The everyday management of a large ward, let alone of a hospital—­the knowing what are the laws of life and death for men, and what the laws of health for wards—­(and wards are healthy or unhealthy, mainly according to the knowledge or ignorance of the nurse)—­are not these matters of sufficient importance and difficulty to require learning by experience and careful inquiry, just as much as any other art?  They do not come by inspiration to the lady disappointed in love, nor to the poor workhouse drudge hard up for a livelihood.

And terrible is the injury which has followed to the sick from such wild notions!

In this respect (and why is it so?), in Roman Catholic countries, both writers and workers are, in theory at least, far before ours.  They would never think of such a beginning for a good working Superior or Sister of Charity.  And many a Superior has refused to admit a Postulant who appeared to have no better “vocation” or reasons for offering herself than these.

It is true we make “no vows.”  But is a “vow” necessary to convince us that the true spirit for learning any art, most especially an art of charity, aright, is not a disgust to everything or something else?  Do we really place the love of our kind (and of nursing, as one branch of it) so low as this?  What would the Mere Angelique of Port Royal, what would our own Mrs. Fry have said to this?

NOTE.—­I would earnestly ask my sisters to keep clear of both the jargons now current every where (for they are equally jargons); of the jargon, namely, about the “rights” of women, which urges women to do all that men do, including the medical and other professions, merely because men do it, and without regard to whether this is the best that women, can do; and of the jargon which urges women to do nothing that men do, merely because they are women, and should be “recalled to a sense of their duty as women,” and because “this is women’s work,” and “that is men’s,” and “these are things which women should not do,” which is all assertion, and nothing more.  Surely woman should bring the best she has, whatever that is, to the work of God’s world, without attending to either of these cries.  For what are they, both of them, the one just as much as the other, but listening to the “what people will say,” to opinion, to the “voices from without?” And as a wise man has said, no one has ever done anything great or useful by listening to the voices from without.

You do not want the effect of your good things to be, “How wonderful for a woman!” nor would you be deterred from good things by hearing it said, “Yes, but she ought not to have done this, because it is not suitable for a woman.”  But you want to do the thing that is good, whether it is “suitable for a woman” or not.

It does not make a thing good, that it is remarkable that a woman should have been able to do it.  Neither does it make a thing bad, which would have been good had a man done it, that it has been done by a woman.