TWO ROYAL HEROINES.

Dominion, Volume 2, Issue 467, 27 March 1909, Page 11

TWO ROYAL HEROINES.

Dealing with the bravery bo often exhibited by royal personages in great emergencies, an English paper says:—The Empress Eugenie atoned for many of the shortcomings laid at her door by the manner in which, on the occasion of the great cholera outbreak in France, in 188S, she visited all the hospitals at Eouen, where the disease was raging with the greatest intensity; whi'o on another occasion, during a particularly violent epidemic of smallpox, she did not hesitate to go through the hospitals in Paris to encourage the doctors and nurses to remain at their post of duty, although by so doing she risked those good looks and that beauty which constituted her principal if not indeed her only claim to sovereignty. Nor would any reference to European monarchs in this connection be complete without a brief mention of the widowed Queen Amelie of Portugal, who, having rendered herself immune from diphtheria by inoculation, with the object of removing the popular prejudice against this form of vaccination, was wont, until the murder of her husband and her eldest son. a year ago, to visit the diphtheria wards of the Lisbon hospitals each week. She showed an even still greater degree of bravery at the time of the last outbreak of the bubonic plague in Portugal. "While it lasted sho appeared daily in the hospitals, and herself acted as the nurse, Mid attended the deathbed of a young physician who succumbed to tho malady while ministerijg to tho stricken. Sho is a trained nurse -ind a full fledged physician, being tho only occupant of a throne vho is entitled to add the letters "M.D." to the list of her dignities.