medical man from that clerical work, because there was a great deal of clerical work. It is all very well to say you are keeping up your history. The very best histories I have ever seen were written in the days of Dr. Workman, because he certainly did that most promptly, and very simple ones they are.

Now the great hampering in this Province has been-you are afraid to say it; I am not afraid to say it, because I am free— is the fact that asylums have never been altogether away from Government control. Until Mr. Hanna's regime I suppose that probably I was the only assistant appointed, and my appointment came merely as an accident; it was not because I had any particular merit or I had any particular association. As a matter of fact, I resigned my position because I would not ask for preferment on political grounds, which I recognized as the curse of the whole service. Other men, admirable in their way, were appointed, who were not thorough superintendents. They were to blame because they allowed themselves to be appointed; and the medical profession has taken a certain amount of the blame. At all events, I do not think you will reach your highest result until the asylum service is free from politics. Your superintendents must be appointed because of their qualifications as psychiatrists and not because they were successful or perhaps unsuccessful politicians, but they must be appointed simply because they have the proper qualifications, and a step is being taken in that direction now, and I expected that, because, as I said before, Mr. Hanna sees further than the end of his nose, and I think his ambition is really to put that service on a high plane, but I don't think he will ever succeed until he has appointed a commission, the members of which are absolutely unhampered by any political association, to take charge of these institutions and develop them in this way.

Another thing is this, that the salaries paid the officials are absolutely absurd. You cannot get the type of people you should have to care for the insane unless you pay them proper salaries. Take a married man receiving $20 a month—that is what he is getting to-day. He is surely not going to be a very high type; and the result is that a good many of them are simply of a transient class who come to-day and go to-morrow. There are many in the institutions to-day who do more harm than good;

and the superintendent's difficulties are intensified a thousand times by having to bear with that sort of thing. Better salaries must not be paid only to the subordinates, but also to those in high places. The salaries paid are not at all commensurate with the service given. I do not know any service that demands the same energy and the same devotion. Now that I am out of it, I cannot conceive why I was such a perfect idiot as to remain in the service so many years; I cannot conceive what possessed me.

Now, of course, we all know that the real solution of the question is, as far as the care of the insane is concerned, the individual. I do not think you can convince me that in large institutions where you have segregations of chronies, that the individual is going to receive the best attention. I have never felt he could. I have seen people sacrificing their lives trying to do that, but it cannot be done; nor will the general public sympathize with you in your efforts, they won't understand them, nor will you get the results. As I have often said before, and I have said it until I am sick, the only solution of that difficulty is building a psychiatric clinic in university centres, just as was done in Germany. There isn't a university town in Germany that hasn't a psychiatric clinic. It is absolutely essential; and there are enough university towns in Ontario to provide the necessary facilities, and I think the Government would find it was money well spent if they develop these institutions. They must come; they will come inevitably. We were to have been the first, but the Americans were ahead of us, and there is one now at the Johns Hopkins Hospital at Baltimore, and there is one in Boston. That is the cure. You are doing something in Toronto for the admission of voluntary patients; but if you have this psychiatric in intimate association with the hospital, and better still with the university, look what the result will be, and we will have something to add to science, because, after all, this question of insanity has not been worked out in the same way that other problems of general medicine have, and they have not been worked out for the simple reason that the subject is the most difficult of all, and until you have proper men who can devote their whole time to these studies you will not get the results you should have. The time is now ripe, I am quite satisfied, when we must face things as an absolute right. It is a duty

the Government owes to the country, and nothing should be put in the way. Local jealousies should be sunk, and we should not draw herrings across the trail. I have heard discussions as to what shall we do with our nervous wards in the general hospital. That is only a small issue. The real question is, we must have a psychiatric clinic. It is all very well having your wards for so-called nervous patients, many of which are really psychiatric cases. The real advantage of that service is the building and equipment of psychiatric clinics-I use the word in the plural, because I think one will not meet the necessities of the case; you must have one, or two, or three, and they will do good work. Hampered as you are in Ontario-the situation I do not think anybody can tell me about-you should all do your best to accomplish this; then you will have men going into the service who can have the advantage of a proper psychiatric training and who will go into it to do their work enthusiastically and accomplish results.

DR. DOBBIE: There is one question I would like to ask, and the question is this: When a superintendent of a small hospital finds among the patients of the hospital some day a patient who has become violently insane, who is liable to do injury to himself and everybody else in the institution, and is making a considerable noise, what would be the proper procedure for that superintendent to carry out during the two or three days that must elapse before the patient can be moved by the ordinary means to the hospital for the insane? Will someone give us a little light on that?

DR. CLARK: I would suggest that everyone of these small hospitals should be equipped with a properly constructed continuous bath as being the simplest method of controlling those patients.

DR. YOUNG (in reply): Mr. President, with reference to Dr. Clark's criticisms of my paper, probably I knew a little more about the history of this Province than the paper would lead you to infer; but I did not wish to convey the impression that all that can be done is done now. Conditions are not ideal by any means. But what I wished to impress on you was that these institutions are as quickly as they can and very rapidly now introducing year after year hospital features into them, and that the general

hospital and the hospitals for the mental sick are coming closer and closer together all the time in organization and methods.

I believe, in looking over the list, I am the only man in the hospital for the insane service who is a member of the American Association, and I think I am almost the only one in this Association. This paper was practically in explanation of my presence at this meeting.

Another correction I would like to make is, that I do not mean to say that no work was done in the past. There was good work done in the past; but I think that the men in the asylum service kept quiet too much, and I think they are keeping too quiet now. I think they are in possession of a lot of information as to the causes which occasion and underlie insanity which they should give the public; and if they are behind the times in these institutions, I do not think all the blame can be laid on the politicians. The politicians can only go as far as public sentiment will allow them, and the men in the hospital for insane service have been used to sitting in there and not telling the public anything, and the consequence was that the public sentiment was never enlightened in any way. People come to visit the hospital in which I work now, and I show them through the hospital, and I take them through our male acute ward in charge of women nurses, and they are thunderstruck, and they say, "How can you get a woman to work in here among crazy men?” And yet we have had them there for years, and not an accident, not a girl has been injured in any way. The whole conception of to-day with regard to the insane man is absolutely and entirely wrong. I have no doubt that once the public learn that there is reason for an optimistic view with regard to insanity, the Government will advance the appropriation. We have a Minister who is not slow to take up any pointers of that kind, and he might even see his way to appointing a commission. We have to get the public sentiment, and that is one reason why I attended this meeting to-day, and I must say that I am very glad for the welcome you have given me.

WHAT NURSES SHOULD BE *

What kind of women shall nurses be? The best in the world -those who love greatly. No woman is too good for a life that saves lives and comforts living and wipes away all tears from the eyes. The greatest life ever lived on earth was the most sensitive, and one of the lowliest; a life that felt all the sorrow and pain of this world, yet shrank from none of it; a life that knew the agony to come, and met it with a courage which twenty centuries have not dimmed.

I once asked a college woman whether Dr. Worcester might speak about nursing to some girls under her care. She replied that she did not think much of nursing as a profession for educated women because of the many disagreeable details it involves. I am glad to go on record as the president of a girls' college who believes that no college girl is too good to be a nurse, and that by no means all of them are good enough. Were I talking to college girls, I should say: Every refinement will teach you to refine the sick-room and the sick; every sensitiveness will give you insight into the minds and souls of those whose life and death it may be are in your hands. Without sensitiveness there is no insight; without insight there is no high intelligence. Without quick response to the unspoken word, without delicate intuition of the patient's mind and heart, without that native, spiritual power which gets its growth through training, no woman can be supremely strong. Without the fine intelligence which lifts disagreeable details to their true place as necessary, and, therefore, to be done with a share of high enthusiasm, no woman. is worthy to be a nurse.

They say it takes a lady to trim lamps. It takes a lady to see in sickening details the path to that ideal which leavens drudgery with inspiration like His who washed the disciples' feet. It takes a lady to enter any household, rich or poor, squalid or splendid, and unobtrusively to make it better by her very presence. Nothing worth doing as the work of life is without details which are dull, it may be foul, drudgery to her who

*Selected from an address by Dean Briggs, at the celebration of the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of the Waltham Training School for nurses.