An English writer, Miss Margaret Fox, in an address to nurses has called attention to the great need of the spirit of vocation in the nurses of today. “Look at it what way you will,” she states, “the fact remains that nursing is work demanding something more than mere business qualities, more than an active intelligence, more than even sympathy and kindness of heart. The latter, precious though it is, may be worn very threadbare in the constant daily contact with all sorts of unlovely natures suffering from every variety of trying ailment. Patients are not all grateful, or appreciative, and you will find some of them by no means ready to kiss your shadow as you pass on your rounds. Sometimes they are inclined to grumble because they do not immediately get all they want. Their disease may make them irritable, captious even, sometimes, repulsive. These people need more than ordinary everyday good qualities in a nurse. They need one who, over and above her professional ability, looks upon her work as a vocation, ‘a calling by the will of God.’ It was that spirit which made the best of the pioneers of other days what they were. Nursing was undertaken by them as a definite life-work. It cost them so much to enter upon it, that they were unlikely to throw it up without some very cogent reason. Work was not then considered so much a means to an end. It was the ultimate achievement. Nursing is a mission; and wherever it is done, it needs the same spirit of true vocation to do it well, and to persevere in spite of difficulties. “There would be fewer restless, discontented nurses, if each possessed the spirit of vocation. It is a spirit that gives one the calm, quiet feeling of being in the only possible place and doing the only possible work. It stirs in one a large-hearted charity towards all such as be sorrowful, sick or poor. It makes one feel, ‘Well, whoever fails, I must not.’ It helps wonderfully when things are crooked and the work is hard, or uninteresting. One simply can’t help making things look nice, or doing the little extra bit which just makes all the difference.” The motives which influence an individual to undertake a task are tremendously important factors in real and full success, and it is well, in such work as nursing, that all who enter on it analyze carefully their own motives in so doing.