“The more she heard of the worst, the more was Florence Nightingale resolved to make things better; but the more her parents heard, the greater and more natural was their repugnance. Somebody must do the rough pioneer work of the world; but one can understand how the parents of an attractive daughter, to whom their own life at home seemed to them to open many possibilities of comfortable happiness, came to desire that in this case the somebody should be somebody else.” It is difficult to study her life without feeling that she was sent into the world especially to accomplish the great tasks to which in early middle life, her powers were chiefly devoted. It should, however, be always remembered that during this period others besides Miss Nightingale were making their contribution to better nursing and better sanitary conditions in hospitals, and in the world outside. Lord Lister, who ushered in the new era of antiseptic surgery, was seven years younger than Florence Nightingale. “He and she, each in the manner in which Nature or Providence fitted them, were simultaneously inaugurating the new era, he the foster father, she the foster mother of myriads of this generation and unthinkable millions of those who are to be. His methods demanded the trained nurse both for surgery and midwifery, both for the battlefield where life is destroyed, and for the lying-in room where it is ushered into separate existence. Her work was to provide the training and the principles, the ideals, the enthusiasm, and the tiniest, humblest details, whereby the modern nurse is made.” [Illustration: LORD LISTER] Apart entirely from the generally undesirable type of women (there were many exceptions) found in charge of the care of the sick when Florence Nightingale began her work, were the generally undesirable conditions which existed before Lord Lister’s antiseptic methods were inaugurated in 1868. Erysipelas, gangrene, pyemia, and septicemia were common complications of surgery and the death rate of maternity patients in hospitals was appalling. A nurse who was one of the pioneers in improving the care of the sick, thus describes her experience when she entered for training in an English hospital: “New methods of nursing as well as of surgery had to contend with tremendous difficulties in the way of bad buildings, bad ventilation, old-fashioned furniture, and lack of apparatus.