Page:A short history of nursing - Lavinia L Dock (1920).djvu/199

183 Extensions of Nursing Field 183 pists, also, clung to the delusion that inferior grades of professional self-supporting workers can be pro- duced by partial training, who will nurse for low wages, and who will remain distinct like manu- factured goods of different grades. We believe that, rather, the true solution, and the only sound one, of this problem of nursing patients singly in their homes has been reached by nurses themselves, when, in one of their meetings, in a discussion on the need of nurses in families of modest means, the following words were spoken : What is really needed ... is a woman who is a combination of nurse, housewife, laundress, char- woman, and a good mother to boot, and these women are extremely rare. A good jack-of-all- trades is frequently a specialist, and a very busy specialist, at that. The appalling ignorance. . • encountered over and over again, in the homes of the well-to-do as well as the very poor, has con- vinced many nurses that a much better plan than the training of short-course women, is the intro- duction into our high schools, and perhaps into our eighth grades, of courses in home nursing for all girls in these two groups ; this course to be com- pulsory, not elective. Poor nurses for poor people will be as great a travesty or injustice as poor doc- tors for poor people, or poor school teachers for the poorer districts. We all know that the poor man