198 A Short History of Nursing health work is taken over by the municipality, state, or nation, and to bring this about has been aimed at by social workers for various types of public service, — the goal toward which they tried their experiments, and this in spite of the fact that, as organized at present, government is often bureaucratic and repressive in its methods. Nevertheless the conception is correct, for mere methods can be improved, if the ultimate plan is right. At this point, before describing the new lines of work to which our text has led up, it will be The National well to introduce the national society Organization formed to promote them, although in for Public Health strict point of time it would come in a Nursing little later. Meetings of visiting nurses had been held in connection with one or two con- ferences on Charities and Corrections some years before, but plans for a separate organization then advanced were believed to be premature. In. 1 912, at an intensely enthusiastic meeting of the visiting nurses of the country, the National Organization for Public Health Nursing was formed in Chicago at the convention of the Ameri- can Nurses' Association, and Miss Wald was made its first president. Its official magazine, The Public Health Nurse, a monthly, was originally published
