Page:A short history of nursing - Lavinia L Dock (1920).djvu/270

254 A Short History of Nursing nouncement was made that a College for Nurses was to be established in commemoration of Miss Nightingale, in connection with King's College, and to be controlled, mainly, by the Nightingale foundation which had inherited the direction of the training school at St. Thomas's hospital. That was, of course, ideally the right thing, yet nurses at once surmised (and correctly) that little power to guide the new courses would be given to their organized associations. The col- lege did, indeed, profess a democratic purpose, and its constitution provided for the election of nurses on directing committees, but as individuals only, and no self-governing society of British nurses was consulted, no recognition accorded to the nationally organized profession as such. Very soon after its inception the new college declared for state registration, but not in support of the bill so long and so faithfully upheld by British nurses. It advanced its own bill, in which keen parliamen- tarians saw possibilities of control by conservative elements. The college also linked itself up with registration in a way that is puzzling to us, as shown in the following quotation from one of its circulars : I. ... the Council of the College of Nursing has drafted a "Nurses' Registration