368 A Short History of Nursing in upon their side, to fight with them the unseen enemy. "Whoever undertakes to share that conflict must acquire whatever is necessary for the task, and lift herself to the required level of endurance, of self-denials, and of loyalties. More than half of my working life has been spent in a great hospital, and I have become familiar with many others both in this country and elsewhere. I have found in them, and particularly among nurses, the purest unselfishness, the sternest devotion to duty, the simplest and most unaffected bravery, and the richest traditions of disinterested service that I have ever known. I believe that you will find them there also. "The hospital of the past was the outcome of humane and ennobling ideals of service to one's fellows, and in spite of all the vicissitudes of his- tory which have made it now the engine of the church, now the plaything of politics, or the path to fame of the ambitious, or have even abased it to clear commercial uses, to me it still stands in all its early beauty as the Hotel Dieu, the House of God. We may have great and imposing buildings, the last word in hygienic and sanitary appliances, dazzling operation rooms and laboratories, but that stricken human being lying there has many
