Nursing in other Countries 289 great hospitals of Paris, all of which were then, as now, under government control. Dr. Bourneville, a very eminent medical specialist and in many- ways a revolutionary, who was for years on the city council, made the instruction of such a personnel the chief object of his life. He went to England and studied the Nightingale system, but he seemed not to have perceived that the trained Matron was the keynote of that system. His efforts were largely a failure. Altruistic groups of women then tried to train pupils in carefully guarded homes under high standards of moral influence, with academic instruction as in a boarding school, but as public hospitals were unfit for young women of refined types to live in, those pupils could only visit them for a few hours daily. Such efforts were also of incomplete result. But France had a peer to Miss Nightingale in the person of Anna Hamilton, whose father's family was English, or rather Scotch- ^j^^ Nightin Irish. Born in 1864, Anna studied gale system medicine in Geneva, Marseilles, and *° France Paris. She was, however, so revolted by the con- ditions in hospitals that she took for her medical thesis the subject "Hospital Nursing," treat- ing it with a thoroughness and outspokenness of criticism that angered the entire existing system, i9
