Early in 2002, the earth experienced a near-miss: an asteroid passed within a whisker (in astronomical terms) of the planet. Had it struck, it would have done so with a force six hundred times greater than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. No observer saw it coming, and it was tracked only after it had passed; yet this event produced little surprise. We already knew that the secure foundations of modernism had moved beneath our feet: the idea of continental drift; then pollution; then global climate change; then epidemic disease, AIDS; now the realization that life on this planet is regularly challenged, and at longer periods catastrophically transformed, by the impact of extraterrestrial objects. Asteroids are rational in the sense that they obey mechanical laws well understood since Newton; yet their intrusion into our world says nothing of human or divine reason, and seems to re-assert the old doctrine: chance rules all.

The main problem in staffing military hospitals with female nurses, Florence Nightingale explained in 1857, was to find “respectable and efficient women” who would be willing to undertake such work. Many women would apply for the positions but few would be acceptable. “Many a woman who will make a respectable and efficient Assistant-Nurse [the equivalent of our modern staff nurse] under the eye of a vigilant Head-Nurse, will not do at all when put in a military ward,” Nightingale said, because, “As a body, the mass of Assistant-Nurses are too low in moral principle, and too flighty in manner, to make any use of.” Nightingale thought that efficient and respectable assistant nurses had “in a great degree, to be created.” Developing respectability and efficiency in hospital nurses were the two major goals of nineteenth-century nursing reformers, and vigilant supervision was to be the major method for achieving them.