WE all have a reason to be grateful for nurses and today is all about a celebration in their honour. It’s International Nurses Day, which gives us here at Times Past HQ an excuse to talk about some of the great women who have graced Glasgow hospitals over the centuries. Hard to imagine, especially in this year of all years, that nursing as a career did not command much respect until the middle of the 1800s. As Florence Nightingale put it, nursing was left for “those who were too old, too weak, too drunken, too dirty, too stupid or too bad to do anything else.”