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New Zealand Mail, Issue 14, 29 April 1871, Page 5

Nursing. —No medical practitioner can fail to have been more painfully impressed with the frequency with which broken health in women of the middle classes dates from protracted attendance on sick friends ; and this not from want of means, but for lack simply of persons with whom to share the burden. Like other things which are not understood, nursing is supposed to be a thing which everyone understands, and, accordingly, when illness comes, utterly untrained women apply themselves to it with a zeal stimulated by affection to a pitch alike disastrous to the patient and themselves. How can over-weariness, which is fatal to efficiency in all other things leave efficiency in nursing unimpaired ? It is only ignorance—an ignorance fatal to innumerable lives in England now—that fancies the reckless energies of unskilled affection are more available in the sick room than in the other exigencies of life. Instead of diminishing disease, unwise attentions to the sick multiply it. —“ Cornhill Magazine.” Youthful Fortitude. —lt is not often a youngster is met with who possesses the presence of mind and pluck shown by a lad named Alfred Ashton, living in the neighborhood of the Moorabool Falls. 'He was out (says the Ballarat Evening Post), in the forest with a number of woodcutters, and was playing a few yards,from them lately, when he was bitten on the extreme end of the second finger of the left hand by a snake, which he mistook for a piece of charred wood. The youngster at once ran to the men, and, laying his finger upon a log near at hand, asked one of the number to cut it off at the first joint. This was demurred to at first, but upon the brave little fellow saying that if they did not do as he wished he would do it himself, one of the men severed the poisoned portion. The lad bore the operation with great firmness, merely ejaculating “Oh, my!” as the axe’s edge passed through the member. The little sufferer is progressing as well as anyone could wish.