I ’eärd ’um a bummin’ awaäy ... ower my ’eäd, ...
An’ I thowt a said whot a owt to ’a said an’ I coom’d awaäy.
We laugh at that. But is the Parasite much better than that?
Now the Ambulance Classes, the Registration, the Certificates of Nursing and of Nurses (and of midwifery), especially any which may demand the minimum of practice, which may substitute for personal progress in active proficiency, mere literary or word progress, instead of making it the material for growth in correct knowledge and practice, all such like things may tend this way.
It is not the certificate which makes the Nurse or the Midwife. It may un-make her. The danger is lest she let the certificate be instead of herself, instead of her own never ceasing going up higher as a woman and a Nurse.
This is the “day” of Examinations in the turn that Education—Elementary, the Higher Education, Professional Education—seems taking. And it is a great step which has substituted this for what used to be called “interest.” Only let us never allow it to encroach upon what cannot be tested by examinations. Only let the “day” of Practice, the development of each individual’s thought and practice, character and dutifulness, keep up, through the materials given us for growth and for correct knowledge, with the “day of examinations” in the Nurse’s life, which is above all a moral and practical life, a life not of show, but of faithful action.
But above all, dear comrades, let each one of us, each individual of us, not only bid “God speed” in her heart to this, our own School (or Association—call it so if you will), but strive to speed it with all the best that is in her, even as your “Association” and its dear heads strive to speed each one of you.
Let each one of us take the abundant and excellent food for the mind which is offered us, in our training, our classes, our lectures, our examinations and reading—not as “Parasites,” no, none of you will ever do that—but as bright and vigorous fellow-workers, working out the better way every day to the end of life.
Once more, my heartiest sympathy, my dearest love to each and to all of you,
from your ever faithful old comrade,
Florence Nightingale.