The Challenge to Public Health Nursing is to aid in the prevention of and the ability to deal with mental and nervous diseases. For too long have we been willing and desirous of thinking that physical and mental health were two separate and entirely different things that one must be stressed, while the other can be more or less ignored. Too long have we been willing to nurse a diseased organ and neglect the mental reaction created in that individual because of illness. Too long have we emphasized the physical and neglected the mental. In medicine, there is now the realization that these two phases of health, or of sickness, can no longer be separated--physical well-being is dependent on mental well-being and vice versa.