Page:A short history of nursing - Lavinia L Dock (1920).djvu/285

Nursing in other Countries 269 velopments that may affect professional standards. When "bush" nursing for the rural and outlying districts of the "bush" was organized in 191 1, some attempts were made to introduce the Eng- lish system of "cottage nursing," that is, of pro- viding an inferior and partly trained woman for certain parts of the service. This the Australian nurses were able to defeat, claiming rightly that only the best trained service should be given in district nursing, especially in lonely regions where physicians were not easily called. Australia gives us the only present example of membership with votes given to medical men in a society of nurses. Universal suffrage exists, and the general tendency of the country is for men and women to work together on an equality. Yet some feel that nurses are too prone to silence and ac- quiescence in any case, and that the medical members are often allowed to shoulder responsi- bility which the nurses should take themselves. This, the smallest but in many ways most pro- gressive of England's domains has had trained nursing since 1883. The first modern New professional school was that of the Zealand Wellington hospital. The Dunedin hospital, to which the Medical School of the Dominion is attached, opened a school for nurses in 1888.