_GRAPPLING WITH CHOLERA AND FEVER_
Florence Nightingale describes the Hardships of the Soldiers--Arrival
of Fifty More Nurses--Memories of Sister Mary Aloysius--The
Cholera Scourge.
So in that house of misery,
A lady with a lamp I see
Pass through the glimmering gloom,
And flit from room to room.
LONGFELLOW.
The New Year of 1855 brought no mitigation in Florence Nightingale’s
arduous task. Though there was no longer the influx of wounded from the
battlefields, disease was making fearful ravages amongst the soldiers
now engaged in the prolonged siege of Sebastopol. Miss Nightingale thus
described the hardships endured by the men in a letter to a friend.
“Fancy,” she writes, “working five nights out of seven in the trenches!
Fancy being thirty-six hours in them at a stretch, as they were all
December, lying down, or half lying down, after forty-eight hours, with
no food but raw salt pork sprinkled with sugar, rum, and biscuit;
nothing hot, because the exhausted soldier could not collect his own
fuel, as he was expected to do, to cook his own rations; and fancy
through all this the army preserving their courage and patience as they
have done. There is something sublime in the spectacle.”
The result of this life of exposure in the trenches during the rigours
of the Crimean winter was terrible suffering amongst the soldiers from
frost-bite and dysentery, and there was a great increase in cholera and
fever, which kept the hospitals more crowded than ever.
At the beginning of the year a further staff of fifty trained nurses
under Miss Stanley, the sister of the late Dean, arrived at Scutari
and were distributed amongst the various hospitals in the East.
Miss Nightingale had now five thousand sick and wounded under her
supervision, and eleven hundred more were on their way from the
Crimea. Under her immediate personal care in the Barrack Hospital were
more than two thousand wounded, all severe cases. She had also now
established her _régime_ in the General Hospital at Scutari, and some
of the new nurses were installed there under Miss Emily Anderson, while
others went to Kullali Hospital on the other side of the Bosphorus and
worked under Miss Stanley until she returned to England.
Sisters of mercy from some of the Irish convents were among the new
nurses, and one of the number, Sister Mary Aloysius, is still at the
time of writing living in her convent home at Gort, Co. Galway. Her
“Memories” of the Crimea afford a graphic picture of the state of the
General Hospital at Scutari and of the arduous toil of the nurses.
The aged sister has a keen sense of humour, and in describing the
departure of Miss Stanley’s company from London Bridge for Scutari,
evidently derived some satisfaction that her nun’s garb was less
extraordinary than the dresses provided by the Government for its
nurses. “The ladies and the paid nurses,” she relates, “wore the same
uniform--grey tweed wrappers, worsted jackets, white caps and short
woollen cloaks, and a frightful scarf of brown holland embroidered in
red with the words ‘Scutari Hospital.’ The garments were contract work
and all made the same sizes. In consequence the tall ladies appeared
to be attired in short dresses and the short ladies in long.” It was
a similar evidence of official blundering to that which sent a cargo
of boots for the soldiers in the Crimea all shaped for the left foot.
“That ladies could be found to walk in such a costume was certainly
a triumph of grace over nature,” adds Sister Aloysius. The fact is
interesting as showing the advance made in modern times in a nurse’s
official dress as exemplified in the charming though useful costumes
worn by military nurses in the South African war.
However, all honour to the noble pioneers who sank personal
considerations and effaced self in a desire to discharge their errand
of mercy.
A powerful sidelight is thrown on the work of the Lady-in-Chief by the
experiences of her subordinates. Sister Mary Aloysius writes: “Where
shall I begin, or how can I ever describe my first day in the hospital
at Scutari? Vessels were arriving and orderlies carrying the poor
fellows, who with their wounds and frost-bites had been tossing about
on the Black Sea for two or three days and sometimes more. Where were
they to go? Not an available bed. They were laid on the floor one after
another, till the beds were emptied of those dying of cholera and every
other disease. Many died immediately after being brought in--their
moans would pierce the heart--and the look of agony on those poor dying
faces will never leave my heart. They may well be called ‘the martyrs
of the Crimea.’
“The cholera was of the very worst type, and the attacked men lasted
only four or five hours. Oh, those dreadful cramps! You might as well
try to bend a piece of iron as to move the joints. The medical staff
did their best, and daily, hourly, risked their own lives with little
or no success. At last every one seemed to be getting paralysed and
the orderlies indifferent as to life or death.... The usual remedies
ordered by the doctors were stuping and poultices of mustard. They
were very anxious to try chloroform, but did not trust any one with it
except the sisters.”
If the Lady-in-Chief and her nurses had been at first rather coldly
welcomed in the surgery wards, their presence when the epidemic of
cholera set in was indeed counted a blessing. These trained and devoted
women could be entrusted with applying the desperate remedies needed
for the disease, which the medical staff would have felt it useless to
leave in the hands of orderlies. The stuping, for example, required
the most careful attention to have any chance of success. The method
of the sisters was to have a large tub of boiling water, blankets torn
in squares, and a piece of canvas with a running at each end to hold a
stick. The blankets were put into the boiling water, lifted out with
tongs and put into the canvas. An orderly at each end wrung the flannel
out so dry that not a drop of moisture remained. Then chloroform was
sprinkled on the hot blanket, which was then applied to the patient’s
stomach. Rubbing with mustard and even with turpentine followed, until
the iron grip which had seized the body was released or the end had
come.
The nurses fought with the dread disease in the most heroic manner, but
the proportion saved among the stricken was small indeed. The saddest
thing was that it was generally the strong and healthy soldier who was
attacked.
“One day,” says Sister Aloysius, “a fine young fellow, the picture of
health and strength, was carried in on a stretcher to my ward. I said
to the orderlies, ‘I hope we shall be able to bring him through.’ I set
to work with the usual remedies; but the doctor shook his head, and
said, ‘I am afraid it’s all no use, sister.’ When the orderlies, poor
fellows, were tired, I set to work myself, and kept it on till nearly
the end--but you might as well rub iron; no heat, no movement from his
joints. He lived about the usual time--four or five hours.”
Week after week the fearful scourge continued, until the avenues to the
wards were never free from the two streams of stretchers, one bringing
in the stricken, the other carrying out the dead. The spread of the
infection was thought to be largely due to the graves not being deep
enough, and the air surrounding the hospitals had become putrid.
Scarcely less dreadful than the cholera patients were the men suffering
from frost-bite, who arrived in hundreds from the trenches before
Sebastopol. Nothing enables one to realise their terrible condition
like the narrative of one on the spot. Referring to her experience
amongst the frost-bitten patients, Sister Aloysius says: “The men who
came from the ‘Front,’ as they called it, had only thin linen suits--no
other clothing to keep out the severe Crimean frost. When they were
carried in on the stretchers, which conveyed so many to their last
resting-place, their clothes had to be cut off. In most cases the flesh
and clothes were frozen together; and, as for the feet, the boots had
to be cut off bit by bit--the flesh coming off with them; many pieces
of the flesh I have seen remain in the boot. Poultices were applied
with some oil brushed over them. In the morning, when these were
removed--can I ever forget it?--the sinews and bones were seen to be
laid bare. We had surgical instruments; but in almost every case the
doctors or staff-surgeons were at hand, and removed the diseased flesh
as tenderly as they could. As for the toes, you could not recognise
them as such.”
One could multiply these ghastly descriptions if further evidence was
needed to show the terrible sufferings endured by officers and men
alike in the trenches before Sebastopol. Mention the famous siege
to any of the old Crimean veterans as they sit beneath the trees in
the grounds of Chelsea Hospital, and they will tell you stories of
hardships endured which makes one regard their still living bodies
with amazement. And they are not mere soldiers’ tales: the old heroes
could scarcely invent greater horrors than history has recorded.
The weary weeks were passed for the most part by the men sitting
or lying in holes dug in the frozen ground deep enough to shelter
their heads from the flying bullets and bursting bombs. If a poor
fellow decided to stretch his numbed and cramped legs, he was more
than likely to have his head blown off. Lord Wolseley bears to-day
the marks of his experiences as a venturesome young subaltern in the
trenches at Sebastopol, when, riddled with bullets and a part of his
face blown away, he was laid on one side by the surgeons as a “dead
un.” Fortunately he managed to prove that he was yet alive. The _Life
of Captain Hedley Vicars_ reveals also the privations of the time. He
himself lay in the open air on a bed of stones and leaves, having given
up his tent to men who were sick.
The cold was so intense that in a sudden skirmish the men were often
unable to draw their triggers. A frost-bitten soldier lying ill at
Balaclava, when he tried to turn in the night, found that his feet were
frozen to those of another soldier lying opposite.
Hundreds of these poor men, worn out by every imaginable kind of
suffering, were constantly arriving at the already crowded hospitals at
Scutari. As many as sixty men were known to die in a single night, and
for two months the death rate stood at 60 per cent.
Florence Nightingale seemed to be everywhere, and particularly did her
deep religious feelings prompt her to speak with the dying and point
their thoughts to heaven. She was a ministering angel alike for soul
and body. In her ear was often murmured the last message home, and
to her was entrusted the bit of money, the watch, or the cherished
keepsake to be sent to wife or sweetheart. How faithfully these dying
commissions were carried out, in spite of overwhelming duties to the
living, is known to families all over the land who have loved ones
sleeping beneath the cypress-trees on the shores of the Bosphorus.
At night, after the surgeons had gone their rounds, the figure of the
Lady-in-Chief was seen in her simple black dress, white apron, and
small closely fitting white cap gliding through the wards and corridors
carrying a tiny lamp in her hand. By its light she saw where pain was
greatest, where the Angel of Death was about to descend, and she would
pause to smooth a pillow, or give the word of consolation.
Florence Nightingale’s sublime courage was strikingly shown in these
nocturnal rounds. Then, when silence for the most part reigned, and the
sufferers were courting slumber, the ear was most likely to be startled
by some heart-breaking sound. The delirious call of the poor emaciated
fellow who still fancied himself in the trenches before Sebastopol,
or on the blood-stained ridges of Inkerman fighting for dear life,
the smothered sob at thought of home, the hacking cough, the groan
of agony, the gasp of death--these were the sounds which fell on the
stillness as “the lady with the lamp” moved from bed to bed. One such
experience would be a memory for a life-time, but night after night,
week after week, and month after month, our heroine fulfilled this sad
and tender ministry to the suffering. Longfellow paid his beautiful
tribute to the lady with the lamp in verses which impel quotation,
familiar as they are:--
So in that house of misery,
A lady with a lamp I see
Pass through the glimmering gloom,
And flit from room to room.
And slowly, as in a dream of bliss,
The speechless sufferer turns to kiss
Her shadow, as it falls
Upon the darkening walls.
On England’s annals, through the long
Hereafter of her speech and song,
A light its rays shall cast
From portals of the past.
A lady with a lamp shall stand
In the great history of the land,
A noble type of good,
Heroic womanhood.
To the poet’s vision, Florence Nightingale was the modern Santa
Filomena, the beautiful saint pictured by Sabatelli descending from
heaven with attendant angels to minister to the sick and maimed.