“Worthy To Serve the Suffering”

Abstract

W HENEVER I rise to address a group of students I am reminded, I hope to the ultimate profit of my hearers, of that delightful letter in which Robert Louis Stevenson says that he went to church one summer morning and the clergyman did his best to make him hate him. What methods the clergyman adopted to achieve that end we are left to surmise, but I have always suspected that the length of his sermon was his chief offense. That special pitfall I shall avoid, though I admit that I am going to preach to you, and I apologize unreservedly for taking such an advantage of the opportunity you have given me in asking me to speak to you on this, your commencement night. The amenities of congratulation and good wishes, however, I think we may take for granted as between friends, and instead of dwelling on them, as is the way of most commencement addresses, I shall ask you to consider with me the outstanding problem which confronts the nursing profession today, the question of the real purpose of the nurse's education. You nurses who are graduating tonight have behind you three years of training, but do you realize, I wonder, what its whole aim has been? Do you realize that your profession stands today literally at the crossways, that it must decide whether it shall cling to the old faiths or shall follow strange gods? Do you realize that the tendency today among those responsible for the education of nurses is more and more to emphasize the scientific and theoretic side, less and less to emphasize that nurses, like doctors, are