Page:A short history of nursing - Lavinia L Dock (1920).djvu/28

12 been assigned much that used to be given to the medical man. Perhaps the one essential dividing line between nursing and medical specialties is that they require a different discipline, a different administration. What this shall be has formed the controversial element in nursing history. Today, the field of work has again been further divided by the specialization of sanitation. Not every sanitarian is a physician or a nurse, but every physician and nurse must be something of a sanitarian.

In prehistoric ages man's chief interest must have been the effect upon his own and his family's life of the natural phenomena which he beheld but of whose nature he was entirely ignorant. In his simplicity he naturally assumed that everything was alive, even as he felt life in himself. To him the waters, trees, winds, storm, and lightning were personalities, and the harshness of nature betokened harmful or cruel living agencies which filled his life with fear and dread. No mysteries were so great as those connected with birth, life, disease, and death. Illness was soon ascribed to some malign neighbour, and later to some evil deity. So arose the infinite variety of superstitions regarding sickness that have persisted with an extraordinary strength and universality even