THE COSMOPOLITE.
SISTERS OF CHARITY.[7]
All the world, that is, one out of the two millions of people in this great town, know, that the above is the title of a somewhat romantic drama, in which Miss Kelly is fast monopolizing the tears and sympathies of the public by her impersonation of a Sister of Charity. To witness it will do every heart good; and this is the highest aim of a dramatic representation. The performance has had the effect of drawing our attention to the original of the character, which is intensely interesting, though at the same time overtinged with romance.
Every six weeks' tourist has seen or heard of the Sisters of Charity on the Continent. They are nurses in the hospitals there, but on a system very different from the hireling attendants in similar institutions in England. Indeed, they may be said to have quitted the world to devote themselves to the relief of those unfortunate persons, who people the abodes of misery and distress. They form, it appears, a numerous body, consisting of several thousand members, who are said to perform or superintend the administration of 300 hospitals in France. They are united under several denominations, as nuns of those monastic communities which escaped the storms of the revolution. Many of them are in the prime of life, and though not bound by absolute vows, devote the whole of their time, and even die in the act of doing good. In spiritual matters, they are under the jurisdiction of the bishop of the district in which the hospital is situated; in temporal concerns they are subject to the authority of the heads of the establishment to which they belong; but they are chiefly under the guidance of the superior of their order. They are fed and lodged at the expense of the hospital, and receive in addition, a certain stipend for the purchase of clothes. In the hospital at Lyons, (which forty or fifty years ago, was the only hospital in France which was not in a barbarous state), there are about 150 of these Sisters, wearing a uniform dress of dark worsted, and remarkably clean. They receive the trifling sum of forty francs a year for pocket-money, and sit up one night in each week; the following is a day of relaxation, and the only one they have. During the siege of Lyons, when cannon-balls passed through the windows, and struck the walls every moment, not one abandoned her post near the sick.
Every one will rejoice at the existence of such offices as the Sisters of Charity—benign, nay almost divine; and until this moment, we thought that such had been their real character. Our belief has, however, been somewhat staggered by an article in the last number of the London Review; in which the services of the Sisters are represented in a much less amiable light than we have been accustomed to view them. This notice occurs in a paper on a work by Dr. David Johnston, of Edinburgh, on the Public Charities of France. The Doctor, whose book abounds with evidence of considerable research, thus speaks of the Sisters of Charity:—
"The inmate of an hospital is alone qualified to speak with justice of the blessings which such attendance affords. Possessed of superior education, and from their religious profession placed above many of the worldly considerations which affect nurses in general, the Sisters of Charity act at once as temporal and spiritual comforters, watch over the sick bed, soothe the prisoner in his confinement, and penetrate into the worst abodes of misery, to comfort the distress, and instruct the ignorant."
Such we also thought had been their portraiture, although we could not so far speak from personal evidence. But the reviewer gainsays all this, and even does more. After drawing a comparison, and not altogether a just one, between the "Sisters of Charity in France," and ladies of fortune who unostentatiously visit the sick poor in England, he says—
"It is matter of fact, generally observable in the instances of the soeurs de charité, that in the performance of their duties towards the sick, during the first three or four months, they display all that tender solicitude and devotedness, which romance ascribes to them as constant and habitual. After the first feelings have subsided, the soeurs are found to consult, in all their actions, first, their own interests, in ease and comfort; next, those of their order, and of the servants on the establishment personally connected with them; and, last of all, those of the patients. On an unprejudiced examination it will be found, that a body so constituted as the soeurs, are extremely unfit for the performance of such functions as are entrusted to them in these establishments. It is essential to the good performance of the duties of a nurse, that she should be responsible to the medical officer for their omission. The soeurs are entirely independent of any such control, and their usual answer to any complaint is, 'Je reponds a mon crucifix.'"