A King's Daughter

Kai Tiaki : the journal of the nurses of New Zealand, Volume III, Issue 3, 1 July 1910, Page 118

A King's Daughter

E. D. Mackellar

By

It is well for nurses of to-day to know something about devoted women who lived long ago. It is good to read : — " . . . How of old our saintly mothers Schooled themselves by vigil, fast, anel prayer : Learnt to love as Jesus loved before them ; While thev bore the cross which poor men bear." It is difficult for us to realise what those eld times were like — times of force and earnestness it is true, but also times of force and cruelty ; times when to be weak, and poor, anel suffering was to be an outcast and an excrescence ; times when, for the moment, at least, the race was very much to the swift, and the battle to the strong. But even in that iron age there were many loving hearts, of whom St. Elizabeth, of Hungary, and St. Francis of Assisi are types : who called the sick their brethren, because for them, too, Christ had died. Many of you know something of the life of St. Elizabeth, daughter of the King of Hungary, who lived about the time when the Barons of England were winning their country's liberties at Runnymede. Those that know something should refresh their memories, and those that know nothing about her should begin to learn by reading her life, as sketched by Kingsley in " The Saint's Tragedy." The " Tragedy " will teach you something of the difference between the thirteenth and the twentieth centuries in a more forceful and easily remembered way than the study of formal history. But this is not all. It will give you a lesson of comfort and a lesson of humility. It will be a comfort to you, after you have done your best for a patient and received scant thanks, to know that the Princess gave up position, anel wealth, and home, to be the sister of the suffering poor. You can hardly understand what this meant, because you cannot realise what a medieval hospital 01 lazaretto was. Indeed, a New Zealand trained nurse can scarcely imagine what the air of a surgical ward was like before the time of Lord Lister, and cannot know what it is to walk down a

long ward and watch face after face, c o marred by a loathsome, disfiguring malady, that dearest friends anel absolute strangers are equally unrecognisable. This, and very much worse than this, was faced by a young girl, who, nurtured in a palace, made her home with outcasts, and was rewarded by — persecution. Remember all this wheu you think your patients ungrateful. And what of humility ? It is right that you should keep yourselves abreast of recent knowledge, and that you should feel pride in your profession ; but it should be a chastened pride, for the progress of to-day has not been the work of to-day alone. Not only are you but building on foundations laid by others long ago, but you are working with the sympathy and approbation of all rightthinking people, anel you work with convenience and with comfort. Those whose hard lives made possible your easy lives laboured not for those whom the great ones of the earth are now prouel to succour, but for those who, in that age, were thought of little more account than the beasts that perish — the sufferers who had no friends. Those tireless workers, too, were not encouraged by societies and organisations ; by publicity and rewards. Far from it ! They were looked on with elerision and contempt for demeaning themselves by contact with the useless and debased — " the numbered with the worse than slain." Never forget that you are the heirs of those devoted ones, anel that without them you would have had no inheritance at all, for : — " Old decays but foster new creations ; Bones anel ashes feed the golden corn ; Fresh elixirs wander every moment Down the veins through which the live past feeds its child, the live unborn." I feel that I am quite unequal to the task of painting such a noble character, but I shall do my best to give you some idea of her supreme self-abnegation by attempting to paraphrase the glowing words of a great and eloquent French ecclesiastic. Saint Elizabeth of Hungary left the palace of her fathers and the palace of her husband, and entered a hospital to tend with her own!

hands the poor of God. One day a leper begged admittance. She took him in and eliessed his dreadful sores, and when she had finished she took the vessel with the lotion she had used and drank the noisome draught. This was no doubt an act of " extravagance," but smile not at it, for it was also an act of power ; of that peculiar power that marks the person of heroic mould. Anel what is extravagance ? It is the self-regardkss enthusiasm of the saints ; the love of God and the love of man carried to a degree that shocks the ordinary human intelligence, that takes the wholly common for its rule of life, and looks on custom as its guiding star. And what benefit did mankinel reap from this action of extravagance ? Need you ask ? By it Saint Elizabeth taught this abandoned loathsome outcast that he was a man, and loved by God as much as any peer or prince. vShe said to him : " Beloved brother in the Lord, if, when I had washed thy sores I had taken thee in my arms to show thee that in Christ thou art my brother, it would have been but an act of fraternal love to give thee back once more that affection which thou hast never known since thou wast a little child upon thy mother's knee. But, beloveel brother, it has been God's will that I should do for thee what no one has ever done for any prince or King ; I have not only tended thee anel laved thy wounds, but I have raised the vessel to my lips as if it were the cup of blessing from the Altar of the Lord." This was an act, my brethren, at once extravagant and sublime, and woe to him who cannot read it aright ! Thanks to Saint Elizabeth, it will be handed down to all

eternity, that a leper received from the daughter of a King more proof of self-elenying love than human beauty has ever won upon this mortal earth. Let a man of genius scoff at the deed if he will. We admit that he is right according to his purblind vision, and we grant that it would have been more natural to take a glass of Chateau-Margaux with a friend : But ! this wise man will die someday ; his writings will hardly outlive him, and his joys and sorrows will be as forgotten things. Saint Elizabeth died, and Kings and beggars strove for shreds of her clothing as if her sackcloth had been cloth of gold. Her remains were enshrined in gold and precious stones, and the most renowned artificers in the world were summoned to make for her deael body a dwelling worthy of her living self. And from age to age, princes and sages, poets, lepers, pilgrims of every rank journeyed tc her tomb, and by the touch of their lips left upon it the stigamata of enduring love. They addressed her as if she were living still : " O our beloved sister in the Lord, thou hadst palaces and thou didst give them up for us ; thou hadst children, but thou adoptedst us ; thou wast a great lady, but thou didst wait on us ; thy love thou gavest to the poor, the weak, the wretched ; thou hast put joy into the hearts of those that knew it not ; anel now we give thee back the glory that thou didst renounce for us. We return thee the love that for our sakes thou dielst lose. O our beloved sister, pray for thy friends who were unborn when thou wast in this world ; even for us, who had not the blessing to behold thy face."