Page:A short history of nursing - Lavinia L Dock (1920).djvu/134

ii8 A Short History of Nursing has become classic. We learn to know the personal quality which carried her influence around the world. We see also, and many learn for the first time in reading her biography, that she was an eminent sanitarian and statistician, with an intense passion for hygiene and the conservation of health. Finally, we are shown the commanding intellectual gifts and insight for affairs which would have sufficed to equip a great statesman, and which enabled her to confer in public matters with men in government, always as their equal, often as their superior. Miss Nightingale belonged to an EngHsh family possessing every advantage of wealth and social position. That choice circle, in England and on the continent, was highly cultured, so that Miss Night- ingale was educated with a thoroughness very different from the preparation of the average English girl. She was drawn to nursing with an intense and compelling desire, and wished to enter an English ^ thought. At last, in 1 85 1 (she was then thirty-one), she obtained her family's consent to a period of training in Kaiser swerth with the Flied- ners. She went there first, to look over the place, Prepara- tion for nursing hospital when she was about twenty- five, but her mother could not bear the