No one who reads the story of the beautiful life of Florence Nightingale can fail to be impressed with the fact that the dominant motive of that life was--SERVICE. It has been aptly said that one of the first and most important lessons that a nurse needs to learn, is to spell SELF with a little s. In this she has a worthy example for forgetfulness of self seems to have been characteristic of Florence Nightingale all through her life. Service to humanity--especially service to the sick and distressed part of humanity--seems to have made its strong appeal to her almost from childhood. Organization for service, education and training for service, plans for service in a hundred different ways--filled her life, and the story of her many-sided activities, as revealed by her official biographer--has been a surprise to those who have thought of her only in connection with nursing. While she will always be best remembered as the founder of modern nursing, her great efforts in improving sanitary conditions in India, in which she labored unceasingly for many years with officials in the War Department, and her work in behalf of reform in the management of workhouses in England, were closely interwoven with her work in behalf of better nursing for the sick. Her voluminous correspondence and her literary work seem in themselves to have been sufficient to occupy her full time, after her return from the Crimea. The popular idea of Florence Nightingale has been drawn largely from the pen picture of Longfellow in Santa Filomena, but it is far from being a true picture of her life. To fully appreciate her character and influence one must study to some extent, not alone the social and sanitary conditions that prevailed in her earlier life, but the habits of thought and even the etiquette of the times, during which her chief work was being accomplished. Of these conditions her biographer says: “Now that the fruits of Florence Nightingale’s pioneer work have been gathered, and that nursing is one of the recognized occupations for gentlewomen, it is not altogether easy to realize the difficulties which stood in her way. The objections were moral and social, in large measure rooted to conventional ideas. Gentlewomen, it was felt, would be exposed, if not to danger and temptations, at least to undesirable and unfitting conditions. ‘It was as if I had wanted to be a kitchen maid,’ Miss Nightingale herself said in later years. Nothing is more tenacious than social prejudice. But the prejudice was in part founded on very intelligible reasons and in part was justified by the level of nursing as an occupation at that time. It will suffice to say that though there were better-managed and worse-managed hospitals, yet there was strong evidence to show that hospital nurses had opportunities which they freely used, for ‘putting the bottle to their lips’ when so disposed, also that other evils were more or less prevalent.