A Balanced View

It is important that we have a balanced view of the ladies who went to South Africa, and became involved in nursing for good or bad. Lady Randolph Spencer Churchill summed this up when visiting Cape Town from the Hospital Ship Maine:

I dined at the Mount Nelson Hotel, where I must own to having been much astonished – the dresses, the babble of both men and women, were bewildering, and seemed under the circumstances rather out of place, and a great contrast to the realities of Durban. But too much has perhaps already been said about it, and it would be a pity, and I hope impossible, if the appearance and conduct of some inconscient and frivolous beings should efface the splendid and self-sacrificing work done by many noble women who deserve to be long remembered both in Natal and in Cape Colony.