Happy Nurse's Day

Nursing is an art:
and if it is to be made an art,
It requires an exclusive devotion
as hard a preparation,
as any painter´s or sculptor´s work;
for what is the having to do with
dead canvas or dead marble,
compared with having to do
with the living body,
the temple of God´s spirit?
It is one of the Fine Arts:
I had almost said,
the finest of Fine Arts.
- Florence Nightingale

Props today to all the nurses who keep our sagging, inequitable American health care system from becoming a vast, squirming charnel house. When the streets are thick with entrails of our corporate masters, you will be among the first to receive your just recompense.

For all your nurse-blogging needs today, see Thinking Nurse, Head Nurse, The Unlikely RN, and of course Sonic Nurse, the best nursing/political blog of them all. All have been pre-screened and approved by yours truly. No right-wing nurses allowed — all sites with links to "Instapundit" and "Blogs for Bush" were automatically disqualified from consideration.

Also highly recommended is the massive roster of nurse romance novels on display at Tiny Pineapple. Cover art and brief excerpts included from such prize-winning works as Angels in White, A Nurse on Horseback, and My Friend, Dr. John:

Half the nurses at the hospital had, at one time or another, referred to the Senior R.M.O., John Reddman, as “My friend, Doctor John” — but that was as far as it had ever got.

Would Nurse Karen Mason be any luckier than all the rest of them?

I think we know the answer to that one. Oh, yes. I think we do.