Her desire was for definite preparatory knowledge and discipline, and we of this generation can hardly realize how much searching must have been necessary before the adequate training could be found. Certificated nursing is now a commonplace, and we forget that it dates from Miss Nightingale’s efforts after her return from the Crimea. We have only to turn to the life of Felicia Skene and her lonely labour of love at the time when the cholera visited Oxford—some twelve years later than Florence Nightingale’s seventeenth birthday, that is to say, in 1849-51, and again in 1854—to gain some idea of the bareness of the field. Sir Henry Acland, whose intimate friendship with Felicia dates from their common labours among the cholera patients, has described one among the terrible cases for which there would, it seems, have been no human aid, but for their discovery of the patient’s neglected helplessness. “She had no blanket,” he says, “or any covering but the ragged cotton clothes she had on. She rolled screaming. One woman, scarcely sober, sat by; she sat with a pipe in her mouth, looking on. To treat her in this state was hopeless. She was to be removed. There was a press of work at the hospital, and a delay. When the carriers came, her saturated garments were stripped off, and in the finer linen and in the blankets of a wealthier woman she was borne away, and in the hospital she died.” This is given, it would seem, as but one case among hundreds. Three old cattle-sheds were turned into a sort of impromptu hospital, to which some of the smallpox and cholera patients were carried, and the clergy, especially Mr. Charles Marriott and Mr. Venables, did all they could for old and young alike, seconding the doctors, with Sir Henry at their head, in cheering and helping every one in the stricken town; and Miss Skene’s friend, Miss Hughes, Sister Marion, directed the women called in to help, who there received a kind of rough-and-ready training. But more overwhelming still was Miss Skene’s own work of home nursing in the cottages, at first single-handed, and afterwards at the head of a band of women engaged by the deputy chairman as her servants in the work, of whom many were ignorant and needed training. “By day and by night she visited,” writes Sir Henry. “She plied this task, and when she rested—or where as long at least as she knew of a house where disease had entered—is known to herself alone.”