The trained nurse has become one of the great blessings of humanity, taking a place beside the physician and the priest.

Osler elevates the modern, professionally educated nurse to a status of moral and social importance comparable to two traditional figures of trust: the physician (scientific healer) and the priest (spiritual comforter). The line reflects the late-19th/early-20th-century transformation of nursing from informal domestic caretaking into a disciplined vocation shaped by training schools and hospital systems. It also signals Osler’s characteristic emphasis on bedside care: medicine is not only diagnosis and treatment but also sustained human attention to suffering. By calling nursing a “blessing of humanity,” he frames it as a civilizational advance—an institutionalized compassion that strengthens both medical outcomes and the patient’s experience of illness.