Sister Giovanna's nerves were good.

The modern trained nurse is a machine, and a wonderfully good one on the whole; when she is exceptionally endowed for her work she is quite beyond praise.

People who still fancy that Rome is a mediaeval town, several centuries behind other great capitals in the application of useful discoveries and scientific systems, would be surprised if they knew the truth and could see what is done there, and not as an exception, but as the general rule.

The common English and American belief, that Roman nuns nurse the sick chiefly by prayer and the precepts of the school of Salerno, is old-fashioned nonsense; the Pope's own authority requires that they should attend an extremely modern training-school where they receive a long course of instruction, probably as good as any in the world, from eminent surgeons and physicians.
One of the first results of proper training in anything is an increased steadiness of the nerves, which quite naturally brings with it the ability to bear a long strain better than ordinary persons can, and a certain habitual coolness that is like an armour against surprises of all kinds.

One reason why Anglo-Saxons are generally cooler than people of other nations is that they are usually in better physical condition than other men.
A digression is always a liberty which the story-teller takes with his readers, and those of us have the fewest readers who make the most digressions; hence the little old-fashioned civility of apologising for them.