What she wrote when asking for recruits for St. Thomas’s at the outset still remains the basis of the ideal held there. “We require,” she wrote, “that a woman be sober, honest, truthful, without which there is no foundation on which to build. “We train her in habits of punctuality, quietness, trustworthiness, personal neatness. We teach her how to manage the concerns of a large ward or establishment. We train her in dressing wounds and other injuries, and in performing all those minor operations which nurses are called upon day and night to undertake. “We teach her how to manage helpless patients in regard to moving, changing, feeding, temperature, and the prevention of bedsores. “She has to make and apply bandages, line splints, and the like. She must know how to make beds with as little disturbance as possible to their inmates. She is instructed how to wait at operations, and as to the kind of aid the surgeon requires at her hands. She is taught cooking for the sick; the principle on which sick wards ought to be cleansed, aired, and warmed; the management of convalescents; and how to observe sick and maimed patients, so as to give an intelligent and truthful account to the physician or surgeon in regard to the progress of cases in the intervals between visits—a much more difficult thing than is generally supposed. “We do not seek to make ‘medical women,’ but simply nurses acquainted with the principle which they are required constantly to apply at the bedside. “For the future superintendent is added a course of instruction in the administration of a hospital, including, of course, the linen arrangements, and what else is necessary for a matron to be conversant with. “There are those who think that all this is intuitive in women, that they are born so, or, at least, that it comes to them without training. To such we say, by all means send us as many such geniuses as you can, for we are sorely in want of them.” CHAPTER XX. _William Rathbone—Agnes Jones—Infirmaries—Nursing in the homes of the poor—Municipal work—Homely power of Miss Nightingale’s writings—Lord Herbert’s death._