SOURCE: "Florence Nightingale," in American Addresses, The Century Co., 1911, pp. 341-60.

In the following speech, originally delivered in 1910, Choate describes Nightingale's career as a war nurse.

I consider it a very great privilege to be permitted to stand here for a few minutes to speak about Florence Nightingale. How could this great convention of the nurses of America, gathered from all parts of the country, representing a thousand schools of trained nurses; representing more than fifty thousand graduates of those schools, and more than twenty-five thousand pupils of those schools to-day—how could they better close their conference than by coming here to-night, to celebrate the foundation, by that great woman, of the one first great training school for nurses, which was the model of them all? And how could she, that venerable woman, be more highly honored than by this gathering, in a distant land, of these...