“We train her in habits of punctuality, quietness, trustworthiness, personal neatness. We teach her how to manage the concerns of a large ward or establishment. We train her in dressing wounds and other injuries, and in performing all those minor operations which nurses are called upon day and night to undertake. “We teach her how to manage helpless patients in regard to moving, changing, feeding, temperature, and the prevention of bed sores. “She has to make and apply bandages, line splints and the like. She must know how to make beds with as little disturbance as possible to their inmates. She is instructed how to wait at operations, and as to the kind of aid the surgeon requires at her hands. She is taught cooking for the sick; the principle on which sick wards ought to be cleansed, aired, and warmed; the management of convalescents, and how to observe sick and maimed patients, so as to give an intelligent and truthful account to the physician or surgeon in regard to the progress of cases in the intervals between visits--a much more difficult thing than is generally supposed. “We do not seek to make ‘medical women,’ but simply nurses acquainted with the _principle_ which they are required constantly to apply at the bedside. “For the future superintendent is added a course of instruction in the administration of a hospital, including, of course, the linen arrangements and what else is necessary for a matron to be conversant with. “There are those who think that all this is intuitive in women, that they are born so, or, at least, that it comes to them without training. To such we say, by all means send us as many such geniuses as you can, for we are sorely in want of them.” While Miss Nightingale was thus piloting nursing reform in the country and endeavouring to enlist recruits, she was also actively engaged in assisting the Hon. Sidney Herbert in carrying out his important schemes for the improvement of the condition of the soldier, a work to which Mr. Herbert devoted himself most strenuously in the last years of his life. Up to the period of the Crimean War the sanitary condition of the soldier was utterly neglected. He was as a general rule left to his chance. At home in barracks he was ill-lodged and ill-fed, and during active service was practically uncared for. He was a constant victim to preventable disease by reason of unhealthy camps and ill-managed and defective hospitals. Fever and dysentery slew their tens of thousands. The mortality returns showed a deplorable death rate. Seventeen out of every thousand soldiers died annually at home as against eight in every thousand of civilians. It was calculated at this period that of every two soldiers who died, one died from causes which a proper attention to his surroundings would have removed.