[Tidyness and thrift. The exemplary role of religious women in nineteenth-century nursing].

The traditional view of nineteenth-century nursing in Holland is anything but bright. The abominable conditions in hospitals and suchlike institutions, the incompetence of the lay staff recruited from the lower strata of society are invariably emphasised. Slight improvements are only first noticeable at the end of the nineteenth century, particularly by the efforts of the deaconess' movement and pioneers like Florence Nightingale. This is a one-sided view. In Catholic circles it was already in the first half of the nineteenth century that Dutch women's congregations fell back on the Christian charitable traditions of care for the elderly, the orphaned and the infirm, and of nursing the sick. The way in which women religious realised this was an example and a model for the reorganisation of nursing: the self-denying efforts of 'women of good breeding' cooperating with the doctors made it possible for nineteenth-century hospitals to develop into centres of medical care.