Page:A short history of nursing - Lavinia L Dock (1920).djvu/377

361 The Past and Future comparison of the student nurse with the private soldier, serving in the past as a justification for a rather severe and rigid system of discipHne, a quite unecessary emphasis on drill and routine, and in many cases, an unfortunate subordination of qualities of reasoning, initiative, and individuality. Such a system of training may have served a gen- eration ago, but it is out of touch with the spirit and the accepted principles of our day. With a growing understanding of what education means, of what real democracy implies, and of what the actual work of the nurse demands, many of these outworn vestiges of the military tradition are al- ready disappearing, and a new conception of the functions and possibilities of nursing education is being developed. Medicine has, of course, had a very strong in- fluence on nursing, as indeed nursing has on medi- cine. The standards of medical ethics ^ ^ Influence of have been shared to a large degree by medical and both professions. Some of the finest scientific things which medicine stands for are its high sense of responsibility for human life, its scorn of quackery and self-advertising, its scrupu- lousness in guarding the personal confidences of patients, and an unusual, sometimes perhaps exaggerated, sense of loyalty to professional col-