Excerpt:
It is offered here as an historical and cultural appreciation of nursing somewhat after the Nightingale era of reform (approximately forty years after the Crimean War, during a prosperous phase of an ongoing Industrial Revolution with its attendant urbanization, rise of the middle class, smug self-, class-, and national-consciousness), but distinctly before the development of more modern attitudes regarding Woman's "Place" and Woman's Work, and the more fulsome professionalisation and empowerment of Nursing. The views expressed herein are in my opinion are transitional and as generally supportive of nursing as it was probably possible to be in its own era, however amusing or outrageous we might personally find some of the quaint and dated comments to be. We can be pleased, but I hope also inspired, by realisation of how far we have come as we try to continue our progress, or but maintain it in this era of "restructuring." We should spare some kindly and proud thoughts also at how nurses in the pre-modern era had themselves come so far from the truly hideous conditions of a past still within memory when this was written.