Page:A short history of nursing - Lavinia L Dock (1920).djvu/22

6 would not suffice to nurture health or overcome disease. Even among primitive peoples we find great manual dexterity in the carrying out of many nursing and medical procedures. Although all arts require certain inborn qualities (which sometimes amount to genius) they do not reach perfection without careful training and experience. From the crude beginnings of the nursing art, nurses of the past, who possessed the natural gift, developed by their labours a gradually improving system of training through practice and tradition, which we regard as indispensable. The final essential is knowledge. Nursing art, like medical art, is based on science, or knowledge of facts and truth. Only as science displaced superstition could these arts make real, substantial progress, and this is why we are so much interested in following every step in the development of a knowledge of nature, and especially of medical science, throughout the ages. Only the awakening of women to intellectual life and emancipation has been of equal significance in the history of nursing, with the progress of the medical profession.

At a very early, perhaps an incredibly early, period a rudimentary type of nursing became distinguished as a form of community service, combined with other branches of charitable aid