Page:A short history of nursing - Lavinia L Dock (1920).djvu/227

211 Extensions of Nursing Field 211 careful instruction, and offered to supply lectures and outlines of study where needed. Syllabuses of lecture courses were supplied to every English hospital, and many responded by promising to instruct their pupil nurses in this special subject. The same request has been made to training schools in America by the Social Hygiene Associa- tion, and lectures are to be given under its general auspices. The first attempt to prepare nurses especially for social service work in Venereal Disease Clinics was undertaken in the summer of 1 91 9, at the request of the United States Public Health Service, by the Department of Nursing and Health at Teachers College in co-operation with Bellevue hospital. After a theoretical and practical course of four months, the United States Public Health Service gave its special certificate to a group of seventeen nurses who then devoted themselves exclusively to this branch of work. There is every reason to believe that this is just the beginning of a widespread public health move- ment in which nurses will play a most important part. The growing knowledge of mental hygiene and its increasing importance as a subject of advanced study for nurses may be mentioned as one of the most recent of all the new lines of public health