Page:Una and the Lion by Florence Nightingale.djvu/22

 answer the calls upon us for trained matrons or superintendents, as well as for trained nurses, for hospitals, and nursing institutions of all kinds, we can scarcely obtain anything like sufficient living materials. By all who have really labored in these and similar fields the same tale is told. People cry out and deplore the unremunerative employment for women. The true want is the other way. Women really trained, and capable for good work, can command any wages or salaries. We can't get the women. The remunerative employment is there, and in plenty. The want is the women fit to take it.

It is wonderful (to return to our own case of the hospitals), the absence of thought which exists upon this point. As if a woman could undertake hospital management, or the management of a single ward—in which, more than in anything else, hundreds, or even thousands, of lives are involved—without having learnt anything about it, any more than a man can undertake to be, for example, professor of mathematics without having learnt mathematics!

It is time to come to the dry bones of the affair, after having shown how beautifully these could be clothed in flesh and blood. We admit at St. Thomas' Hospital Training School—subject to the judgment of the matron, and subject to certain conditions being accepted or