LOOKING OUT.
Step by step, and all unconsciously, Florence Nightingale had been
training her hand and eye to follow the dictates of her keen mind and
loving heart. Now, grown a young woman, she began to think seriously how
she should apply this training. What should she do with her life? Should
she go on like her friends, in the quiet pleasant ways of country life?
The squire's daughter was busy enough, surely. Every hour of the day was
full of useful, kindly work, of happy, healthy play; should she be
content with this? Her heart told her that she was not content. In her
friendly visiting among the sick poor she had seen much misery and
suffering, far more than she and all the other kindly ladies could
attempt to relieve. She felt that something more was needed; she began
to look around to see what was being done in the larger world.
It was about this time that she met Elizabeth Fry, the noble and
beautiful friend of the prisoner. Mrs. Fry was then an elderly woman,
with all the glory of her saintly life shining about her; Florence
Nightingale an earnest and thoughtful girl of perhaps eighteen or
twenty. It is pleasant to think of that meeting. I do not know what
words passed between them, but I can almost see them together, the
beautiful stately woman in her Quaker dress, the slender girl with her
quiet face and earnest eyes; can almost hear the young voice,
questioning, eager and ardent; the elder answering, grave and sedate,
words full of weight and wisdom, of sweetness and tenderness. This
interview was one of the great moments of Florence Nightingale's early
life.
A little later than this, in 1843, she met another person whose words
and counsel impressed her deeply; and of this meeting I can give you a
clearer account, for that person was my own dear father, Dr. Samuel G.
Howe. Some ten years before this my father had decided to devote his
life to helping people who needed help. He had established a school for
the blind in Boston; he had brought Laura Bridgman, the blind, deaf
mute, out of her loneliness and taught her to read, write, and talk
with her fingers; the first time this had ever been done with a person
so afflicted. He had labored to help the prisoners and captives in the
North, and the slaves in the South; in short he was what is called a
_philanthropist_, that is, one who loves his fellow-men and tries to
help them.
My father and mother were traveling in England soon after their
marriage, and were invited by Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale to spend a few
days at Embley Park. One morning Miss Nightingale (for so I must call
her now that she is a woman) met my father in the garden and said to
him:
"Dr. Howe, you have had much experience in the world of philanthropy;
you are a medical man and a gentleman; now may I ask you to tell me,
upon your word, whether it would be anything unsuitable or unbecoming to
a young Englishwoman, if she should devote herself to works of charity,
in hospitals and elsewhere, as the Catholic Sisters do?"
My father replied: "My dear Miss Florence, it would be unusual, and in
England whatever is unusual is apt to be thought unsuitable; but I say
to you, go forward, if you have a vocation for that way of life; act up
to your aspiration, and you will find that there is never anything
unbecoming or unladylike in doing your duty for the good of others.
Choose your path, go on with it, wherever it may lead you, and God be
with you!"
It was in this spirit that Miss Nightingale now began to train herself
for her life work.
It is hard for you children of to-day to imagine what nursing was in the
early part of the nineteenth century. To you a nurse means a trim,
alert, cheerful person in spotless raiment, who knows just what to do
when you are ill, and does it in the pleasantest possible manner; you
are glad when she comes into the room, sorry when she leaves. But this
pleasant person did not exist in those days, except in the guise of a
Catholic Sister of Charity. The other nurses were for the most part
coarse and ignorant women, often cruel, often intemperate. When you read
"Martin Chuzzlewit" you will find out more about them than I can tell
you. But "Martin Chuzzlewit" was not written when Miss Nightingale
determined to find out the condition of nursing in England and on the
Continent. She first spent some months in the London hospitals, and
then visited those in Scotland and Ireland. She was horrified at what
she found there; dirt and misery and needless suffering among the
patients, drunkenness and ignorance and brutality among the nurses. Then
she turned to the Continent and found a very different state of things.
The hospitals were clean and cheerful, and the Sisters of Mercy in their
white caps and aprons were as good and kind and capable as our trained
nurses to-day.
Up to this time these good sisters had been the only trained nurses in
Europe; but in Germany Miss Nightingale found a Protestant sisterhood
which was working along the same lines, and in a more enlightened and
modern way; these were the Deaconesses of Kaiserswerth, the pupils of
Pastor Fliedner.
This good man--one of the best men, surely, that ever lived--was the son
of a Lutheran minister. His father was poor, and Theodore had to work
his way through college, but this he did cheerfully, for he loved work.
He studied very hard and also gave lessons, sawed wood, blacked boots,
and did other odd jobs. When his clothes began to wear out he sewed up
the holes with white thread, all he had, and then inked it over. He
loved children, and on the long tramps he used to take in vacation time
he was always collecting songs and games, and teaching them to the
children.
When he was twenty-two years old Theodore Fliedner became pastor of a
small Protestant parish at Kaiserswerth on the Rhine. The people were so
poor that they could do little either for their church or themselves, so
the young pastor set out on foot to seek aid from other Christian
people. He traveled in Germany, Holland and England, and everywhere
people felt his goodness and gave him help. In London he met Elizabeth
Fry, and the noble work she was doing among the prisoners at Newgate
made a deep impression on him. He determined to do something to help the
prisoners in Germany, especially the poor women, who, after being
imprisoned for a certain time, were cast upon the world with no
possession save an ill name.
In his little garden stood an old summerhouse, partly ruinous, but with
strong walls. With his own hands the good pastor mended the roof and
made the place clean and habitable. He put in a bed, a table and a
chair, and then prayed that God would send to this shelter some poor
soul who needed it.
One night a homeless outcast woman came to the door, and the pastor and
his wife bade her welcome, and took her to the clean pleasant room that
was all ready.
In this humble way opened the now famous institution of Kaiserswerth.
Other poor women soon found out the friendly shelter; in a short time a
new and larger building was needed, and more helping hands beside those
of the good pastor and his devoted wife. The good work grew and grew;
some of the poor women had children, and so a school was started; the
school must have good teachers, and so a training school for teachers
was opened.
But most of all Pastor Fliedner wished to help the condition of the sick
poor; three years after the first opening of the summerhouse shelter in
the garden he founded the Deaconess Hospital. We are told that it was
opened "practically without patients and without deaconesses." He
obtained the use of part of a deserted factory, and begged from his
neighbors old furniture and broken crockery, which he mended carefully,
and put in the big empty rooms. He had only six sheets, but there was
plenty of water to wash them, and when the first patient, a poor
suffering servant maid, came to the door, she was made comfortable in a
spotless bed, in a clean though bare room.
I wish I could tell you the whole beautiful story, but it would take too
long. By the end of the year there were sixty patients in the hospital,
and seven deaconess nurses to care for them. To-day there is a deaconess
hospital or home in almost every town in Germany, and thousands upon
thousands of sick and poor people bless the deaconesses, though they may
never have heard the name of Pastor Fliedner.