FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE
TO HER NURSES

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Florence Nightingale
to her Nurses

A SELECTION FROM MISS NIGHTINGALE’S
ADDRESSES TO PROBATIONERS AND NURSES
OF THE NIGHTINGALE SCHOOL AT
ST. THOMAS’S HOSPITAL
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1914
COPYRIGHT

PREFACE

Between 1872 and 1900 Miss Nightingale used, when she was able, to send an annual letter or address to the probationer-nurses of the Nightingale School at St. Thomas’ Hospital, “and the nurses who have been trained there.”[1] These addresses were usually read aloud by Sir Harry Verney, the chairman of the Nightingale Fund, in the presence of the probationers and nurses, and a printed copy or a lithographed facsimile of the manuscript was given to each of the nurses present, “for private use only.” A few also were written for the Nightingale Nurses serving in Edinburgh.

The letters were not meant for publication, and indeed are hardly suitable to be printed as a whole as there is naturally a good deal of repetition in them. Since Miss Nightingale’s death, however, heads of nursing institutions and others have asked for copies of the addresses to be read or given to nurses, and her family hope that the publication of a selection may do something to carry further the intention with which they were originally written.

Perhaps, too, not only nurses, but others, may care to read some of these letters. There is a natural desire to understand the nature of a great man’s or woman’s influence, and we see in the addresses something at least of what constituted Miss Nightingale’s power. Her earnest care for the nurses, her intense desire that they should be “perfect,” speak in every line. They do not, of course, give full expression to the writer’s mind. They were written after she had reached middle age, as from a teacher of long and wide experience to pupils much younger than herself—pupils some of whom had had very little schooling and did not easily read or write. The want of even elementary education and of habits and traditions of discipline which grow in schools are difficulties less felt now than in 1872, when Miss Nightingale’s first letter to nurses was written. At that time it was necessary in addressing such an audience to write very simply, without learned allusions (though some such appear in disguise) and without too great severity and concentration of style. The familiar words of the Bible and hymns could appeal to the least learned among her hearers, and never lost their power with Miss Nightingale herself.

But through the simple and popular style of the addresses something of a philosophical framework can be seen. When Miss Nightingale hopes that her nurses are a step further on the way to becoming “perfect as our Father in Heaven is perfect,” she has in mind the conception she had formed of a moral government of the world in which science, activity, and religion were one. In her unpublished writings these ideas are dwelt on again and again. They are clearly explained in her note on a prayer of St. Teresa:—

“We cannot really attach any meaning to perfect thought and feeling, unless its perfection has been attained through life and work, unless it is being realised in life and work. It is in fact a contradiction to suppose Perfection to exist except at work, to exist without exercise, without ‘working out.’ We cannot conceive of perfect wisdom, perfect happiness, except as having attained, attained perfection through work. The ideas of the Impassible and of Perfection are contradictions.... This seems to be the very meaning of the word ‘perfect’—‘made through’—made perfect through suffering—completed—working out; and even the only idea we can form of the Perfect Perfect ... ‘God in us,’ ‘grieving the Holy Spirit of God,’ ‘My Father worketh and I work’—these seem all indications of this truth.... We cannot explain or conceive of Perfection except as having worked through Imperfection or sin.... The Eternal Perfect almost pre-supposes the Eternal Imperfect.” Hence her deep interest in the “laws which register the connection of physical conditions with moral actions.” She quotes elsewhere a scientific writer who delighted in the consciousness that his books were to the best of his ability expounding the ways of God to man. “I can truly say,” she continues, “that the feeling he describes has been ever present to my mind. Whether in having a drain cleaned out, or in ventilating a hospital ward, or in urging the principles of healthy construction of buildings, or of temperance and useful occupation, or of sewerage and water supply, I always considered myself as obeying a direct command of God, and it was ‘with the earnestness and reverence due to’ God’s laws that I urged them.... For mankind to create the circumstances which create mankind through these His Laws is the ‘way of God.’ ”

The letters have needed a little editing. Miss Nightingale had great power of succinct and forcible statement on occasion, but here she was not tabulating statistics nor making a businesslike summary for a Minister in a hurry. Certain ideas had to be impressed, in the first place orally, on minds which were not all highly trained; and for this she naturally wrote in a discursive way. She did not correct the proofs. As readers of her Life will know, she was burdened with other work and delicate health, and she found any considerable revision difficult and uncongenial. It has therefore been necessary to make a few emendations, such as occasionally correcting an obvious misprint, adding a missing word, and taking out brackets, stops, and divisions which obscured the sense. A few of the many repetitions and one or two passages only interesting at the time, have also been left out. The object has been to change as little as possible, and I hope nothing has been done that Miss Nightingale would not have done herself if she had corrected the proofs. The first two addresses give perhaps the fullest expression of the main theme to which she returns again and again. Others have been chosen chiefly for the sake of characteristic illustrations of the same theme.

ROSALIND NASH.

I

London, May, 1872.

For us who Nurse, our Nursing is a thing, which, unless in it we are making progress every year, every month, every week, take my word for it we are going back.

The more experience we gain, the more progress we can make. The progress you make in your year’s training with us is as nothing to what you must make every year after your year’s training is over.

A woman who thinks in herself: “Now I am a ‘full’ Nurse, a ‘skilled’ Nurse, I have learnt all that there is to be learnt”: take my word for it, she does not know what a Nurse is, and she never will know; she is gone back already.

Conceit and Nursing cannot exist in the same person, any more than new patches on an old garment.

Every year of her service a good Nurse will say: “I learn something every day.”

I have had more experience in all countries and in different ways of Hospitals than almost any one ever had before (there were no opportunities for learning in my youth such as you have had); but if I could recover strength so much as to walk about, I would begin all over again. I would come for a year’s training to St. Thomas’ Hospital under your admirable Matron (and I venture to add that she would find me the closest in obedience to all our rules), sure that I should learn every day, learn all the more for my past experience.

And then I would try to be learning every day to the last hour of my life. “And when his legs were cuttit off, He fought upon his stumps,” says the ballad; so, when I could no longer learn by nursing others, I would learn by being nursed, by seeing Nurses practise upon me. It is all experience.

Agnes Jones, who died as Matron of the Liverpool Workhouse Infirmary (whom you may have heard of as “Una”), wrote from the Workhouse in the last year of her life: “I mean to stay at this post forty years, God willing; but I must come back to St. Thomas’ as soon as I have a holiday; I shall learn so much more” (she had been a year at St. Thomas’) “now that I have more experience.”

When I was a child, I remember reading that Sir Isaac Newton, who was, as you know, perhaps the greatest discoverer among the Stars and the Earth’s wonders who ever lived, said in his last hours: “I seem to myself like a child who has been playing with a few pebbles on the sea-shore, leaving unsearched all the wonders of the great Ocean beyond.”

By the side of this put a Nurse leaving her Training School and reckoning up what she has learnt, ending with—“The only wonder is that one head can contain it all.” (What a small head it must be then!)

I seem to have remembered all through life Sir Isaac Newton’s words.

And to nurse—that is, under Doctor’s orders, to cure or to prevent sickness and maiming, Surgical and Medical,—is a field, a road, of which one may safely say: There is no end-no end in what we may be learning every day.[2]

I have sometimes heard: “But have we not reason to be conceited, when we compare ourselves to ... and ...?” (naming drinking, immoral, careless, dishonest Nurses). I will not think it possible that such things can ever be said among us. Taking it even upon the worldly ground, what woman among us, instead of looking to that which is higher, will of her own accord compare herself with that which is lower—with immoral women?

Does not the Apostle say: “I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus”; and what higher “calling” can we have than Nursing? But then we must “press forward”; we have indeed not “apprehended” if we have not “apprehended” even so much as this.

There is a little story about “the Pharisee” known over all Christendom. Should Christ come again upon the earth, would He have to apply that parable to us?

And now, let me say a thing which I am sure must have been in all your minds before this: if, unless we improve every day in our Nursing, we are going back: how much more must it be, that, unless we improve every day in our conduct as Christian women, followers of Him by whose name we call ourselves, we shall be going back?

This applies of course to every woman in the world; but it applies more especially to us, because we know no one calling in the world, except it be that of teaching, in which what we can do depends so much upon what we are. To be a good Nurse one must be a good woman; or one is truly nothing but a tinkling bell. To be a good woman at all, one must be an improving woman; for stagnant waters sooner or later, and stagnant air, as we know ourselves, always grow corrupt and unfit for use.

Is any one of us a stagnant woman? Let it not have to be said by any one of us: I left this Home a worse woman than I came into it. I came in with earnest purpose, and now I think of little but my own satisfaction and a good place.

When the head and the hands are very full, as in Nursing, it is so easy, so very easy, if the heart has not an earnest purpose for God and our neighbour, to end in doing one’s work only for oneself, and not at all—even when we seem to be serving our neighbours—not at all for them or for God.

I should hardly like to talk of a subject which, after all, must be very much between each one of us and her God,—which is hardly a matter for talk at all, and certainly not for me, who cannot be among you (though there is nothing in the world I should so dearly wish), but that I thought perhaps you might like to hear of things which persons in the same situation, that is, in different Training Schools on the Continent, have said to me.

I will mention two or three:

1. One said, “The greatest help I ever had in life was that we were taught in our Training School always to raise our hearts to God the first thing on waking in the morning.”

Now it need hardly be said that we cannot make a rule for this; a rule will not teach this, any more than making a rule that the chimney shall not smoke will make the smoke go up the chimney.

If we occupy ourselves the last thing at night with rushing about, gossiping in one another’s rooms; if our last thoughts at night are of some slight against ourselves, or spite against another, or about each other’s tempers, it is needless to say that our first thoughts in the morning will not be of God.

Perhaps there may even have been some quarrel; and if those who pretend to be educated women indulge in these irreligious uneducated disputes, what a scandal before those less educated, to whom an example, not a stone of offence, should be set!

“A thousand irreligious cursed hours” (as some poet says), have not seldom, in the lives of all but a few whom we may truly call Saints upon earth, been spent on some feeling of ill-will. And can we expect to be really able to lift up our hearts the first thing in the morning to the God of “good will towards men” if we do this?

I speak for myself, even more perhaps than for others.

2. Another woman[3] once said to me:—“I was taught in my Training School never to have those long inward discussions with myself, those interminable conversations inside myself, which make up so much more of our own thoughts than we are aware. If it was something about my duties, I went straight to my Superiors, and asked for leave or advice; if it was any of those useless or ill-tempered thoughts about one another, or those that were put over us, we were taught to lay them before God and get the better of them, before they got the better of us.”

A spark can be put out while it is a spark, if it falls on our dress, but not when it has set the whole dress in flames. So it is with an ill-tempered thought against another. And who will tell how much of our thoughts these occupy?

I suppose, of course, that those who think themselves better than others are bent upon setting them a better example.

II

And this brings me to something else. (I can always correct others though I cannot always correct myself.) It is about jealousies and punctilios as to ranks, classes, and offices, when employed in one good work. What an injury this jealous woman is doing, not to others, or not to others so much as to herself; she is doing it to herself! She is not getting out of her work the advantage, the improvement to her own character, the nobleness (for to be useful is the only true nobleness) which God has appointed her that work to attain. She is not getting out of her work what God has given it her for; but just the contrary.

(Nurses are not children, but women; and if they can’t do this for themselves, no one can for them.)

I think it is one of Shakespeare’s heroes who says “I laboured to be wretched.” How true that is! How true it is of some people all their lives; and perhaps there is not one of us who could not say it with truth of herself at one time or other: I laboured to be mean and contemptible and small and ill-tempered, by being revengeful of petty slights.

A woman once said: “What signifies it to me that this one does me an injury or the other speaks ill of me, if I do not deserve it? The injury strikes God before it strikes me, and if He forgives it, why should not I? I hope I love Him better than I do myself.” This may sound fanciful; but is there not truth in it?

What a privilege it is, the work that God has given us Nurses to do, if we will only let Him have His own way with us—a greater privilege to my mind than He has given to any woman (except to those who are teachers), because we can always be useful, always “ministering” to others, real followers of Him who said that He came “not to be ministered unto” but to minister. Cannot we fancy Him saying to us, If any one thinks herself greater among you, let her minister unto others.

This is not to say that we are to be doing other people’s work. Quite the reverse. The very essence of all good organisation is that everybody should do her (or his) own work in such a way as to help and not to hinder every one else’s work.

But this being arranged, that any one should say, I am “put upon” by having to associate with so-and-so; or by not having so-and-so to associate with; or, by not having such a post; or, by having such a post; or, by my Superiors “walking upon me,” or, “dancing” upon me (you may laugh, but such things have actually been said), or etc., etc.,—this is simply making the peace of God impossible, the call of God (for in all work He calls us) of none effect; it is grieving the Spirit of God; it is doing our best to make all free-will associations intolerable.

In “Religious Orders” this is provided against by enforcing blind, unconditional obedience through the fears and promises of a Church.

Does it not seem to you that the greater freedom of secular Nursing Institutions, as it requires (or ought to require) greater individual responsibility, greater self-command in each one, greater nobleness in each, greater self-possession in patience—so, that very need of self-possession, of greater nobleness in each, requires (or ought to require) greater thought in each, more discretion, and higher, not less, obedience? For the obedience of intelligence, not the obedience of slavery, is what we want.

The slave obeys with stupid obedience, with deceitful evasion of service, or with careless eye service. Now, we cannot suppose God to be satisfied or pleased with stupidity and carelessness. The free woman in Christ obeys, or rather seconds all the rules, all the orders given her, with intelligence, with all her heart, and with all her strength, and with all her mind.

“Not slothful in business; fervent in spirit, serving the Lord.”

And you who have to be Head Nurses, or Sisters of Wards, well know what I mean, for you have to be Ward Mistresses as well as Nurses; and how can she (the Ward Mistress) command if she has not learnt how to obey? If she cannot enforce upon herself to obey rules with discretion, how can she enforce upon her Ward to obey rules with discretion?

III

And of those who have to be Ward Mistresses, as well as those who are Ward Mistresses already, or in any charge of trust or authority, I will ask, if Sisters and Head Nurses will allow me to ask of them, as I have so often asked of myself—

What is it that made our Lord speak “as one having authority”? What was the key to His “authority”? Is it anything which we, trying to be “like Him,” could have—like Him?

What are the qualities which give us authority, which enable us to exercise some charge or control over others with “authority”? It is not the charge or position itself, for we often see persons in a position of authority, who have no authority at all; and on the other hand we sometimes see persons in the very humblest position who exercise a great influence or authority on all around them.

The very first element for having control over others is, of course, to have control over oneself. If I cannot take charge of myself, I cannot take charge of others. The next, perhaps, is—not to try to “seem” anything, but to be what we would seem.

A person in charge must be felt more than she is heard—not heard more than she is felt. She must fulfil her charge without noisy disputes, by the silent power of a consistent life, in which there is no seeming, and no hiding, but plenty of discretion. She must exercise authority without appearing to exercise it.

A person, but more especially a woman, in charge must have a quieter and more impartial mind than those under her, in order to influence them by the best part of them and not by the worst.

We (Sisters) think that we must often make allowances for them, and sometimes put ourselves in their place. And I will appeal to Sisters to say whether we must not observe more than we speak, instead of speaking more than we observe. We must not give an order, much less a reproof, without being fully acquainted with both sides of the case. Else, having scolded wrongfully, we look rather foolish.

The person in charge every one must see to be just and candid, looking at both sides, not moved by entreaties or, by likes and dislikes, but only by justice; and always reasonable, remembering and not forgetting the wants of those of whom she is in charge.

She must have a keen though generous insight into the characters of those she has to control. They must know that she cares for them even while she is checking them; or rather that she checks them because she cares for them. A woman thus reproved is often made your friend for life; a word dropped in this way by a Sister in charge (I am speaking now solely to Sisters and Head Nurses) may sometimes show a probationer the unspeakable importance of this year of her life, when she must sow the seed of her future nursing in this world, and of her future life through eternity. For although future years are of importance to train the plant and make it come up, yet if there is no seed nothing will come up.

Nay, I appeal again to Sisters’ own experience, whether they have not known patients feel the same of words dropped before them.

We had in one of the Hospitals which we nurse a little girl patient of seven years old, the child of a bad mother, who used to pray on her knees (when she did not know she was heard) her own little prayer that she might not forget, when she went away to what she already knew to be a bad life, the good words she had been taught. (In this great London, the time that children spend in Hospital is sometimes the only time in their lives that they hear good words.) And sometimes we have had patients, widows of journeymen for instance, who had striven to the last to do for their children and place them all out in service or at work, die in our Hospitals, thanking God that they had had this time to collect their thoughts before death, and to die “so comfortably” as they expressed it.

But, if a Ward is not kept in such a spirit that patients can collect their thoughts, whether it is for life or for death, and that children can hear good words, of course these things will not happen.

Ward management is only made possible by kindness and sympathy. And the mere way in which a thing is said or done to patient, or probationer, makes all the difference. In a Ward, too, where there is no order there can be no “authority”; there must be noise and dispute.

Hospital Sisters are the only women who may be in charge really of men. Is this not enough to show how essential to them are those qualities which alone constitute real authority?

Never to have a quarrel with another; never to say things which rankle in another’s mind; never when we are uncomfortable ourselves to make others uncomfortable—for quarrels come out of such very small matters, a hasty word, a sharp joke, a harsh order: without regard to these things, how can we take charge?

We may say, so-and-so is too weak if she minds that. But, pray, are we not weak in the same way ourselves?

I have been in positions of authority myself and have always tried to remember that to use such an advantage inconsiderately is—cowardly. To be sharp upon them is worse in me than in them to be sharp upon me. No one can trample upon others, and govern them. To win them is half, I might say the whole, secret of “having charge.” If you find your way to their hearts, you may do what you like with them; and that authority is the most complete which is least perceived or asserted.

The world, whether of a Ward or of an Empire, is governed not by many words but by few; though some, especially women, seem to expect to govern by many words—by talk, and nothing else.

There is scarcely anything which interferes so much with charge over others as rash and inconsiderate talking, or as wearing one’s thoughts on one’s cap. There is scarcely anything which interferes so much with their respect for us as any want of simplicity in us. A person who is always thinking of herself—how she looks, what effect she produces upon others, what others will think or say of her—can scarcely ever hope to have charge of them to any purpose.

We ought to be what we want to seem, or those under us will find out very soon that we only seem what we ought to be.

If we think only of the duty we have in hand, we may hope to make the others think of it too. But if we are fidgety or uneasy about trifles, can we hope to impress them with the importance of essential things?

There is so much talk about persons now-a-days. Everybody criticises everybody. Everybody seems liable to be drawn into a current, against somebody, or in favour of every one doing what she likes, pleasing herself, or getting promotion.

If any one gives way to all these distractions, and has no root of calmness in herself, she will not find it in any Hospital or Home.

“All this is as old as the hills,” you will say. Yes, it is as old as Christianity; and is not that the more reason for us to begin to practise it to-day? “To-day, if ye will hear my voice,” says the Father; “To-day ye shall be with me in Paradise,” says the Son; and He does not say this only to the dying; for Heaven may begin here, and “The kingdom of heaven is within,” He tells us.

Most of you here present will be in a few years in charge of others, filling posts of responsibility. All are on the threshold of active life. Then our characters will be put to the test, whether in some position of charge or of subordination, or both. Shall we be found wanting? Unable to control ourselves, therefore unable to control others? With many good qualities, perhaps, but owing to selfishness, conceit, to some want of purpose, some laxness, carelessness, lightness, vanity, some temper, habits of self-indulgence, or want of disinterestedness, unequal to the struggle of life, the business of life, and ill-adapted to the employment of Nursing, which we have chosen for ourselves, and which, almost above all others, requires earnest purpose, and the reverse of all these faults? Thirty years hence, if we could suppose us all standing here again passing judgment on ourselves, and telling sincerely why one has succeeded and another has failed; why the life of one has been a blessing to those she has charge of, and another has gone from one thing to another, pleasing herself, and bringing nothing to good—what would we give to be able now to see all this before us?

Yet some of those reasons for failure or success we may anticipate now. Because so-and-so was or was not weak or vain; because she could or could not make herself respected; because she had no steadfastness in her, or on the contrary because she had a fixed and steady purpose; because she was selfish or unselfish, disliked or beloved; because she could or could not keep her women together or manage her patients, or was or was not to be trusted in Ward business. And there are many other reasons which I might give you, or which you might give yourselves, for the success or failure of those who have passed through this Training School for the last eleven years.

Can we not see ourselves as others see us?

For the “world is a hard schoolmaster,” and punishes us without giving reasons, and much more severely than any Training School can, and when we can no longer perhaps correct the defect.

Good posts may be found for us; but can we keep them so as to fill them worthily? Or are we but unprofitable servants in fulfilling any charge?

Yet many of us are blinded to the truth by our own self-love even to the end. And we attribute to accident or ill-luck what is really the consequence of some weakness or error in ourselves.

But “can we not see ourselves as God sees us?” is a still more important question. For while we value the judgments of our superiors, and of our fellows, which may correct our own judgments, we must also have a higher standard which may correct theirs. We cannot altogether trust them, and still less can we trust ourselves. And we know, of course, that the worth of a life is not altogether measured by failure or success. We want to see our purposes, and the ways we take to fulfil such charge as may be given us, as they are in the sight of God. “Thou God seest me.”

And thus do we return to the question we asked before—how near can we come to Him whose name we bear, when we call ourselves Christians? How near to His gentleness and goodness—to His “authority” over others.[4]

And the highest “authority” which a woman especially can attain among her fellow women must come from her doing God’s work here in the same spirit, and with the same thoroughness, that Christ did, though we follow him but “afar off.”

IV

Lastly, it is charity to nurse sick bodies well; it is greater charity to nurse well and patiently sick minds, tiresome sufferers. But there is a greater charity even than these: to do good to those who are not good to us, to behave well to those who behave ill to us, to serve with love those who do not even receive our service with good temper, to forgive on the instant any slight which we may have received, or may have fancied we have received, or any worse injury.

If we cannot “do good” to those who “persecute” us—for we are not “persecuted”: if we cannot pray “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”—for none are nailing us to a cross: how much more must we try to serve with patience and love any who use us spitefully, to nurse with all our hearts any thankless peevish patients!

We Nurses may well call ourselves “blessed among women” in this, that we can be always exercising all these three charities, and so fulfil the work our God has given us to do.

Just as I was writing this came a letter from Mrs. Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She has so fallen in love with the character of our Agnes Jones (“Una”)[5] which she had just read, that she asks about the progress of our work, supposing that we have many more Unas. They wish to “organise a similar movement” in America—a “movement” of Unas—what a great thing that would be! Shall we all try to be Unas?

She ends, as I wish to end,—“Yours, in the dear name that is above every other,”

Florence Nightingale.

II

May 23, 1873.

My dear Friends,—Another year has passed over us. Nearly though not quite all of us who were here at this time last year have gone their several ways, to their several posts; some at St. Thomas’, some to Edinburgh, some to Highgate. Nearly all are, I am thankful to say, well, and I hope we may say happy. Some are gone altogether.

May this year have set us all one step farther, one year on our way to becoming “perfect as our Father in Heaven is perfect,” as it ought to have done.

Some differences have been made in the School by our good Matron, who toils for us early and late—to bring us on the way, we hope, towards becoming “perfect.”

These differences—I leave it to you to say, improvements—are as you see: our new Medical Instructor having vigorously taken us in hand and giving us his invaluable teaching (1) in Medical and Surgical Nursing, (2) in the elements of Anatomy. I need not say: Let us profit.

Next, in order to give more time and leisure to less tired bodies, the Special Probationers have two afternoons in the week off duty for the course of reading which our able Medical Instructor has laid down. And the Nurse-Probationers have all one morning and one afternoon in the week to improve themselves, in which our kind Home Sister assists them by classes. And, again, I need not say how important it is to take the utmost advantage of this. Do not let the world move on and leave us in the wrong. Now that, by the law of the land, every child between five and thirteen must be at school, it will be a poor tale, indeed, in their after life for Nurses who cannot read, write, spell, and cypher well and correctly, and read aloud easily, and take notes of the temperature of cases, and the like. Only this last week, I was told by one of our own Matrons of an excellent Nurse of her own to whom she would have given a good place, only that she could neither read nor write well enough for it.

And may I tell you, not for envy, but for a generous rivalry, that you will have to work hard if you wish St. Thomas’ Training School to hold its own with other Schools rising up.

Let us be on our guard against the danger, not exactly of thinking too well of ourselves (for no one consciously does this), but of isolating ourselves, of falling into party spirit—always remembering that, if we can do any good to others, we must draw others to us by the influence of our characters, and not by any profession of what we are—least of all, by a profession of Religion.

And this, by the way, applies peculiarly to what we are with our patients. Least of all should a woman try to exercise religious influence with her patients, as it were, by a ministry, a chaplaincy. We are not chaplains. It is what she is in herself, and what comes out of herself, out of what she is—that exercise a moral or religious influence over her patients. No set form of words is of any use. And patients are so quick to see whether a Nurse is consistent always in herself—whether she is what she says to them. And if she is not, it is no use. If she is, of how much use, unawares to herself, may the simplest word of soothing, of comfort, or even of reproof—especially in the quiet night—be to the roughest patient, who is there from drink, or to the still innocent child, or to the anxious toil-worn mother or husband! But if she wishes to do this, she must keep up a sort of divine calm and high sense of duty in her own mind. Christ was alone, from time to time, in the wilderness or on mountains. If He needed this, how much more must we?

Quiet in our own rooms (and a room of your own is specially provided for each one here); a few minutes of calm thought to offer up the day to God: how indispensable it is, in this ever increasing hurry of life! When we live “so fast,” do we not require a breathing time, a moment or two daily, to think where we are going? At this time, especially, when we are laying the foundation of our after life, in reality the most important time of all.

And I am not at all saying that our patients have everything to learn from us. On the contrary, we can, many a time, learn from them, in patience, in true religious feeling and hope. One of our Sisters told me that she had often learnt more from her patients than from any one else. And I am sure I can say the same for myself. The poorest, the meanest, the humblest patient may enter into the kingdom of Heaven before the cleverest of us, or the most conceited. For, in another world, many, many of the conditions of this world must be changed. Do we think of this?

We have been, almost all of us, taught to pray in the days of our childhood. Is there not something sad and strange in our throwing this aside when most required by us, on the threshold of our active lives? Life is a shallow thing, and more especially Hospital life, without any depth of religion. For it is a matter of simple experience that the best things, the things which seem as if they most would make us feel, become the most hardening if not rightly used.

And may I say a thing from my own experience? No training is of any use, unless one can learn (1) to feel, and (2) to think out things for oneself. And if we have not true religious feeling and purpose, Hospital life—the highest of all things with these—without them becomes a mere routine and bustle, and a very hardening routine and bustle.

One of our past Probationers said: “Our work must be the first thing, but God must be in it.” “And He is not in it,” she added. But let us hope that this is not so. I am sure it was not so with her. Let us try to make it not so with any of us.

There are three things which one must have to prevent this degeneration in oneself. And let each one of us, from time to time, tell, not any one else, but herself, whether she has these less or more than when she began her training here.

One is the real, deep, religious feeling and strong, personal, motherly interest for each one of our patients. And you can see this motherly interest in girls of twenty-one—we have had Sisters of not more than that age who had it—and not see it in women of forty.

The second is a strong practical (intellectual, if you will) interest in the case, how it is going on. This is what makes the true Nurse. Otherwise the patients might as well be pieces of furniture, and we the housemaids, unless we see how interesting a thing Nursing is. This is what makes us urge you to begin to observe the very first case you see.

The third is the pleasures of administration, which, though a fine word, means only learning to manage a Ward well: to keep it fresh, clean, tidy; to keep up its good order, punctuality; to report your cases with absolute accuracy to the Surgeon or Physician, and first to report them to the Sister; and to do all that is contained in the one word, Ward-management: to keep wine-lists, diet-lists, washing-lists—that is Sister’s work—and to do all the things no less important which constitute Nurse’s work.

But it would take a whole book for me to count up these; and I am going back to the first thing that we were saying: without deep religious purpose how shallow a thing is Hospital life, which is, or ought to be, the most inspiring! For, as years go on, we shall have others to train; and find that the springs of religion are dried up within ourselves. The patients we shall always have with us while we are Nurses. And we shall find that we have no religious gift or influence with them, no word in season, whether for those who are to live, or for those who are to die, no, not even when they are in their last hours, and perhaps no one by but us to speak a word to point them to the Eternal Father and Saviour; not even for a poor little dying child who cries: “Nursey, tell me, oh, why is it so dark?” Then we may feel painfully about them what we do not at present feel about ourselves. We may wish, both for our patients and Probationers, that they had the restraints of the “fear” of the most Holy God, to enable them to resist the temptation. We may regret that our own Probationers seem so worldly and external. And we may perceive too late that the deficiency in their characters began in our own.

For, to all good women, life is a prayer; and though we pray in our own rooms, in the Wards and at Church, the end must not be confounded with the means. We are the more bound to watch strictly over ourselves; we have not less but more need of a high standard of duty and of life in our Nursing; we must teach ourselves humility and modesty by becoming more aware of our own weakness and narrowness, and liability to mistake as Nurses and as Christians. Mere worldly success to any nobler, higher mind is not worth having. Do you think Agnes Jones, or some who are now living amongst us, cared much about worldly success? They cared about efficiency, thoroughness. But that is a different thing.

We must condemn many of our own tempers when we calmly review them. We must lament over training opportunities which we have lost, must desire to become better women, better Nurses. That we all of us must feel. And then, and not till then, will life and work among the sick become a prayer.

For prayer is communion or co-operation with God: the expression of a life among his poor and sick and erring ones. But when we speak with God, our power of addressing Him, of holding communion with Him, and listening to His still small voice, depends upon our will being one and the same with His. Is He our God, as He was Christ’s? To Christ He was all, to us He seems sometimes nothing. Can we retire to rest after our busy, anxious day in the Wards, with the feeling: “Lord, into Thy hands I commend my spirit,” and those of such and such anxious cases; remembering, too, that in the darkness, “Thou God seest me,” and seest them too? Can we rise in the morning, almost with a feeling of joy that we are spared another day to do Him service with His sick?—

Awake, my soul, and with the sun,
Thy daily stage of duty run.

Does the thought ever occur to us in the course of the day, that we will correct that particular fault of mind, or heart, or temper, whether slowness, or bustle, or want of accuracy or method, or harsh judgments, or want of loyalty to those under whom or among whom we are placed, or sharp talking, or tale-bearing or gossiping—oh, how common, and how old a fault, as old as Solomon! “He that repeateth a matter, separateth friends;” and how can people trust us unless they know that we are not tale-bearers, who will misrepresent or improperly repeat what is said to us? Shall we correct this, or any other fault, not with a view to our success in life, or to our own credit, but in order that we may be able to serve our Master better in the service of the sick? Or do we ever seek to carry on the battle against light behaviour, against self-indulgence, against evil tempers (the “world,” the “flesh,” and the “devil”), and the temptations that beset us; conscious that in ourselves we are weak, but that there is a strength greater than our own, “which is perfected in weakness”? Do we think of God as the Eternal, into whose hands our patients, whom we see dying in the Wards, must resign their souls—into whose hands we must resign our own when we depart hence, and ought to resign our own as entirely every morning and night of our lives here; with whom do live the spirits of the just made perfect, with whom do really live, ought really as much to live, our spirits here, and who, in the hour of death, in the hour of life, both for our patients and ourselves, must be our trust and hope? We would not always be thinking of death, for “we must live before we die,” and life, perhaps, is as difficult as death. Yet the thought of a time when we shall have passed out of the sight and memory of men may also help us to live; may assist us in shaking off the load of tempers, jealousies, prejudices, bitternesses, interests which weigh us down; may teach us to rise out of this busy, bustling Hospital world, into the clearer light of God’s Kingdom, of which, indeed, this Home is or might be a part, and certainly and especially this Hospital.

This is the spirit of prayer, the spirit of conversation or communion with God, which leads us in all our Nursing silently to think of Him, and refer it to Him. When we hear in the voice of conscience His voice speaking to us; when we are aware that He is the witness of everything we do, and say, and think, and also the source of every good thing in us; and when we feel in our hearts the struggle against some evil temper, then God is fighting with us against envy and jealousy, against selfishness and self-indulgence, against lightness, and frivolity, and vanity, for “our better self against our worse self.”

And thus, too, the friendships which have begun at this School may last through life, and be a help and strength to us. For may we not regard the opportunity given for acquiring friends as one of the uses of this place? and Christian friendship, in uniting us to a friend, as uniting us at the same time to Christ and God? Christ called His disciples friends, adding the reason, “because He had told them all that He had heard of the Father,” just as women tell their whole mind to their friends.

But we all know that there are dangers and disappointments in friendships, especially in women’s friendships, as well as joys and sorrows. A woman may have an honourable desire to know those who are her superiors in education, in the School, or in Nursing. Or she may allow herself to drop into the society of those beneath her, perhaps because she is more at home with them, and is proud or shy with her superiors. We do not want to be judges of our fellow-women (for who made thee to differ from another?), but neither can we leave entirely to chance one of the greatest interests of human life.

True friendship is simple, womanly, unreserved: not weak, or silly, or fond, or noisy, or romping, or extravagant, nor yet jealous and selfish, and exacting more than woman’s nature can fairly give, for there are other ties which bind women to one another besides friendship; nor, again, intrusive into the secrets of another woman, or curious about her circumstances; rejoicing in the presence of a friend, and not forgetting her in her absence.

Two Probationers or Nurses going together have not only a twofold, but a fourfold strength, if they learn knowledge or good from one another; if they form the characters of one another; if they support one another in fulfilling the duties and bearing the troubles of a Nursing life, if their friendship thus becomes fellow-service to God in their daily work. They may sometimes rejoice together over the portion of their training which has been accomplished, and take counsel about what remains to be done. They will desire to keep one another up to the mark; not to allow idleness or eccentricity to spoil their time of training.

But some of our youthful friendships are too violent to last: they have in them something of weakness or sentimentalism; the feeling passes away, and we become ashamed of them. Or at some critical time a friend has failed to stand by us, and then it is useless to talk of “auld lang syne.” Only still let us remember that there are duties which we owe to the “extinct” friend (who perhaps on some fanciful ground has parted company from us), that we should never speak against her, or make use of our knowledge about her. For the memory of a friendship is like the memory of a dead friend, not lightly to be spoken of.

And then there is the “Christian or ideal friendship.” What others regard as the service of the sick she may recognise as also the service of God; what others do out of compassion for their maimed fellow-creatures she may do also for the love of Christ. Feeling that God has made her what she is, she may seek to carry on her work in the Hospital as a fellow-worker with God. Remembering that Christ died for her, she may be ready to lay down her life for her patients.

“They walked together in the house of God as friends”—that is, they served God together in doing good to His sick. For if ever a place may be called the “house of God,” it is a Hospital, if it be what it should be. And in old times it was called the “house” or the “hotel” of God. The greatest and oldest Central Hospital of Paris, where is the Mother-house of the principal Order of Nursing Sisters, is to this day called the Hôtel Dieu, the “House of God.”

There may be some amongst us who, like St. Paul, are capable of feeling a natural interest in the spiritual welfare of our fellow-probationers—or, if you like the expression better, in the improvement of their characters—that they may become more such as God intended them to be in this Hospital and Home. For “Christian friendship is not merely the friendship of equals, but of unequals”—the love of the weak and of those who can make no return, like the love of God towards the unthankful and the evil. It is not a friendship of one or two but of many. It proceeds upon a different rule: “Love your enemies.” It is founded upon that charity “which is not easily offended, which beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.” Such a friendship we may be hardly able to reconcile either with our own character or with common prudence. Yet this is the “Christian ideal in the Gospel.” And here and there may be found some one who has been inspired to carry out the ideal in practice.

“To live in isolation is to be weak and unhappy—perhaps to be idle and selfish.” There is something not quite right in a woman who shuts up her heart from other women.

This may seem to be telling you what you already know, and bidding you do what you are already doing. Well, then, shall we put the matter another way? Make such friendships as you will look back upon with pleasure in later life, and be loyal and true to your friends, not going from one to another.

The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hooks of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatched, unfledged comrade.

And do not expect more of them than friends can give, or weary them with demands for sympathy; and do not let the womanliness of friendship be impaired by any silliness or sentimentalism; or allow hearty and genial good-will to degenerate into vulgarity and noise.

And as was once truly said, friendship perhaps appears best, as it did in St. Paul, in his manner of rebuking those who had erred, “transferring their faults in a figure to Apollos and to himself.” “No one knew how to speak the truth in love like him.”

It has been said of Romans xii.: “What rule of manners can be better than this chapter?” “She that giveth, let her do it with simplicity”; that is, let us do our acts of Nursing and kindness as if we did not make much of them, as unto the Lord and not to men. “Like-minded one towards another”; that is, we should have the same thoughts and feelings with others. “Rejoicing with them that rejoice, and weeping with them that weep”; going out of ourselves and entering into the thoughts of others.

And have we St. Paul’s extraordinary regard for the feelings of others? He was never too busy to think of these. “If meat make my brother to offend, I will eat no more meat while the world standeth,” he says, though he well knew such scruples were really superstitions. If the spirit of these words could find a way to our women’s hearts, we might be able to say, “See how these Christians (Nurses) love one another!”

Then the courtesy we owe, one woman to another: “for the happiness and the good” of our work and our School is not simply “made up of great duties and virtues, nor the evil of the opposite.” But both seem to consist also in a number of small particulars, which, small as they are, have a great effect on the tone and character of our School, introducing light or darkness into the “Home,” sweetness or bitterness into our intercourse with one another.

And, as to our Wards: Christ, we may be sure, did not lose authority, or dignity and refinement, “even in the company of publicans and harlots,” just as we may observe in the Wards, that there are a few of us whose very refinement makes them do the coarsest and roughest things there with simplicity. A Sister of ours once remarked this of one of her Probationers (who was not a lady in the common sense of the word, but she was the truest gentlewoman in Christ’s sense), that she was too refined (most people would have said, to do the indelicate work of the Wards, but she said) to see indelicacy in doing the nastiest thing; and so did it all well, without thinking of herself, or that men’s eyes were upon her. That is real dignity—the dignity which Christ had—on which no man can intrude, yet combined with the greatest gentleness and simplicity of life.

II

And let me say a word about self-denial: because, as we all know, there can be no real Nursing without self-denial. We know the story of the Roman soldier, above fourteen hundred years ago, who, entering a town in France with his regiment, saw a sick man perishing with cold by the wayside—there were no Hospitals then—and, having nothing else to give, drew his sword, cut his own cloak in half, and wrapped the sick man in half his cloak.

It is said that a dream visited him, in which he found himself admitted into heaven, and Christ saying, “Martin hath clothed me with this garment”: the dream, of course, being a remembrance of the verse, “When saw we thee sick or in prison, and came unto thee?” and of the answer, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” But whether the story of the dream be true or not, this Roman soldier, converted to Christianity, became afterwards one of the greatest bishops of the early ages, Martin of Tours.

We are not called upon to feed our patients with our own dinners, or to dress them with our own clothes. We are comfortable, and cannot make ourselves uncomfortable on purpose. But we can learn Sick Cookery for our Patients, we can give up spending our money in foolish dressy ways, and thus squandering what we ought to lay by for ourselves or our families.

On one of the severest winter days in the late war between France and Germany, an immense detachment, many thousands, of wretched French prisoners were passing through the poorest streets of one of the largest and poorest German towns on the way to the prisoners’ camp. Every door in this poor “East End” opened; not one remained closed; and out of every door came a poor German woman, carrying in her hand the dinner or supper she was cooking for herself, her husband, or children; often all she had in the house was in her hands. And this she crammed into the hands of the most sickly-looking prisoner as he passed by, often into his mouth, as he sank down exhausted in the muddy street. And the good-natured German escort, whose business it was to bring these poor French to their prison, turned away their heads, and let the women have their way, though it was late, and they were weary too. Before the prisoners had been the first hour in their prison, six had lain down in the straw and died. But how many lives had been saved that night by the timely food of these good women, giving all they had, not of their abundance, but of their poverty, God only knows, not we. This was told by an Englishman who was by and saw it; one of our own “Aid Committee.”

And at a large German station, which almost all the prisoners’ trains passed through, a lady went every night during all that long, long, dreadful winter, and for the whole night, to feed, and warm, and comfort, and often to receive the last dying words of the miserable French prisoners, as they arrived in open trucks, some frozen to the bottom, some only as the dead, others to die in the station, all half-clad and starving. Some had been nine days and nights in these open trucks; many had been twenty-four hours without food. Night after night as these long, terrible trainsful dragged their slow length into the station, she kneeled on its pavement, supporting the dying heads, receiving their last messages to their mothers; pouring wine or hot milk down the throats of the sick; dressing the frost-bitten limbs; and, thank God, saving many. Many were carried to the prisoners’ hospital in the town, of whom about two-thirds recovered. Every bit of linen she had went in this way. She herself contracted incurable ill-health during these fearful nights. But thousands were saved by her means.

She is my friend.[6] She came and saw me here after this; and it is from her lips I heard the story. Smallpox and typhus raged among the prisoners, most of whom were quite boys. Many were wounded; half were frost-bitten. Sometimes they would snatch at all she brought; but sometimes they would turn away their dying heads from the tempting hot wine, and gasp out, “Thank you, madam; give it to him, who wants it more than I.” Or, “I’m past help; love to mother.”

We have not to give of our own to our sick. But shall we the less give them our all—that is, all our hearts and minds? and reasonable service?

Suppose we dedicated this “School” to Him, to the Divine Charity and Love which said, “Inasmuch as ye do it unto one of the least of these my brethren” (and He calls all our patients—all of us, His brothers and sisters) “ye do it unto me”—oh, what a “Kingdom of Heaven” this might be! Then, indeed, the dream of Martin of Tours, the soldier and Missionary-Bishop, would have come true!

III

May I take this opportunity of saying what I think really very much concerns us? First of all, that you have, or might have, directly and indirectly, a great deal to do with maintaining a supply of good candidates to this School. You know whether you have been happy here or not; you know whether you have had opportunities given you here of training and self-improvement. Many, very many of our old Matrons and Nurses have told me that their time as probationers with us was “the happiest time of their lives.” It might be so with all, though perhaps all do not think so now.

It is in your power to assist the School most materially in obtaining fresh and worthy recruits. There is hardly one of you who has not friends or acquaintances of her own. You ought to advertise us. We ought not to have to put one advertisement in the newspapers. If you think this is a worthy life, why do you not bring others to it? I tried to do my part. When Agnes Jones died, though my heart was breaking, I put an article in Good Words, such as I knew she would have wished, in all but the mention of herself; and for years her dear memory brought aspirants to the work in our Schools, or others’ Schools.

To reform the Nursing of all the Hospitals and Workhouse Infirmaries in the world, and to establish District Nursing among the sick poor at home, too, as at Liverpool—is this not an object most worthy of the co-operation of all civilised people?

In the last ten years, thank God, numerous Training Schools for Nurses have grown up, resolved to unite in putting a stop to such a thing as drunken, immoral, and inefficient Nursing. But all make the same complaint; while the outcry of “employment for women” continues, why does not this most womanly employment for all good women become more sought after? I hope to hear that my old friends in St. Thomas’ have each done their part; and I feel quite sure that if it is once placed before them, as a thing they ought to do, they will be found in the front.

You who are assembled in this room, and who are each connected with some circle, directly or indirectly, may do a good work for the civilisation of the Workhouses and Hospitals of the world. If you inform yourselves on the subject, and if you set yourselves to work, to deal with it, as we do with any other great evil that tortures helpless people, you will be able to act directly upon your friends outside, and ultimately get up an amount of public opinion among women capable of becoming Nurses, which will be of the greatest possible aid to our efforts in improving Hospital and Workhouse Nursing. Every one can help—every one—better than if she were a “newspaper,” better than if she were a “public meeting.” I believe that within a few years you can make it a thing that will be a disgrace to any Hospital or even Workhouse to be suspected of bad Nursing, or to any district (in towns, at any rate) not to have a good District Nurse to nurse the sick poor at home.

Those who have made the right use of all the training that came in their way in this School, if they would write to their own homes for the information of their friends outside, an immense help on its way could be given to the work we have all so much at heart. And I look upon it as a certainty that you will each be able, in one way or another, whether purposely or almost unconsciously, to take a great part in reforming the Hospital and Workhouse Nursing systems of our country, perhaps of our colonies and dependencies, and perhaps of the world.

IV

May I pay ourselves even the least little compliment, as to our being a little less conceited than last year? Were we not as conceited in 1872 as it was possible to be? You shall tell. Are we, in 1873, rather less so? And, without having any one particularly in my head—for what I am going to ask is in fact a truism—is not our conceit always in exact proportion to our ignorance? For those who really know something know how little it is.

Would that this could be a “secret” among us! But, unfortunately, is not our name “up” and “abroad” for conceit? And has it not even been said (“tell it not in Gath”): “And these conceited ‘Nightingale’ women scarcely know how to read and write?”

Now let no one look to see our blushes. But shall we not get rid of this which makes us ridiculous as fast as we can?

But enough of this joke; let us be serious, remembering that the greatest trust which is committed to any woman of us all is, herself; and that she is living in the presence of God as well as of her fellow-women.

To know whether we know our Nursing business or not is a great result of training; and to think that we know it when we do not is as great a proof of want of training.

The world, more especially the Hospital world, is in such a hurry, is moving so fast, that it is too easy to slide into bad habits before we are aware. And it is easier still to let our year’s training slip away without forming any real plan of training ourselves.

For, after all, all that any training is to do for us is: to teach us how to train ourselves, how to observe for ourselves, how to think out things for ourselves. Don’t let us allow the first week, the second week, the third week to pass by—I will not say in idleness, but in bustle. Begin, for instance, at once making notes of your cases. From the first moment you see a case, you can observe it. Nay, it is one of the first things a Nurse is strictly called upon to do: to observe her sick. Mr. Croft has taught you how to take notes; and you have now, every one of you, two leisure times a week to work up your notes.

But give but one-quarter of an hour a day to jot down, even in words which no one can understand but yourself, the progress or change of two or three individual cases, not to forget or confuse them. You can then write them out at your two leisure times. To those who have not much education, I am sure that our kind Home Sister, or the Special Probationer in the same Ward, or nearest in any way, will give help. The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; and “line upon line”—one line every day—in the steady, observing, humble Nurse has often won the race over the smarter “genius” in what constitutes real Nursing. But few of us women seriously think of improving our own mind or character every day. And this is fatal to our improving in Nursing. We do not calculate the future by our experience of the past. What right have we to expect that, if we have not improved during the last six months, we shall during the next six? Then, we do not allow for the changes which circumstances make in us—the being put on Staff duty, when we certainly shall not have more time, but less, for improving ourselves, or the growing older or more feeble in health. We believe that we shall always have the same powers or opportunities for learning our business which we now have. Our time of training slips away in this unimproving manner. And when a woman begins to see how many things might have been better in her, she is too old to change, or it is too late, too late. And she confesses to herself, or oftener she does not confess—“How all her life she had been in the wrong.”

We are all of us, as we believe, passing into an unknown world, of which this is only a part. We have been here a year, or part of a year. What are we making of our own lives? Are we where we were a year ago? Or are we fitter for that work of after-life which we have undertaken?

Do our faults, and weaknesses, and vanities, tend to diminish? Or are we still listless, inefficient, slow, bustling, conceited, unkind, hard judges of others, instead of helping them where we can? There is no greater softener of hard judgments than is the trying to help the person whom we so judge, as I can tell from my own experience; and in this you will tell me whether we have been deficient to each other. There is a true story told of Captain Marryat when a boy; that he jumped overboard to save an older midshipman who had made the boy’s life a misery to him by his filthy cruelties. And the boy Marryat wrote home to his mother “that he loved this midshipman now—and wasn’t it lucky that his life was saved—even better than his own darling mother.”

Do we keep before our minds constantly the sense of our duty here, of our duty to others—Nurses, Sisters, Matron—as well as to ourselves, our fellow Probationers, and our Home Sister, and to the whole School of which we are members?

If we thought of this more, we might hope to attain that quiet mind and self-control, which is the “liberty” spoken of by St. Paul. We might learn how truly to use and enjoy both our fellow Probationers, and this Home and our School, if we were more anxious about following the example of Christ than about the opinion of our “world.” “We are the ‘world,’ which we often seem to think includes every one but us.”

But few comparatively have the power of disengaging themselves, even in thought, from those about them. They take the view of their own set. If it is the fashion to conceal, they conceal; if to carry tales, they carry tales. There are a few who never allow themselves to speak against others, and exercise such a kind of authority as to prevent others being spoken against in their hearing. These are the “peacemakers” of whom Christ speaks. These are they who keep a Home or Institution together, and seem more than any others in this our little world to bear the image of Christ until His coming again.

Do we ever do things because they are right, without regard to our own credit? When we ask ourselves only “What is right?” or (which is the same question), “What is the will of God?” then we are truly entering His “kingdom.” We are no longer grovelling among the opinions of men and women. We can see God in all things, and all things in God, the Eternal Father shining through the accidents of our lives—which sometimes shake us more, though less conspicuous, than the accidents we see brought into our Surgical Wards—the accidents of the characters of those under whom we are placed, and of our own inner life.

One of the greatest missionaries that ever was, wrote more than 300 years ago to his pupils and fellow-missionaries:

“Self-knowledge”—(the knowledge by which we see ourselves in God)—“self-knowledge is the nurse of confidence in God. It is from distrust of ourselves that confidence in God is born. This will be the way for us to gain that true interior lowliness of mind which, in all places, and especially here, is far more necessary than you think. I warn you also not to let the good opinion which men have of you be too much of a pleasure to you, unless perhaps in order that you may be the more ashamed of yourselves on that account. It is that which leads people to neglect themselves, and this negligence, in many cases, upsets, as by a kind of trick, all that lowliness of which I speak, and puts conceit and arrogance in its place. And thus so many do not see for a long time how much they have lost, and gradually lose all care for piety, and all tranquillity of mind, and thus are always troubled and anxious, finding no comfort either from without or within themselves.”

“Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden,” says our Lord, “and I will give you rest.” But He adds immediately who those are to whom He will give this “rest” or quietness of mind—namely those, who, like Himself, are “meek and lowly of heart.”

These words may seem in a Hospital life “like dreams.” But they are not dreams if we take them for the spirit of our School and the rule of our Nursing. “To practise them, to feel them, to make them our own,” this is not far from the “kingdom of Heaven” in a Hospital.

Pray for me, as I do for you, that “piety” and a “quiet mind”—but these always and only in the strenuous effort to press forwards—may be ours.

Florence Nightingale.

III

July 23rd, 1874.

Another year has passed over us, my dear friends. There have been many changes among us. We have each of us tasted somewhat more of the discipline of life. To some of us it may have been very bitter; to others, let us hope, not so. By all, let us trust, it has been put to heroic uses.

“Heroic?” I think I hear you say; “can there be much of ‘heroic’ in washing porringers and making beds?”

I once heard a man (he is dead now) giving a lesson to some poor orphan girls in an Orphan Asylum. Few things, I think, ever struck me so much, or them. It was on the “heroic virtues.” It went into the smallest particulars of thrift, of duty, of love and kindness; and he ended by asking them how they thought such small people as themselves could manage to practise those great virtues. A child of seven put up its little nib and chirped out: “Please, my lord, we might pick up pins when we don’t like to.” That showed she understood his lesson.

His lesson was not exactly fitted to us, but we may all fit it to ourselves.

This night, if we are inclined to make a noise on the stairs, or to linger in each other’s rooms, shall we go quietly to bed, alone with God? Some of you yourselves have told me that you could get better day sleep in the Night Nurses’ Dormitory than in your own “Home.” Is there such loud laughing and boisterous talking in the daytime, going upstairs to your rooms, that it disturbs any one who is ill, or prevents those who have been on night duty from getting any sleep?

Is that doing what you would be done by—loving your neighbour as yourselves, as our Master told us?

Do you think it is we who invent the duty “Quiet and orderly,” or is it He?

If our uniform dress is not what we like, shall we think of our Lord, whose very garments were divided by the soldiers? (But I always think how much more becoming is our uniform than any other dress I see.)

If there is anything at table that we don’t like, shall we take it thankfully, remembering Who had to ask a poor woman for a drink of water?

Shall we take the utmost pains to be perfectly regular and punctual to all our hours—going into the wards, coming out of the wards, at meals, etc.? And if we are unavoidably prevented, making an apology to the Home Sister, remembering what has been written about those who are in authority over us? Or do we think a few minutes of no consequence in coming from or going to the wards?

Do we carefully observe our Rules?

If we are what is printed at the top of our Duties, viz.:

Trustworthy,
Punctual,
Quiet and orderly,
Cleanly and neat,
Patient, cheerful, and kindly,

we scarcely need any other lesson but what explains these to us.

Trustworthy: that is, faithful.

Trustworthy when we have no one by to urge or to order us. “Her lips were never opened but to speak the truth.” Can that be said of us?

Trustworthy, in keeping our soul in our hands, never excited, but always ready to lift it up to God; unstained by the smallest flirtation, innocent of the smallest offence, even in thought.

Trustworthy, in doing our work as faithfully as if our superiors were always near us.

Trustworthy, in never prying into one another’s concerns, but ever acting behind another’s back as one would to her face.

Trustworthy, in avoiding every word that could injure, in the smallest degree, our patients, or our companions, who are our neighbours, remembering how St. Peter says that God made us all “stewards of grace one to another.”

How can we be “stewards of grace” to one another? By giving the “grace” of our good example to all around us. And how can we become “untrustworthy stewards” to one another? By showing ourselves lax in our habits, irregular in our ways, not doing as we should do if our superiors were by. “Cripple leads the way.” Shall the better follow the worse?

It has happened to me to hear some of you say—perhaps it has happened to us all—“Indeed, I only did what I saw done.”

How glorious it would be if “only doing what we saw done” always led us right!

A master of a great public school once said that he could trust his whole school, because he could trust every single boy in it. Oh, could God but say that He can trust this Home and Hospital because He can trust every woman in it! Let us try this—every woman to work as though success depended on herself. Do you know that, in this great Indian Famine, every Englishman has worked as if success depended on himself? And in saving a population as large as that of England from death by starvation, do you not think that we have achieved the greatest victory we ever won in India? Suppose we work thus for this Home and Hospital.

Oh, my dear friends, how terrible it will be to any one of us, some day, to hear another say, that she only did what she saw us do, if that was on the “road that leadeth to destruction”!

Or taking it another way, how delightful—how delightful to have set another on her journey to heaven by our good example; how terrible to have delayed another on her journey to heaven by our bad example!

There is an old story—nearly six hundred years old—when a ploughboy said to a truly great man, whose name is known in history, that he “advised” him “always to live in such a way that those who had a good opinion of him might never be disappointed.”

The great man thanked him for his advice, and—kept it.

If our School has a good name, do we live so that people “may never be disappointed” in its Nurses?

Obedient: not wilful: not having such a sturdy will of our own. Common sense tells us that no training can do us any good, if we are always seeking our own way. I know that some have really sought in dedication to God to give up their own wills to His. For if you enter this Training School, is that not in effect a promise to Him to give up your own way for that way which you are taught?

Let us not question so much. You must know that things have been thought over and arranged for your benefit. You are not bound to think us always right: perhaps you can’t. But are you more likely to be right? And, at all events, you know you are right, if you choose to enter our ways, to submit yours to them.

In a foreign Training School, I once heard a most excellent pastor, who was visiting there, say to a nurse: “Are you discouraged?—say rather, you are disobedient: they always mean the same thing.” And I thought how right he was. And, what is more, the Nurse thought so too; and she was not “discouraged” ever after, because she gave up being “disobedient.”

“Every one for herself” ought to have no footing here: and these strong wills of ours God will teach. If we do not let Him teach us here, He will teach us by some sterner discipline hereafter—teach our wills to bend first to the will of God, and then to the reasonable and lawful wills of those among whom our lot is cast.

I often say for myself, and I have no doubt you do, that line of the hymn:

Tell me, Thou yet wilt chide, Thou canst not spare,
O Lord, Thy chastening rod.

Let Him reduce us to His discipline before it is too late. If we “kick against the pricks,” we can only pray that He will give us more “pricks,” till we cease to “kick.” And it is a proof of His fatherly love, and that He has not given us up, if He does.

For myself, I can say that I have never known what it was, since I can remember anything, not to have “prickly” discipline, more than any one knew of; and I hope I have not “kicked.”

To return to Trustworthiness.

Most of you, on leaving the Home, go first on night duty. Now there is nothing like night duty for trying our trustworthiness. A year hence you will tell me whether you have felt any temptation not to be quite honest in reporting cases the next morning to your Sister or Nurse: that is, to say you have observed when you have not observed; to slur over things in your report, which, for aught you know, may be of consequence to the patient: to slur over things in your work because there is no one watching you: no one but God.

It has indeed been known that the Night Nurse had stayed in the kitchen to talk; but we may trust such things will not happen again.

And, for all, let us all say this word for ourselves: everything gets toppled over if we don’t make it a matter of conscience, a matter of reckoning between ourselves and our God. That is the only safeguard of real trustworthiness. If we treat it as a mere matter of business, of success in our career in life, never shall we give anything but eye-service, never shall we be really trustworthy.

Orderly: Let us never waste anything, even pins or paper, as some do, by beginning letters or resolutions, or “cases,” which they never take the trouble to finish.

Cheerful and Patient: Let us never wish for more than is necessary, and be cheerful when what we should like is sometimes denied us, as it may be some day; or when people are unkind, or we are disregarded by those we love: remembering Him whose attendants at His death were mocking soldiers.

I assure you, my friends, that if we can practise those “duties” faithfully, we are practising the “heroic virtues.”

Patient, cheerful, and kindly: Now, is it being patient, cheerful, and kindly to be so only with those who are so to us? For, as St. Peter tells us, even ungodly people do that. But if we can do good to some one who has done us ill, oh, what a privilege that is! And even God will thank us for it, the Apostle says. Let us be kindest to the impatient and unkindly.

Now let me tell you of two Nurses whom we knew.

One was a lady, with just enough to live upon, who took an old widow to nurse into her house: recommended to her by her minister. One day she met him and reproached him. Why? Because the old widow was “too good”; “anybody could nurse her.” Presently a grumbling old woman, never contented with anything anybody did, who thought she was never treated well enough, and that she never had “her due,” was found. And this old woman the lady took into her house and nursed till she died; because, she said, nobody else liked to do anything for her, and she did. That was something like kindness, for there is no great kindness in doing good to any one who is grateful and thanks us for it.

But my other story is something much better still.

A poor Nurse, who had been left a widow, with nothing to live upon but her own earnings, inquired for some tedious children to take care of. As you may suppose, there was no difficulty in finding this article. And from that day, for twenty years, she never had less than two, three, or four orphans with her, and sometimes five, whom she brought up as her own, training them for service. She taught them domestic work, for she herself went out to service at nine years old. She never had any difficulty in finding places for them, and for twenty years she had thus a succession of children. But she taught them something better.

She taught them that they had “nothing but their character to depend upon.” “I tell them,” she said, “it was all I had myself; God helps girls that watch over themselves. If a girl isn’t made to feel this early, it’s hard afterwards to make her feel it.”

These girls, so brought up, turned out much better than those brought up in most large Union schools, for asylums are not like homes. Of the children whom Nurse took in, one was a girl of such bad habits and such a mischief-maker that no one else could manage her. But Nurse did. She soon found she could not refuse boys. One was a boy of fourteen, just out of prison for bad ways, whom she took and reclaimed, and who became as good a boy as can be. These are only two specimens.

They called her “Mother.” And God, she used to say, gave them to her as her own. You will ask how she supported them. The larger number of them she supported by taking in washing, by charing one day a week, and bye and bye, by taking in journeymen as lodgers. Now and then a lady would pay for an orphan. Once she took in a sailor’s five motherless children for 5s. a week from the father: but she has taken in apprentices as lodgers, whose own fathers could not afford to keep them for their wages.

All this time she washed for a poor sick Irishwoman, who never gave her any thanks but that “the clothes were not well washed, nor was anything done as it ought to be done.” Yet she took in this woman’s child of two years old as her own, till the father came back, when he gave up drink and claimed it.

Every Friday she gave her earnings to some poor women, who bought goods with the money, which they sold again in the market on Saturday, and returned her money to her on Saturday night. She said she never lost a penny by this: and it kept several old women going.

She must have been a capital manager, you will say. Well, till she took in lodgers, she lived in a cellar which she painted with her own hands, and kept as clean as a new pin. Afterwards she let her cellar for 2s. a week, though she might have got 2s. 6d. or 3s. a week for it, because, she said, “the poor should not be hard on one another.” Milk she never tasted; meat seldom, and then she always stewed, never roasted it. She lived on potatoes, and potato pie was the luxury of herself and children.

On Sundays she filled her pot of four gallons and made broth: sometimes for six or eight poor old women besides her own family, as she called her orphans. These must be satisfied with what she provided, little or much. She never let them touch what was sent her for her patients. Sometimes good things were sent her, which she always gave to sick neighbours; yet she has been accused of keeping for herself nice things sent to her care for others. She never owed a penny, for all her charity.

If this Nurse has not practised the “heroic virtues,” who has?

I mentioned this Nurse merely as an instance of one who literally fulfilled the precept to “do good” to them that “despitefully use you”: to be “patient, cheerful, and kindly.” There is no time to tell you how she was left a widow with two infants and a blind and insane mother, whom she kept till doctors compelled her to put her mother into a lunatic asylum: how one of her sons was a sickly cripple, whom she nursed till he died, working by day and sitting up with him at night for years: how the other boy was insane, and ran away: how, to ease her broken mother’s heart, she returned to sick-nursing, chiefly among the poor, nursed through two choleras, till her health broke down, and, by way of taking care of herself, then took up the “tedious” orphan system, which she never ceased. She felt, she said, as if she were doing something then for her “own dear boy.” As soon as she lived in a poor house of four rooms and an attic, she has had as many as ten carpenters’ men of a night, who had nowhere but the public-house to go to. She gave them a good fire, borrowed a newspaper for them, and made one read aloud. They brought her sixpence a week, and she laid it all out in supper for them, and cooked it. She gave the only good pair of shoes she had to one of these, because “he must go to work decent!”

She was a famous sick cook, often carrying home fish-bones to stew them for the sick, who seldom thanked her; and the remains of damsons and currants, to boil over again as a drink for fever patients: who sometimes accused her of keeping back things sent for them.

“How much more the Lord has borne from me,” she used to say.

And of children she used to say: “We never can train up a child in the way it should go till we take it in our arms, as Jesus did, and feel: ‘Of such is the kingdom of heaven’; and that there is a ‘heavenly principle’ (a ‘little angel,’ I think she said) in each child to be trained up in it.”

She said she had learnt this from the master in a factory where she had once nursed.

(How little he knew that he had been one means of forming this heroic Nurse.)

II

And now I have a word for the Ladies, and a word for the Nurse-Probationers. Which shall come first?

Do the ladies follow up their intellectual privileges? Or, are they lazy in their hours of study? Do they cultivate their powers of expression in answering Mr. Croft’s examinations?

Ought they not to look upon themselves as future leaders—as those who will have to train others? And to bear this in mind during the whole of their year’s training, so as to qualify themselves for being so? It is not just getting through the year anyhow, without being blamed. For the year leaves a stamp on everybody—this for the Nurses as well as the Ladies—and once gone can never be regained.

To the Special Probationers may I say one more word?

Do we look enough into the importance of giving ourselves thoroughly to study in the hours of study, of keeping careful Notes of Lectures, of keeping notes of all type cases, and of cases interesting from not being type cases, so as to improve our powers of observation—all essential if we are in future to have charge? Do we keep in view the importance of helping ourselves to understand these cases by reading at the time books where we can find them described, and by listening to the remarks made by Physicians and Surgeons in going round with their Students? (Take a sly note afterwards, when nobody sees, in order to have a correct remembrance.)

So shall we do everything in our power to become proficient, not only in knowing the symptoms and what is to be done, but in knowing the “Reason Why” of such symptoms, and why such and such a thing is done; and so on, till we can some day TRAIN OTHERS to know the “reason why.”

Many say: “We have no time; the Ward work gives us no time.”

But it is so easy to degenerate into a mere drudgery about the Wards, when we have goodwill to do it, and are fonder of practical work than of giving ourselves the trouble of learning the “reason why.” Take care, or the Nurses, some of them, will catch you up.

Take ten minutes a day in the Ward to jot down things, and write them out afterwards: come punctually from your Ward to have time for doing so. It is far better to take these ten minutes to write your cases or to jot down your recollections in the Ward than to give the same ten minutes to bustling about. I am sure the Sisters would help you to get this time if you asked them: and also to leave the Ward punctually.

And do you not think this a religious duty?

Such observations are a religious meditation: for is it not the best part of religion to imitate the benevolence of God to man? And how can you do this—in this your calling especially—if you do not thoroughly understand your calling? And is not every study to do this a religious contemplation?

Without it, May you not potter and cobble about the patients without ever once learning the reason of what you do, so as to be able to train others?

(I do not say anything about the “cards,” for I take it for granted that you can read them easily.)

Our dear Matron, who is always thinking of arranging for us, is going to have a case-paper with printed headings given to you, and to keep this correctly ought to be a mere every-day necessity, and a very easy one, for you.

2. And for the Nurses:

They are placed, perhaps here only, on a footing of equality with educated gentlewomen. Do they show their appreciation of this by thinking, “We are as good as they”? Or, by obedience and respect, and trying to profit by the superior education of the gentlewomen?

Both we have known; we have known Nurse-Probationers who took the Ladies “under their protection” in saving them the harder work, and the Ladies have given them the full return back in helping them in their education.

And we have known—very much the reverse.

Also, do the Nurse-Probationers take advantage of their opportunities, in the excellent classes given them by the Home Sister, in keeping diaries and some cases?

Very few of the Nurse-Probationers have taken notes of Mr. Croft’s Lectures at all; it is not fair to Mr. Croft to give him people who do not benefit by his instruction.

3. And I have another word to say:

Are there parties in our Home?

Could we but be not so tenacious of our own interests, but look at the thing in a larger way!

Is there a great deal of canvassing and misinterpreting Sisters and Matron and other authorities? every little saying and doing of theirs? talking among one another about the superiors (and then finding we were all wrong when we came to know them better)?

We must all of us know, without being told, that we cannot be trained at all, if in training this will of our own is not kept under.

Do not question so much. Does not a spirit of criticism go with ignorance? Are some of you in all the “opposition of irresponsibility”? Some day, when you are yourselves responsible, you will know what I mean.

Now could not the Ladies help the Nurse-Probationers in this: (1) in never themselves criticising; and (2) in saying a kindly word to check it when it is done?

Let me tell you a true story about this.

In a large college, questions—about things which the students could but imperfectly understand in the conduct of the college—had become too warm. The superintendent went into the hall one morning, and after complimenting the young men on their studies, he said: “This morning I heard two of the porters, while at their work, take up a Greek book lying on my table; one tried to read it, and the other declared it ought to be held upside down to be read. Neither could agree which was upside down, but both thought themselves quite capable of arguing about Greek, though neither could read it. They were just coming to fisticuffs, when I sent the two on different errands.”

Not a word was added: the students laughed and retired, but they understood the moral well enough, and from that day there were few questions or disputes about the plans and superiors of the college, or about their own obedience to rules and discipline.

Do let us think of the two porters squabbling whether the Greek book was to be read upside down, when we feel inclined to be questioning about “things too high for us.”

We are constantly making mistakes in our judgment of our little world. We fancy that we have been harshly treated or misunderstood. Or we cannot bear our fellow-Probationers to laugh at us.

Believe me, there will come a time when all such troubles will simply seem ridiculous to us, and we shall be unable to imagine how we could ever have been the victims of them. (One of your number told me this herself. She has left St. Thomas’ for another post.) Let us not brood or sentimentalise over them. They should be met in a common-sense way. How much of our time has been spent in grieving over these trifles, how little in the real sorrow for sin, the real struggle for improvement.

4. As for obedience to rules and our superiors: “True obedience,” said one of the most efficient people who ever lived, “obeys not only the command, but also the intention” of those who have a right to command us. Of course, this is a truism: the thing is, how to do it. As it is a struggle, it requires a brave and intrepid spirit, which helps us to rise above trifles and look to God, and His leadings for us. Oh, when death comes, how sorry we shall be to have watched others so much and ourselves so little; to have dug so much in the field of others’ consciences and left our own fallow! What should we say of a “Leopold” Nurse who should try to nurse in “Edward” Ward, and neglect her own “Leopold”? Well, that is what we do. Or who should wash her patients’ hands and not her own?

It is of ourselves and not of others that we must give an account. Let us look to our own consciences as we do to our own hands, to see if they are dirty.

We take care of our dress, but do we take care of our words?

It is a very good rule to say and do nothing but what we can offer to God. Now we cannot offer Him backbiting, petty scandal, misrepresentation, flirtation, injustice, bad temper, bad thoughts, jealousy, murmuring, complaining. Do we ever think that we bear the responsibility of all the harm we do in this way?

Look at that busybody who fidgets, gossips, makes a bustle, always wanting to domineer, always thinking of herself, as if she wanted to tell the sun to get out of her way and let her light the world in its place, as the proverb says.

And when we might do all our actions and say all our words as unto God!

So many imperfections; so many thoughts of self-love; so many selfish satisfactions that we mix with our best actions! And when we might offer them all to God. What a pity!

5. One word more for the Ladies, or those who will have to train and look after others.

What must she be who is to be a Ward or “Home” Sister?

We see her in her nobleness and simplicity: being, not seeming: without name or reward in this world: “clothed” in her “righteousness” merely, as the Psalms would say, not in her dignity: often having no gifts of money, speech, or strength: but never preferring seeming to being.

And if she rises still higher, she will find herself, in some measure, like the Great Example in Isaiah 1iii., bearing the sins and sorrows of others as if they were her own: her counsels often “despised and rejected,” yet “opening not her mouth” to be angry: “led as a lamb to the slaughter.”

She who rules best is she who loves best: and shows her love not by foolish indulgence to those of whom she is in charge, but by taking a real interest in them for their own sakes, and in their highest interests.

Her firmness must never degenerate into nervous irritability. And for this end let me advise you when you become Sisters, always to take your exercise time out of doors, your monthly day out, and your annual holiday.

Be a judge of the work of others of whom you are in charge, not a detective: your mere detective “is wonderful at suspicion and discovery,” but is often at fault, foolishly imagining that every one is bad.

The Head-Nurse must have been tested in the refiner’s fire, as the prophets would say: have been tried by many tests: and have come out of them stainless, in full command of herself and her principles: never losing her temper.

She never nurses well till she ceases to command for the sake of commanding, or for her own sake at all: till she nurses only for the sakes of those who are nursed. This is the highest exercise of self-denial; but without it the ruin of the nursing, of the charge, is sure to come.

Have we ever known such a Nurse?