CHARGE OF HUSBAND.

Tuapeka Times, Volume XXXIV, Issue 4870, 3 July 1901, Page 4

CHARGE OF HUSBAND.

HUNTING.

One of the daily papers includes among the attractions offered to nurses for pursuing their vocation in South. Africa the prospect of obtaining a wealthy husband. To quote our contemporary : « If the nurses be young, in a land where the men are many and women so few, there should be an excellent prospect of marriage for those so inclined. The ordinary hospital doctor would be a small catch beside the wealthy English colonists who require nursing and are sentimental in their new home.' There is a suggestion here which cannot be too strongly repudiated It is true that one or two of the nurses who went out to South Africa have since been married, but neither nurses in hospitals at home, nor nurses of the sick and wounded in distant lands, have forsworn matrimony.

We have seen it stated that there is ' a craze for marrying hospital nurses,' and the author of the statement justified it on the ground that the . training of the nurse — training which teaches her to use her intelligence in an emergency, to be methodical and to keep the home healthy — renders her pre-eminently desirable as wife. To this might easily be added many other reccommendations, and we unhesitatingly assert that the capable nurse does, as a rule, make an admirable wife. But the idea that ■be is on the lookout to ' catch ' the ordinary hospital doctor, or might be temptcid to go to South Africa merely in the hope of securing a rich husband, is exceedingly and gratuitously offensive.- There are several false conceptions of the nursing vocation, but if once people becaroTimbued with the notion that it includes husband hunting, the results would be, disastrous. — ' St. James.'