You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
It May Be Argued That a doctor has no business addressing the subject of Nursing and its related problems. Moreover, Julia Fabricius has, you will have noticed, made little reference to doctors.
My first inclination was to hang my head and apologise for a medical intrusion; or at least to make some deferential mumblings. But further reflection inclines me less to such pussy-footing.
Clemenceau declared war to be too serious a matter to be left to generals. I venture to say that Nursing may, likewise, be too serious to be left to nurses in isolation. Much the same could be said of doctors who, as we know, frequently have difficulty in hearing that which impinges upon maternal feeling, whether from within themselves, from nurses, patients, or anyone else.
Nevertheless, as a psychoanalyst who is also a doctor of medicine, I must assure you that I am immensely proud of my medical qualification. Moreover, I have long held the view, first expressed by Claude Bernard, the founder of Experimental Medicine, in the 1850s, that isolation leads to annihilation, and that only in the relationship between entities is scientific truth to be found. We therefore think of a man not in splendid isolation but in relationship to himself, to his objects, to women, to children, to peers, to society, and so forth. Consequently I see myself at this Conference neither as an autonomous fount of wisdom nor as a fount of foolishness; but as in relationship to all those listed, and especially in this context to nurses generally and Julia Fabricius in particular.
For I must tell you plainly that just as I personally owe an immeasurable professional debt to certain nurses — such that I speak of the relationship in no theoretical way — so I say that as long as we doctors and nurses abjure or deny our interdependence we are all in dire trouble. Within three months — or was it weeks? — of pretentious arrogance as a junior psychiatrist, I finally turned to a charge nurse and said ‘I don't know what I am do