TWENTY-ONE nurses were graduated in the spring of 1939 from the nursing school at the Hospital Santo Tomis in Panama City and, in March 1940, twenty-nine other students were graduated. This hospital is one of the oldest in the Americas.' The nursing school was inaugurated in 1908, by government decree, with Louise Brakemeier as its first director. In i937 a course in public health nursing was incorporated into the regular nursing course. The student nurses are not all Panamanians. Each year, the Government of Panama grants scholarships to two girls from each country in Central and South America which wishes to send students to this school. Each student is chosen, with regard to the school's requirement for admission, by the Minister of Health of her country. Last year, British Honduras sent three students, for the first time, and Mexico is planning to send two students for the class which will enter this spring. Of the twenty-one nurses graduating last year, ten were Panamanians and eleven came from other countries: Guatemala, Salvador, Colombia, Costa Rica, Honduras, Bolivia, and Nicaragua. Two of these "foreign" students are now taking a course in the x-ray department to prepare themselves as technicians in their own countries; two are taking the course for graduate nurses in midwifery; one is completing her work in the school; one is married, and the rest have returned to work in hospitals and clinics in their own countries.