Page:A short history of nursing - Lavinia L Dock (1920).djvu/171

155 Nursing in America i55 physician, must have (subject only to the board of directors), entire control over the training school, even to possessing the power of choosing and dismissing the head or directress of nurses. Even yet, in this country, this is a controver- sial question, and Miss Nightingale's principle, usually adopted in theory, is often evaded in practice. In two respects the Bellevue Committee departed from the English system at that time found in training schools; all the American pupils entered on a strict social equality, and when they had completed their course of training they were entirely free from control by the school or hospital. In the English schools there was a remnant of caste in the difference made between pupils of higher and lower social classes. There was also the private duty system, which Miss Nightingale thought was all-important, of retaining the certi- ficated nurse under contract to work on a salary for the training school and live in it. Both customs have now become practically obsolete in England, and they were of course incompatible with Ameri- can ideas. Mrs. Hobson's writings declared that after graduation the nurse must be profession- ally free and economically independent and self- reliant. The managers also had a vision of some