Page:A short history of nursing - Lavinia L Dock (1920).djvu/119

The Dark Period in Nursing 103 in order to realize how lately we have come out of barbaric darkness and how much still remains to be done to attain universal civilization. The pioneers in treating the insane without forci- ble restraint will be mentioned in a later para- graph. In the latter part of the eighteenth century several advanced physicians, French, English, and German, realized the need of skilled hospital nursing, and, in the effort to ^^°sressive ^ o» ' physicians improve the existing personnel, they write on wrote text-books on nursing technique "reform and the management of the sick. Some of these books were very good indeed. The illiter- ate servant-nurses did not read them, but other physicians and intelligent social workers did, and the subject was agitated and discussed. Among religious bodies the Society of Friends had always stood for the equality of men and women, and their influence was felt, in Attitude of time, by prominent dissenters such as religious bodies to Wesley, who advocated a wider sphere women's for women along evangelical and hu- manitarian lines, while the Established Church, chief bulwark of English conservatism, held longest to a negation of all such subversive views.