vocation equal in dignity and in
general esteem to the medical profession, of which it is the right
hand? Why should our dearest hopes, in the hour of their greatest
peril, be committed into the hands of Sairey Gamps, when the world has
seen Florence Nightingales?"

"Yes, indeed," said my wife; "I can testify, from my own experience,
that the sufferings and dangers of the sickbed, for the want of
intelligent, educated nursing, have been dreadful. A prejudiced,
pig-headed, snuff-taking old woman, narrow-minded and vulgar, and more
confident in her own way than seven men that can render a reason,
enters your house at just the hour and moment when all your dearest
earthly hopes are brought to a crisis. She becomes absolute dictator
over your delicate, helpless wife and your frail babe,--the absolute
dictator of all in the house. If it be her sovereign will and pleasure
to enact all sorts of physiological absurdities in the premises, who
shall say her nay? 'She knows her business, she hopes!' And if it be
her edict, as it was of one of her class whom I knew, that each of her
babies shall eat four baked beans the day it is four days old, eat
them it must; and if the baby die in convulsions four days after, it
is set down as the mysterious will of an overruling Providence.

"I know and have seen women lying upon laced pillows, under silken
curtains, who have been bullied and dominated over in the hour of
their greatest helplessness by ignorant and vulgar tyrants, in a way
that would scarce be thought possible in civilized society, and
children that have been injured or done to death by the same means. A
celebrated physician told me of a babe whose eyesight was nearly
ruined by its nurse taking a fancy to wash its eyes with camphor,--'to
keep it from catching cold,' she said. I knew another infant that was
poisoned by the nurse giving it laudanum in some of those patent
nostrums which these ignorant creatures carry secretly in their
pockets, to secure quiet in their little charges. I knew one delicate
woman who never recovered from the effects of being left at her first
confinement in the hands of an ill-tempered, drinking nurse, and whose
feeble infant was neglected and abused by this woman in a way to cause
lasting injury. In the first four weeks of infancy the constitution is
peculiarly impressible; and infants of a delicate organization may, if
frightened and ill-treated, be the subjects of just such a shock to
the nervo