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THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



RECREATION ROOM OE ONE OE THE AMERICAN RED CROSS METROPOLITAN CANTEENS 



EOR FRENCH SOLDIERS 



Cooperating with the French Army, one of the first activities of the American Red Cross 

 in France was the organization of canteens, rest stations, and sleeping quarters for men on 

 their way to and from the fighting front. 



Florence Nightingale, then thirty-four 

 years of age, born to considerable wealth 

 and surroundings of superlative culture 

 and refinement, but who had already de- 

 voted herself to the mission of develop- 

 ing a more intelligent system of public 

 nursing — a woman of extraordinary 

 ability, whose genius might have made 

 her eminent in any one of several fields 

 of endeavor, but who had chosen this 

 metier which seemed strange to some of 

 her friends and shocking to others. 



As a young girl she had deplored the 

 fact that the Protestant Church made no 

 provision for the training of women, 

 comparable to that which the Catholic 

 Sisters of Mercy obtained, and had there- 

 fore welcomed an opportunity to go to 

 Germany and study with Pastor Fliedner 

 in his institute at Kaiserwerth on the 

 Rhine. 



Pastor Fliedner was the sort of Ger- 



man that many million other Germans 

 would be if they would only wake up 

 from their lethargy and cast off their 

 abominable autocracy and militarism and 

 give their, own abundant better natures 

 "a chance" — a kind, devoted man, seek- 

 ing to make himself useful by showing 

 others how to be useful. He had estab- 

 lished, in a modest, practical way, an in- 

 stitute for the training of deaconesses in 

 connection with a hospital, a penitentiary, 

 an orphan asylum, and a normal school 

 for the training of teachers. 



FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE'S NURSERY 



NOVITIATE 



In comparison with her own later and 

 so much more scientific work of training 

 nurses, Miss Nightingale found the 

 nurse-training feature of the Kaiser- 

 werth School crude and inadequate ; but 

 here she found mental and spiritual stim- 



