What are the works the nurse can undertake, and what doors stand open before her?

First: in her home — she can live a healthy life and secure such a life for her family, for her husband, for her children, and for all who surround her. The presence of a nurse in the home, like the presence of a physician, is such as to guarantee the household good prevention and good treatment, suitable food and sufficient cleanliness, healthy clothing and an orderly life, protection from germs, filth, flies, mosquitoes, and the other carriers of disease.

Second: the nurse can be of use in the quarter where she lives, and can help raise the standard of health by giving her neighbors and friends whatever guid-ance she can concerning the methods of prevention and treatment and the raising of children. In this respect she is of use in every place where she settles and to every family with which she comes in contact.

Third: the need for nurses in public work grows with the growing number of hospitals, the advance of the sciences of medicine and health, and mankind's increasing concern with fighting disease, prolonging life, and raising the health standard in every milieu — in the working class as in the privileged classes.

For this reason the work of the nurse enrolled in the ranks of social service has become a ramified, many-sided work. Sometimes she is a worker in the hospital or the sanatorium, where her presence is as necessary as the physician's. At times she is a government employee assisting the district physician in securing the means of prevention and treatment. Or an employee in the hotels, schools, companies, and other centers of collective work whose owners have seen that employing a physician and a nurse to watch over the health of students and workers, to raise their health standard, to vaccinate them against diseases, and to supply them with the means of prevention and first aid — all this is bound to increase their production and to improve it in quality and in quantity; and that the material and moral profit which employers reap from improving the health of their workers repays them for the cost of keeping a permanent physician and nurse at their places of work.

People wrongly suppose that any woman who can sterilize a needle and give a patient an injection has become a nurse. In fact nurses are of different grades. Among them is she who received no scien-tific education worth mentioning, but picked up some practical knowledge thanks to practice and training. The difference is vast between her and the one who entered nursing school after graduating from a secondary school, obtained her certificate after three years of study or more, and then became a regis-

tered nurse — that is, a holder of a government cer-tificate in this art. Above her in grade stands the one who took a degree from one of the colleges and then entered nursing school to specialize in one of the branches of the art; and the one who continued her studies in certain sciences after obtaining the nurs-ing certificate, and gained the higher degrees that qualify her for teaching, or for administration, or for heading one of the hospital's departments and super-vising some of the important technical operations.

Here is a list of the most important posts and works that a holder of the nursing certificate can fill in the Arab countries, according to her preparation and her specialty: administration; teaching; technical work; social work; employment in the departments of public health; sanitary inspection in prisons and public houses; preventive work in schools and children's homes; the care of the insane and of the disabled; prevention and first-aid work in factories, in industrial companies, in life-insurance companies, to watch over the health of the insured; in the army and national defense; in the departments of child welfare; in transport and travel companies, to attend to the health of passengers and travelers.

In view of the growing importance of this art in the present age, the ramification of its branches, and the intensity of the need for it in our country and in other lands, it behooves us to encourage the largest possible number of girls to study it. It is essential that the government take an interest in encouraging it by regulating the conditions of nurses, laying down a special law for them, and instituting a government certificate for them on the model of physicians; thus one may distinguish between a nurse trained by practice and another who holds an official certificate recognized by the international body of nurses.

And if we recall that the material rewards reaped from the practice of this art may become, thanks to its ramification and its growing possibilities, more tempting than what any other women's profession yields, and that it allows a woman to practice it in her home and outside it, then we can name no art or profession that elevates woman personally and keeps pace with her renaissance and her economic and social progress more than the art of nursing; for it accustoms her to activity, precision, and order, and awakens in her the feeling of concern for others, the desire to help them, and to share with man — an effective sharing — in the building of a better world.

If the nurse can accomplish but one single work — to teach those around her the principles of modern cleanliness — she has accomplished one of the noblest of works.