Every country that depends on tourism and summering as one of its important resources must give special care to matters of health and what is connected with them: securing public cleanliness, teaching the modern scientific principles of the art of preparing food and of managing homes and hotels, and readying the means of prevention, nursing, disinfection, and first aid. And no one is worthier than women to undertake such work.
Our women talk a great deal on the subject of voting and elections, and demand their political rights, besides the right to enter public work so that the field of social service outside their homes may open before them. It behooves us to ask each of these women demanding their rights: What is the work you do well? What is the measure of your preparation for the social service you demand? What is the number of our women specialized in sociology, or in social service, or in the civic sciences and similar qualifications for work outside the home? Indeed, what is the number of women who have mastered the work inside the home — I mean household management and the practical arts it includes, such as the art of preparing food, sewing, the science of hygiene, and the arrangement of furniture?
Everyone concedes that our country needs women specialists to train our women in the various works and arts I have mentioned, before we cast them into the field of elections and politics. But there is one work within reach of all women, for in our country there are a number of institutions fully equipped to teach it; and yet the demand for it among our women remains small. I mean the art of nursing, which I call the ideal women's art, because it opens before women the widest field of service inside their homes and outside them. It is regrettable that the scarcity of interest in it should be due, for the most part, to our ignorance of its possibilities and of its standing in the present age. There are other reasons, of which I mention our contempt for manual work and our desire to move tongues rather than hands — though the latter is better than the former and more useful. Among them, too, is our misunderstanding of the demands of this art and its duties, and our mistaken belief that it is a kind of cleaning and wiping, whereas the courses given to nurses require of them, before embarking on its study, the completion of secondary education and the obtaining of its certificate; for, on the model of medicine, it comprises theoretical and practical lessons in the following sciences: anatomy and physiology, chemistry, drugs, nutrition, bacteriology, pathology or the science of diseases and their symptoms, women's nursing and obstetrics, psychology, first aid, cleansing and
disinfection, public health, surgery, the nursing of the mentally ill, the nursing of children... and so on. They have rightly called the nurse the physician's right arm; and she is, beyond that, the cornerstone of public health, and no country can boast of the height of its health standard unless the number of its nurses is great and most of its women have some acquaintance with the art of nursing.
Nursing is not only among the most honorable and most useful of women's works, but also among the oldest works women have practiced in history. The chronicles and biographies dwell at length on the Arab women who accompanied their men in the wars to serve the sick and tend the wounded. From ancient times, nursing — the care of the wounded and the sick — was counted a noble work, whose source is mercy and human compassion, practiced by noblewomen and by the most virtuous of women; hence we have seen the princesses of the present age — Carmen Sylva of Romania, Queen Marie, the princesses of Italy, and others — enroll in the ranks of nurses to help the wounded of war.
In the Middle Ages nursing became the affair of nuns and of the monks of the monasteries; later the Sisters of Charity and the Franciscans became famous for it, and then the Evangelical sisters, the Deaconesses, in Germany. But it was not organized as a lay women's profession until the nineteenth century — that is, in the age of Florence Nightingale of England, who was known from her childhood for her compassion for the sick, her gentleness with animals, and her consoling of the weak and suffering. Florence came of a noble family and had gained an ample share of learning; and although nursing was not, in her day, a lay profession, nor a work worthy of the attention of educated women, she studied it in Germany with the Deaconess sisters and devoted herself to practicing it in her own city, and then in the Crimean War, and won such success as made her name famous throughout Europe. Queen Victoria bestowed on her the highest title granted to the women of England, and the English people presented her with the sum of 50 thousand pounds, which she spent on building a hospital in her name. Through Florence Nightingale the value of the art of nursing rose, and people came to look upon it no longer as a work of pity and mercy but as a profession founded on science and long training. From the end of the last century the organization of this profession began in Europe, when a council of nursing matrons was formed in England and the foundation was laid for an international union of nurses. Local societies spread which took up the problems of nurses and sought to regulate their wages, to fix the length of their studies, the subjects of study, and their hours of work, and the question of their social insurance in cases of sickness and disability. Today, in most
Western countries, there are government certificates for nurses, and she who holds one is called a Registered Nurse, R.N.