Nations are the rising and falling tides of humanity; women, the fixed beacon lights along the wave-borne highway of human progress. Fabiola, the Roman Matron of the fourth century, who established the first hospital and herself cared for human wrecks, set a precedent existent through all succeeding centuries. All honor to Queen Isabella, the first to appoint military surgeons and to originate what was known as the “Queen’s Hospital” for the sick and wounded. As a nurse in her home, in the plagues of her country and the wars of the fourteenth century, Catherine Benincasa rose to the exalted position of Saint Catherine, patron saint of Italy. As a nurse among the poor, sewing, cooking, keeping the house clean indoors, and working with her brothers in the harvest field—before she saw the vision of St. Michael—prepared Joan of Arc to become the deliverer of France from Britain in the fifteenth century, and in consequence the Maid of Orleans became a patron saint of that period.
Maria Theresa provided hospitals for the wounded soldiery in the country over which she ruled, until then a soldiery wholly neglected in their sufferings on the battlefield. Ever green in memory should be kept the name of Grace Darling, and that graphic picture of her as she hastens down from the lighthouse on Farne Island, and through the mists of that terrible night in 1838 goes to the rescue of the shipwrecked sailors. Born in Florence, Italy, reared in England, a little girl caring for the injured birds and animals in her improvised hospital at Lea Hurst, the student nurse in Germany, the superintendent of nurses in the Crimean War, Florence Nightingale became adored throughout Christendom, diffusing rays of glory on the closing years of the nineteenth century.
Of England’s heroine, Longfellow sings:
A Lady with a Lamp shall stand
In the great history of the land;
A noble type of good,
Heroic Womanhood.
CLARA BARTON! The Babe of Oxford, a Christmas gift to humanity. In a little corner room of a little farmhouse, her tiny eyes greeted, first, the eyes of highly esteemed but not far-famed parents. From this Huguenot Colony, with no prestige of birth and no power of wealth, the meek, brown-eyed maiden went forth unheralded to carry her message of love and service. No Star of Destiny had cast its rays aslant the cradle, and no omen betokened her future as
Out of the quiet ways
Into the world’s broad track