Source identified1
Image design Linen
Read & copy
“It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very first requirement in a Hospital that it should do the sick no harm.”
Meaning & context
Nightingale begins hospital design from the principle that an institution created to care for sick people must first avoid adding preventable harm through its own conditions.
Source details
Notes on Hospitals, third edition (1863), Preface / opening requirement. In the represented Google Books copy the sentence is exposed in the front matter as “It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very first requirement in a Hospital that it should do the sick no harm.” This remains Nightingale’s nineteenth-century hospital-reform argument and historical professional evidence, not current medical guidance.