A wholesome corrective for the impatience with which we are wont to regard the lack of progress made in regard to all matters which concern the house and home was found at a recent International Health Exposition held in New York City. In one section was arranged an old-time sick-room, presided over by Sairey Gamp. The clock on the mantel pointed to the hour of midnight, and the patient was presumably sleeping, but on a feather bed, under heavy comfortables, with thick draperies hanging about the large high-post bedstead. On a table by the bedside were the remedies administered,--paregoric, salts, castor-oil, goose-grease, and other tradition-honored medicines. Another table bore the remains of the patient’s supper,--fried ham, bread and butter, cucumbers, and milk. Sairey herself reposed in an armchair, flanked, on one side, by the empty gin-bottle, and, on the other, by a pot of tea. In a neighboring booth was found a motley collection of old-time remedies. It comprised elderberry flowers for pleurisy, honey for insomnia, hornet’s-nest tea for colds, baking-soda for the stomach and for bee-stings, cold potatoes for burns, and hot potatoes for ear-aches, cobwebs for hemorrhage, a cat’s skin for pneumonia, to be applied while the animal was still warm, and bags of camphor and assafœtida to be worn around the neck for protection against disease. All of these remedies are within the recollection of most persons who have not yet passed middle life. These two booths were the text from which the silent sermon of comparison was preached by the eighty booths containing the educational exhibits of the training-schools for nurses and of many modern hospitals. The old-time sick-room has given place to one not only attractive to the eye, but furnished with every scientific appliance for the prevention as well as for the cure of disease. In place of Mrs. Gamp is the trained nurse of to-day, attractive in dress, agreeable in manner, intelligent in mind, scientific in methods of work, a friend and a companion, as well as a staff and a dependence. The contrast could not be more world-wide. Yet the time required to revolutionize methods of caring for the sick has been scarcely more than thirty years. The exhibit shown of a ward in Bellevue Hospital, in 1872, is almost as far removed from a modern hospital ward of to-day as it is from Mrs. Gamp. What is the explanation of the transformation of Mrs. Gamp into the trained nurse, and of the evolution of the modern hospital and the modern sick-chamber from the old-time crude, semi-barbarous methods of treatment?