We have come a long way since the above lines were written. We no longer regard nurses as often drunk, nor do we regard their being middle-aged as ‘a bad thing’, and we do not presume that it was only because the ‘hired nurse’ was so feared that households armed themselves with recipes from medical do-it-yourself books. We accept the need for many of them to be paid. We understand the context of Cruikshank's famous drawing of an ugly nurse, with her lantern and urine flask, much more in the humour in which it was drawn – as a parody of extremes – and not as an attempt accurately to portray those who cared for the sick. But we still make assumptions about nursing. In particular, we still tend to assume (on the whole) that nurses were female. There is an assumption, perhaps growing among historians of female labour, that nursing was a significant income-generating occupation for women.