Page:A short history of nursing - Lavinia L Dock (1920).djvu/383

367 The Past and Future 367 Miss Nutting, one of our great modern leaders, has summed up in a talk to a group of college women just entering their nursing training, a few of the things we look for in the nurses of the future. An extract only is given of this talk which is en- titled "The Apprenticeship to Duty." "Upon such exalted traditions and ideals our nursing structure was founded, and though the touch of time has dimmed somewhat their early radiance, in nursing as a whole you will find, I think, that they are still fresh and living. It has been the fashion to cavil somewhat at hospital discipline, to assume that it had hardships and indignities that no free-born young woman bent on preserving her own individuality would endure. Just at the present moment we are not perhaps so greatly concerned, as we have been, with ourselves. Perhaps we are seeing that the higher individual- ism may consist in throwing our own effort into the stream of some greater effort, and that true freedom comes not, but by order and discipline, and perhaps we may come eventually to realize that the hospitals in which we work are in a real sense battlefields where men and women and children are fighting for their lives. In their struggle and their dire need of help they have come to us, trusting us to throw our strength and skill