Page:Una and the Lion by Florence Nightingale.djvu/16

 admittance there to have a year's training, a step entirely unprompted by us. She told me afterwards that she felt, when she had entered there, as if she knew nothing. While there, she went through all the training of a nurse. Her reports of cases were admirable as to nursing details. She was our best pupil: she went through all the work of a soldier; and she thereby fitted herself for being the best general we ever had.

Many a time, in her after life at the work-house, she wrote, that without her training at St. Thomas' Hospital, she could have done nothing. Unless a superintendent herself knows what the nurses she has to superintend ought to do, she is always at a loss. She is never sure of her work. She must be herself the measure of their work. In a work-house, she said, this must be preëminently the case—more even than in a hospital—because on a work-house infirmary matron fall many more of the decisions as to petty medical matters than on a London hospital matron, where the medical and surgical staff are much more numerous and constant.

"Without a regular hard London hospital training I should have been 'nowhere, she used to say.

She was fond of telling her obligations to our admirable matron at St. Thomas' Hospital. I need, however, but to recall one thing. This