CHAPTER XI NURSING IN OTHER COUNTRIES WE have glanced briefly at various types of nursing systems from an early day, — the semi-priestly orders of the old religions ; the loving personal service, at first largely self- directed, of the early Christian deaconess, widow, and virgin; the organized groups of Types of nursing monastic women, aiming at self-govern- systems ment and self-discipline, cherishing all reviewed available education, and, though in- tensely religious in spirit and motive, striving to be free from outside control which fettered their work ; the nursing Sisterhoods, which fell entirely under ecclesiastical control and became stationary, losing all intellectual share in the world's progress; those who became successful insurgents, shaping new secular orders ; the military orders whose disciplin- ary features and ideas of a personnel have been inherited to a certain degree by European Red Cross associations and even by civil hospitals ; the 246
