THE CALL OF THE LAND 



vided the inspiration, the knowledge, the 

 direction. 



6. The training of nurses and the wide 

 use made of tHem in hospitals and homes. 

 So far as known, the employment of women 

 nurses began, for England, in 1799, with an 

 order from the army medical board to 

 regimental surgeons, making provision for 

 the better care of sick soldiers. Women 

 nurses were to prepare comforts for the 

 patients, do their washing, cook their ra- 

 tions, and help administer their medicines, 

 for which services they were to receive a 

 wage of a shilling a day apiece. The eleva- 

 tion of this noble profession till nurses like 

 Florence Nightingale and Sister Dora 

 rank with the world's most distinguished 

 persons, is mainly due to appreciative en- 

 couragement by medical men. A writer in 

 a London paper is "irresistibly compelled 

 to the conclusion that perhaps the most 

 vivid contrast between the social life of the 

 eighteenth and the twentieth centuries will 

 prove to be the changed attitude of the 

 whole community toward women, especially 



358 



