“The utensils, which in the hospitals of today are of white earthenware or enamel, were of exceedingly battered tin, almost entirely denuded of their original covering of black japan, and it was absolutely impossible to keep some of them clean and sweet. Smells abounded. I have seen a visiting surgeon run through a ward to escape them, and during my first week I was much puzzled by the existence of a horrible smell in one corner of the children’s ward. I privately investigated the floor and under the beds, but could find nothing to account for it, but discovered at last that it came from a patient--a child with a diseased bone of the face, a case which nowadays would be antiseptically treated and probably isolated. “Under the old regime the nurses had, as a rule, no uniform dress, and cooked their own meals, which they bought for themselves, in the ward kitchens or scullery, and these conditions did not at once pass away. “The antiseptic treatment of wounds was coming into general use, and the particular method of the moment, which had been advocated by Dr. Lister, was a sort of model steam-engine, which could be carried about and placed on a table or stand by the side of a patient’s bed. When a wound was to be attended to, before the dressings were removed a lamp in this apparatus was lighted. A strong spray of diluted carbolic acid then played over the wound the whole time it was being dressed, much to the discomfort of the doctors and nurses, whose hands would be stiff with the carbolic and their ears dulled with the constant hissing and fizzing of the machine. Everything was saturated with carbolic at that time, wool, bandages, lint, gauze, etc., but in the course of a few years this treatment was entirely superseded. “Operations were comparatively free and easy performances. We nurses wore our ordinary dresses, and were kept busy washing sponges, which were used again and again, though they were boiled between the operation days. In the medical wards enteric cases were indiscriminately mixed with others, and tuberculosis patients stalked about and expectorated freely.” Nurses of today, in common with the rest of the world, owe a greater debt of gratitude than most of them realize to Lord Lister who, by his surgical experiments, and his demand for trained nurses, helped so much in laying the foundations for the trained nursing of today. Other workers in the realm of bacteriology were aiding greatly in the remarkable developments which medicine and surgery were making in that period. THE SPIRIT OF VOCATION.