For years past there has been raging in France a bitter war between the Catholics and the Radicals on the subject of hospital nurses. The Republic, which mistrusts the Catholic party, has sought to limit their power in every direction. It was a mistake, I think, to attack them at hospital beds, for if there is a place which belongs by divine right, if I may say so, to the nun, it is the side of a sick-bed. With their guimps and coifs, their life of religious meekness, their cheerfulness and self-abnegation, they make ideal sick nurses. Then, the patient feels that with them it is not a profession, the means to an end, that money is not their object, nor are they likely to forget their duty in a flirtation with the doctor. In England and France I have had, unfortunately, experience of both kinds of nurses, and I unhesitatingly give my preference to the French nun. She is softer, kinder, gayer, and more delicate and modest in her handling of a patient than the average lady nurse of England. She nurses you for love of nursing, or for the good of her soul, and she has the secret of a boundless sympathy and untiring good-will. Yet many scientific Frenchmen and doctors, while praising her disinterestedness and purity of motive, allow her unsatisfactory peculiarities. For instance, they complain of her indocility to the doctor and surgeon, and state that when a difference of opinion between them and the mother superior arises, the religious sick nurses will obey the latter rather than those in whose hands lies the fate of the patient. Dr. Fauvel, of le Hâvre, stated before the International Congress of Assistance, relative to the laity of the new hospital of that town: “As regards primary instruction and professional education, the nuns are in no wise superior, quite the contrary; with an incomplete professional education, the lay staff has shown special knowledge ignored by the nuns, nursing the sick with greater intimate skill, preparing instruments, baths, helping the doctors and pupils more efficiently, being more docile in taking the thousand precautions ordered in operations and the dressing of wounds.... It is a mistake to regard as false all the accusations made against the sisters; and I declare emphatically that I have found in lay nurses an equal and often a more spontaneous devotion.” This is quite possible, but I maintain, upon personal experience of both methods, that the religious atmosphere brings a refinement and delicacy into the sick room by no means to be despised. Whatever throws a charm, a grace, a sweetness over the sick-bed carries an inappreciable value, and Frenchwomen, at least, however religious, have that delightful tact of their race to prevent them from worrying a recalcitrant patient on the subject of her faith.