London, May 16, 1888.
My dear Friends,—Here, one year more, is my very best love and heart-felt “good speed” to the work.
To each and to all I wish the very highest success, in the widest meaning of the word, in the life’s work you have chosen.
And I am more sorry than for anything else that my illness, more than usually serious, has let me know personally so little of you, except through our dear Matron and dear Home Sister.
You are going steadily and devotedly on in preparing yourselves for future work. Accept my heartiest sympathy and thanks.
We hear much of “Associations” now. It is impossible indeed to live in isolation: we are dependent upon others for the supply of all our wants, and others upon us.
Every Hospital is an “Association” in itself. We of this School are an Association in the deepest sense, regulated—at least we strive towards it—on high and generous principles; through organisation working at once for our own and our fellow Nurses’ success. For, to make progress possible, we must make this interdependence a source of good: not a means of standing still.
There is no magic in the word “Association,” but there is a secret, a mighty call in it, if we will but listen to the “still small voice” in it, calling upon each of us to do our best.
It calls upon our dear heads, and they answer. It calls upon each of us.
We must never forget that the “Individual” makes the Association. What the Association is depends upon each of its members. A Nurses’ Association can never be a substitute for the individual Nurse. It is she who must, each in her measure, give life to the Association, while the Association helps her.