34^ A Short History of Nursing aged, the prisoner and the pauper, and for many other kinds of human wreckage. The Deaconesses and Sisters of Charity are types of the later nursing orders which struggled with these problems of misery and poverty and with most of the other social evils of their day. In calling itself a branch of applied science rather than a charity, and in singling out the care of the sick, and the prevention of disease as its special function, modern nursing has not severed itself completely from these earlier social interests — indeed it could not even if it would, for they are all bound up together. However, now that expert workers are being trained to investigate and handle problems of poverty and other social ills, nurses and physicians are very glad to turn over many of these old responsibilfties to them and to co-operate in every possible way in putting the new science of social diagnosis and therapeutics on a sound basis. But this does not change the fact that most good doctors and nurses are still in the truest sense social workers, constantly battling with adverse social conditions and needing all the social knowl- edge and insight they can find to carry out their own special social function of healing broken bodies and fighting disease. When we consider the whole movement of social
