J. W. CROPPER, _Chairman_. _May 5, 1864._ The report of the Sub-Committee met with the approval of the Vestry. Some delay in the adoption of its recommendations was caused by a severe outbreak of fever in the town, which for the time absorbed all the resources of the Vestry and its officers. But on the 18th of May, 1865, a Lady Superintendent who had received a thorough training at Kaiserswerth and St. Thomas’s, twelve Nightingale nurses from St. Thomas’s, eighteen probationers, and fifty-two of the old pauper nurses were placed in charge of the patients in the male wards of the Workhouse Infirmary. By the judicious management of Mr. Carr, the most admirable arrangements were made for the accommodation of the nurses. Each superior nurse had a little room to herself, and the ex-pauper nurses were entirely separated from the other inmates of the Workhouse. It was hoped that by taking the best of the able-bodied inmates, separating them from the other paupers, and paying them small wages (say 5_l._ a year) they might be made available as assistant nurses, and that many of them might be elevated into independence and usefulness. It will be seen from the foregoing report of the Governor (p. 10), that he always distrusted this part of the plan adopted; and after the system had been at work a year, this attempt to utilize pauper nurses in a workhouse hospital was found to have utterly failed. It was proved that in a town like Liverpool, with very few exceptions, those able-bodied women only become inmates of the Workhouse who are either tainted in character, or are exceptionally ill-educated and inefficient. The experiment, however, was not wholly useless. It conclusively established two facts: that such women are utterly unfit to be trusted as nurses; and that their employment in that capacity does not effect all the saving that might be supposed. It might be thought that the choice lay between such employment and maintaining the pauper in idleness, while paying a nurse in her stead. But it was found—as the Governor had always predicted—that when sent back from the hospital to the able-bodied wards, nearly the whole of these women left the Workhouse, and relieved the parish from the charge of their maintenance. Many of these women, when employed as nurses, remain in the Workhouse for the sake of what they can pick up or extort. And moreover, when they left it, the training they had received, such as it was, rendered them more intelligent, and perhaps not more unreliable nurses than those usually employed by the poor. It is not unlikely that in country places the unfitness of able-bodied paupers to become assistant nurses may be far less than it has been found to be in a great seaport town like Liverpool. They may probably be less universally tainted in character, and after a year or two of employment as under-nurses they may be able to maintain themselves in that