Yet despite these dangers and demands, nurses and our health care colleagues exemplified the best of who we are and what we do. They worked in a cauldron of contagion, initially unaware of what they were fighting, how the infection spread, how it killed or how it could be treated. As one French doctor commented, "We were not playing with fire. It was playing with us" [9] . Was this heroism and heroic actions on their part, or were they 'just doing their job'? If we accept that heroism is "providing service to others in the face of extreme personal danger", then I have no qualms in considering these nurses as exemplars of 21 st Century Nursing heroism.