The Dark Period in Nursing 95 England and on the continent the secular nurse was illiterate, heavy-handed, venal, and over- worked. She divided her time between housework, laundry, scrubbing, and a pretence at nursing of the most rough and ready kind. She seldom re- fused a fee and often demanded it. Strong drink was her weakness, and often her refuge from the drudgery of her life. She was not often young, but was usually a middle-aged woman, often a powerful virago. Charles Dickens has left us an immortal pen picture of this person in "Sairey Gamp." Be- cause of her type the average family of those days dreaded and avoided the hired nurse and dosed themselves with home-made medicines, for which the recipes were found in herbals, books containing the family medical traditions well mixed with superstitious notions. The Sisters of the oldest religious orders shared, we have said, in the general deterioration of nurs- ing standards. The example of overwork indeed had been set by the church, for the shift of ward work for the nuns, copied sometimes by the secular authorities, was often a twenty-four hour regular duty. This division of time might have been seen by the observing traveller in Germany and Austria, in hospitals nursed by Sisters, and in vast secular city institutions, as late as 1912.
