rst-class surgery, and that it was prepared to pay for it.
I have never heard the same accusation levelled at Great Britain.

At St. Camille we had the good fortune to see M. Xambotte at work.
His reputation as a surgeon is worldwide, and it was pleasant to find
that his dexterity as an operator was equal to his reputation. It is not
always the case. He is an expert mechanic, and himself makes most
of the very ingenious instruments which he uses. He was fixing a
fractured femur with silver wires, and one could see the skilled
workman in all that he did. There is no training-ground for one's
hands like a carpenter's bench, and the embryo surgeon might do
much worse with his time than spend six months of it in a workshop.
When medical training emerges from its medieval traditions, manual
training will certainly form a part, and no one will be allowed to
attempt to mend a bone till he has shown his capacity to mend a
chair-leg. Here, again, the surgeon was surrounded by all the
appliances, and even the luxuries, that he could desire. The lot of the
great surgeon abroad is indeed a happy one.

But there is one thing in which we in England are far better off--in
our nursing staffs. In most of the hospitals we visited the nursing was
carried on by Sisterhoods, and though some of them were evidently
good nurses, most of them had no idea whatever of nursing as it is
practised in our country. Fresh air, for example, is to them full of
dangers. One would almost think that it savoured of the powers of
evil. We went into one huge hospital of the most modern type, and
equipped lavishly, and such wag the atmosphere that in ten minutes I
had to make a rush for the door. One large ward was full of wounded
soldiers, many of them with terrible wounds, gangrenous and horrible,
and every window was tightly shut. How they could live in such an
atmosphere is beyond my comprehension, but the Sisters did not
seem to notice it at all.

Some of the surgeons have their specially trained nurses, but nursing
as a profession for the classes who are alone competent to undertake
it is a conception which has yet to dawn upon the Continent, for only
a woman of education and refinement can really be a nurse.

The absence on the Continent of a nursing profession such as ours is
not without its influence on medicine and surgery abroad. The
individual patient meets with far less consideration than would be the
case in this country, and is apt to be rega