Page:Modern Hyderabad (Deccan).djvu/117

Rh the same, perhaps. Now, in England, kings and queens visit hospitals and send gifts of game, fruit, and other things to the patients, rich people endow beds in and leave large sums of money to hospitals, and well-educated and refined women nurse the sick and attend to the ying. And in British India, the wives of viceroys and governors all try to follow the royal example as regards hospitals and nurses.

Government charity must always be a cold and barren business; yet in a purdah country how can any woman become a Florence Nightingale and make hospital nursing fashionable? The care of the sick and suffering is, no doubt, woman's special province, and what women can do in Hyderabad in this direction is proved by the Victoria Zenana Hospital, which was visited in September 191 3 by the late Lady Hardinge. and pronounced by her to be up-to-date and excellent. But in a hospital where men are nursed, as well as women and children, no purdah lady can set foot, and probably that is the real reason why government mixed hospitals and dispensaries are so unpopular all over His Highness the Nizam's Dominions.