“Nursing is an art, and if it is to be made an art, it requires as hard preparation as is required for any painter’s or sculptor’s work; for what is having to do with dead canvas or cold marble compared with caring for the living body?” How to obtain the needed skill was a problem which she had studied for many years. The difficulties and moral dangers that stood in the way of a refined woman securing experience in nursing in a hospital seemed for years insuperable, and can hardly be appreciated by the nurses of today. AT KAISERWERTH. Through a friend, Miss Nightingale learned of an institution for deaconesses at Kaiserwerth, Germany, where there was a school, a hospital and a prison, under the management of deaconesses. It had a decidedly higher tone and reputation than prevailed in hospitals in general, she was told; and Pastor Fliedner’s annual reports of the work of the institution were eagerly studied, and used to silence parental objections. The opportunity to spend a few months at Kaiserwerth was delayed, but finally came when her mother and sister, in search of health, went to Carlsbad, and to travel. In commenting afterward on the new departure of giving some months of training in the care of the sick, inaugurated at Kaiserwerth, Miss Nightingale called special attention to the fact that the Kaiserwerth institutions had begun, not with programs or fullfledged schemes set forth in a prospectus, but with individual cases and personal devotion--and later years showed that her own great work began, also, not with a prospectus or prearranged program, but with actual doing of the thing she felt needed to be done when the opportunity came. The real training in nursing given at Kaiserwerth was far from satisfactory to her, but the atmosphere, the spirit of consecrated service, impressed her deeply. Later she returned to Kaiserwerth for further apprenticeship in nursing and followed this experience by spending some time in the hospitals of Paris presided over by the Roman Catholic sisters. It is very evident that she did not expect to have everything she wished to know, prepared and presented to her to study. Her powers of observation were wonderful, and she proved an indefatigable collector of pamphlets, reports, statistics, methods of work and plans of hospital organization and management.