Nursing is important because it concerns not only “the administration of medicines and the application” (5) but also “the proper use of fresh air, light, warmth, cleanliness, quiet, and the proper selection and administration of diet” (5). Everything that contributes to health and wellbeing is a nurse’s duty. Nothing that helps a patient recover falls outside the definition of nursing. Nightingale writes, “If a nurse declines to do these kinds of things for her patient ‘because it is not her business,’ I should say that nursing was not her calling” (17).

This calling is essential to Nightingale and is the only thing that can keep the nurse from quitting the profession—and the only thing that can make a truly excellent nurse: “What is it to feel a calling for any thing? Is it not to do your work in it to satisfy your own high idea of what is the right, the best, and not because you will be ‘found out’ if you don’t do it?” (99). Excellence in nursing can’t be coaxed into being; it must simply be doing what’s best in and of itself.

When nurses feel that they’ve hit a wall in their profession and have nothing else to give, they must ask if they pursued the art of nursing as a job or as a calling.