I use the word nursing for want of a better.

Women should have the true nurse calling, the good of the sick first the second only the consideration of what is their 'place' to do - and that women who want for a housemaid to do this or the charwomen to do that, when the patient is suffering, have not the making of a nurse in them.

Nursing is an art: and if it is to be made an art, it requires an exclusive devotion as hard a preparation as any painter's or sculptor's work.

Let us never consider ourselves finished nurses....we must be learning all of our lives.

It is the unqualified result of all my experience with the sick that, second only to their need of fresh air, is their need of light; that, after a close room, what hurts them most is a dark room and that it is not only light but direct sunlight they want.

Passion, intellect, moral activity - these three have never been satisfied in a woman. In this cold and oppressive conventional atmosphere, they cannot be satisfied. To say more on this subject would be to enter into the whole history of society, of the present state of civilisation.

A want of the habit of observing and an inveterate habit of taking averages are each of them often equally misleading.