Hospitals are not places for Penitents.
Until the hospitals are swept of the many mothers who are not wives, now unhappily to be found in them, no real good can be done. Hospitals are not, and never can be, places for “penitents;” and they are about the most dangerous places where sham penitents can be.
This is precisely what so many people of very different kinds cannot or will not see; some from ignorance, some from knowledge, some from the vague, silly, kind feeling which does such mischief when exerted on practical matters.
Suffer me to submit, without wearying patience by urging proof,—
i. That real penitents are wrongly placed in hospital service, because their admission breaks down the standard which respectable women who are hospital nurses feel (quite as keenly as their superiors do in their own concerns) ought at once to restrain and to protect those engaged in this very peculiar, very trying, and very exposed work and life. (I have invariably observed that real penitents are extra-prudish, and comparatively inefficient, in their hospital duty. It will at once be perceived how inevitable this result is.)
ii. That sincere but unconfirmed penitents, in addition to the above, are most dangerously and improperly placed in a situation, to them, of very peculiar trial.
iii. That sham penitents, who unhappily abound, are dangerous everywhere, extra-dangerous in hospitals, whether to superiors, companions, or patients.
iv. That although the class must ever be a very mixed one, it is most important to have a standard. Let it be necessary for every nurse to enter hospital with a good character, and to leave it on losing it. Deception, hypocrisy, and successful guilt will be found in hospitals, as elsewhere; but the class must be raised, and therefore improved, by requiring the condition of good character; though guilt may occasionally mask itself behind it.
v. That although, for various and very differing reasons, the certificates will be not unseldom untrustworthy, still the same reasoning will apply. Upon the whole the tendency will be, by requiring the condition of good character, to improve a class which, containing, as it does, many well-conducted women, is sadly degraded and contaminated by many vile ones.