Page:A short history of nursing - Lavinia L Dock (1920).djvu/374

358 358 A Short History of Nursing Although nurses no longer are expected to serve as religious teachers and advisers, and although all efforts to convert patients to any special religious creed are entirely discouraged today in practically all hospitals, there is still room in nursing for more of the positive ethical and spiritual influence which the best of the religious nursing orders have always exercised. Such a spirit is undoubtedly needed to offset the tendency to materialism and cynicism which is rather characteristic of our age and which seems especially out of place where one is so con- stantly faced by pain and suffering and by the mysteries of life and death. The military influence served to reinforce many of the traditions of the religious orders, particu- The military larly their rather rigid system of dis- influence cipline and the Spartan simplicity and austerity of their life. This influence first came through the Knight Hospitallers who gave us their ideals of chivalry and probably too that little touch of romantic glamour which has always seemed to belong to nursing. The old knight- errant spirit — adventurous, gallant, and daring, always ready to fly at the call of distress and always keen for a good fight in a good cause — seems indeed to have been born again in not a few nurses. We have seen it time and again in the recent war,