Page:Old ninety-nine's cave.djvu/171

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our head in reverence to their memory; but we are approaching a practical age in which science and mechanics will be the ruling forces. The time is not far distant when nursing will be a recognized profession, in line with the other educational branches, and expert training an unquestioned necessity. The trained nurse of the future must be an open-eyed, earnest woman with a working hypothesis of a life. She will be keenly alive to the fact that people of culture and refinement into whose homes she may be sent, require an approach, at least, to the same qualities in the one who ministers to their needs. Relations between nurse and patient are peculiarly close and sacred";—involuntarily Dr. Herschel looked upward toward Hernando's window—"she will be the recipient of confidences, often enforced, which no true nurse can violate. In short, her influence in any household is almost unlimited for good—or bad. Any nurse who chooses this life with either no conception of the magnitude of the work or from some ulterior motive, must ultimately