Now for the caution:—­

(3.) It seems a commonly received idea among men and even among women themselves that it requires nothing but a disappointment in love, the want of an object, a general disgust, or incapacity for other things, to turn a woman into a good nurse.

This reminds one of the parish where a stupid old man was set to be schoolmaster because he was “past keeping the pigs.”

Apply the above receipt for making a good nurse to making a good servant.  And the receipt will be found to fail.

Yet popular novelists of recent days have invented ladies disappointed in love or fresh out of the drawing-room turning into the war-hospitals to find their wounded lovers, and when found, forthwith abandoning their sick-ward for their lover, as might be expected.  Yet in the estimation of the authors, these ladies were none the worse for that, but on the contrary were heroines of nursing.

What cruel mistakes are sometimes made by benevolent men and women in matters of business about which they can know nothing and think they know a great deal.

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 everywhere (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