PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 1027 
advances upon it. I may be pardoned for drawing attention toa 
modest institution in Adelaide, known as the Children’s Hospital, 
It has always had an ideal, and it has always maintained it. 
While treating disease, it has never lost sight of its duty to educate 
the public. It has been a training institution for nurses since its 
origin, and yearly distributes, by courses of popular lectures, 
important information on health topics. During the past year it 
has spent £8,000 on buildings and land, in the erection of a 
handsome bacteriological Jaboratory and a series of isolation 
wards. The laboratory was established in a small way two 
years ago, but the work it has done has given it a leading position 
in the organisation of the hospital. Similar laboratories have been, 
or are about to be, established in this city and in Melbourne. 
This cannot fail to exert a powerful influence upon the public, and 
promote the perception that infectious diseases must be controlled 
and their destructiveness opposed by weapons such as modern 
science dictates. The tangible and demonstrably advantageous 
results of the combination of isolation wards and bacteriological 
investigations must before long direct the public mind, and, let 
us fur ther hope, mould into an intelligent and more modern for m 
the hygienic conceptions of our legislators. 
There is a kindred agency to that of the hospital which I should 
like to refer to. It may seem a trifle in an address before a 
scientific audience, but it appears to me to be an agency full of 
promise, and one calculated to carry into effect the details of 
public hygiene in a manner impossible to be provided for by law. 
I refer to the use of trained nurses among the sick poor in their 
own homes. The law may command, but men and women how- 
ever poor are free agents, and if cleanliness in all their surroundings 
as well as the early recognition of communicable diseases is to 
become a part of the daily experience of the poor then the intelli- 
gent and the trained must bring it home to them. Trained 
nurses are exactly the agents required for this service. An 
amendment made last year in the Public Health Act of England 
provides for the employment by corporations and local councils 
of trained nurses as public health officers on the same footing 
as inspectors. ‘Their constant contact in a friendly way, with 
the great body of the people, and more especially those who 
interest themselves least in hygiene, enables them to exercise 
not merely a beneficent but likewise an educative influence on 
the poor, and at the same time, by the timely recognition and 
separation of infectious cases of disease, they confer a precious 
boon upon the rest of the community generally. We are not 
behind in Australia in charitable institutions carrying on the 
same good work, but we have not yet risen to the full perception 
of the large advantageous possibilities to public health that lie in 
this new province of woman’s work. 
