"Penalties" for nursing students...

I was looking for pictures of nurses when I came across the following excerpt on the site Nursing History Digitalization Project

Students in the hospital nursing programs were required to live in residence while enrolled in the nursing school, as well as follow a strict set of rules and regulations which applied to all facets of the student’s life. These rules applied to everything from their behaviour to their dress and if the rules were not followed the students were disciplined. Most dismissals from the program due to a lack of discipline often occurred early on in the student's training. Due to the surplus pool of labour that existed, students who quit or were expelled could easily be replaced. Senior students however, were a valuable skilled labour force and were not quite as easy to replace. Therefore as long as the student was willing to accept a penalty and appeared to repent they would not be expelled from the program.

Hm...now what might those penalties have been?

100 years ago today...

I loved her the first time I ever saw her.

Picture the scene:

There in the dark auditorium on my first day of Art History class the slide projector clicks and suddenly the giant screen at the front of the room is filled with the image of a vibrant orange figure, every lovely curve shown in explicit detail.

My heart reacted long before my mind. She was beautiful, graceful even in all of her plump awkwardness.; heavy breasts hanging low, hips wide, belly bulging, mostly likely with late pregnancy.

The instructor explained that they called her "Venus", but he did not agree with that name as she was carved long before the civilizations of Greece rose. He called her "fertility icon", dutifully I put that down in my notes. The name didn't fit for me, though. To me she looked like a mother, the mother of the world, and that's what I called her.

In Art History her only significance was the honor of being the oldest female figure found. The instructor spent less than 5 minutes on her. And then clicked on.

It would still be more than a year before I learned more about her; eighteen months before I discovered what she meant in archaeological circles, that she was the icon of a newly forming movement, a whole new school being born among anthropologists. It would be through her that I would come to know and understand the true power a woman can wield, but that day in late August all I knew was my imagination had been completely captured by a four inch statue I could not get out of my head.

And to day is her birthday. Well of sorts. 100 years ago today she was unearthed near the village of Willendorf, Austria. On August 7, 1908, she once again came into light after thousands of years buried in the earth.

And she's still every bit as beautiful.

Ms. Betty