who holds your hand aloft as if it were an object in'an exhibition of curiosities.