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How the American Nurses' Association is Eliminating Discrimination in the Nursing Profession...What you can do to help

DEDICATION: TO THE NURSE

YOU WERE a slave in Homer's time, and washing the feet of a wandering beggar who sat in the hall of Odysseus, you were the first to recognize the returned master by his scars when his own wife doubted...In the harbor of Corinth on the Saronic gulf, where stood the pagan temple to Aphrodite, you were a Christian deaconess visiting the afflicted...You were a cloistered nun in the Hôtel-Dieu of Paris, walking for centuries through endless corridors, serving countless patients for Christ's sake...You were a king's daughter, and were married to a king by Anselm in Westminster Abbey, but you put a hair shirt on your queenly body and lovingly kissed the feet of lepers and dried their wounds with your hair and built a hospital for their comfort...You were a Béguine of Flanders, and became known for your skillful ways with the sick...You were a Daughter of St. Camillus, perishing with your Order when you went to the final plague in Barcelona...You were a Sister of Charity of Vincent de Paul, all France was your hospital, and then your white cornettes were seen abroad...You were a pauper in London town, heavy and filthy and drunken, and in the absence of other employment you became an asylum nurse, but as you could not read, you asked the lunatics to decipher the labels on the medicine bottles...In the lost abyss of Scutari, you were the Lady-with-the-Lamp, and with the background of a vast cemetery for statistics your pity and your passion created Modern Nursing...You were a modern girl, and you became a trained nurse for Humanity's sake...In the zero hour of Democracy, you landed with the American troops, and giving sulfa drugs and plasma under fire, you died on the beachhead of Anzio...You were a graduate of Lincoln Hospital, for your skin was colored, and in the European Theatre of Operations you cared tenderly for German prisoners of war...You were an Hadassah Nurse in Palestine, and refugee Jews from Poland and families of Arabs from the desert came to you for relief...You served at Bataan, where you had little to give the soldiers except a smile, and when the Japanese bombers blew your hospital to pieces you escaped by Clipper to Australia...Mother Earth, sick and hungry and tired, awaits your healing hands...

From WHITE CAPS, Copyright, 1946, by Victor Robinson.
Published by J. B. Lippincott Company

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Transcription Notes:
---------- Reopened for Editing 2023-05-27 16:18:47 ---------- Reopened for Editing 2023-05-27 15:47:03