[William A. Baurle]

Since it's National Nurse's Week, and since I've worked in nursing homes and in healthcare all my life, and since we have at least 2 nurses here who are also poets, Eileen Cleary and Steve Bucknell, I thought it appropriate to start a thread about my favorite nurse (Eileen & Steve being very close seconds ):

Florence Nightingale

She would sometimes comfort those in her care with this view. For example, a dying young prostitute being tended by Nightingale was concerned she was going to hell and said to her 'Pray God, that you may never be in the despair I am in at this time'. The nurse replied "Oh, my girl, are you not now more merciful than the God you think you are going to? Yet the real God is far more merciful than any human creature ever was or can ever imagine." - Wikipedia

The little girl who the other day ran back across the railway and snatched two babies whom she saw in danger, “crashing them down,” as a bystander said, “between herself” and the safe platform, giving herself to certain death under the advancing engine but saving the babes without a scratch. She was a greater preacher of righteousness and of the ways of God than all the fathers of the Church who ever were born to write. - Florence Nightingale.