_Years of preparation._
Florence Nightingale, like Felicia Skene, had that saving gift of humour
which at times may make bearable an otherwise unbearable keenness of
vision.
Here, for instance, is her account of the customary dusting of a room
in those days (is it always nowadays so entirely different as might be
wished?):—
“Having witnessed the morning process called ‘tidying the
room’ for many years, and with ever-increasing astonishment,
I can describe what it is. From the chairs, tables, or sofa,
upon which ‘things’ have lain during the night, and which are
therefore comparatively clean from dust or blacks, the poor
‘things’ having ‘caught it,’ they are removed to other chairs,
tables, sofas, upon which you could write your name with your
finger in the dust or blacks. The other side of the things is
therefore now evenly dirtied or dusted. The housemaid then
flaps everything or some things not out of her reach with a
thing called a duster—the dust flies up, then resettles more
equally than it lay before the operation. The room has now been
‘put to rights.’”
You see the shrewd humour of that observation touches the smallest
detail. Miss Nightingale never wasted time in unpractical theorizing. In
discussing the far-off attainment of ideal nursing she says:—
“Will the top of Mont Blanc ever be made habitable? Our answer
would be, it will be many thousands of years before we have
reached the bottom of Mont Blanc in making the earth healthy.
Wait till we have reached the bottom before we discuss the top.”
Did she with her large outlook and big heart see our absurdity as
well as our shame when, pointing a finger of scorn at what we named
the superstition of other countries, we were yet content to see Spain
and France and Italy sending out daily, in religious service to the
poor, whole regiments of gentle and refined women trained in the arts
of healing and the methods of discipline, while even in our public
institutions—our hospitals and workhouses and prisons—it would hardly
have been an exaggeration to say that most of the so-called “nurses” of
those days were but drunken sluts?
She herself has said:—
“Shall the Roman Catholic Church do all the work? Has not the
Protestant the same Lord, who accepted the services not only of
men, but also of women?”
One saving clause there is for England concerning this matter in the
history of that time, in the work of a distinguished member of the
Society of Friends, even before Florence Nightingale or Felicia Skene
had been much heard of. We read that “the heavenly personality of
Elizabeth Fry (whom Miss Nightingale sought out and visited) was an
ever-present inspiration in her life.” From Elizabeth Fry our heroine
heard of Pastor Fliedner’s training institute for nurses at Kaiserswerth,
already described in the foregoing chapter; but, before going there,
she took in the meantime a self-imposed course of training in Britain,
visiting the hospitals in London, Edinburgh, and Dublin, though, so far
as the nursing was concerned, the criticisms in her own _Nursing Notes_
of later years would certainly suggest that what she learned was chiefly
what _not_ to do. Her gracious and winning dignity was far indeed from
the blindness of a weak amiability, and it can hardly be doubted that
what she saw of the so-called “nurses” in our hospitals of those days,
went far to deepen her resolve to devote herself to a calling then in
dire neglect and disrepute. Dirt, disorder, drunkenness—these are the
words used by a trustworthy biographer in describing the ways of English
nurses in those days—of whom, indeed, we are told that they were of a
very coarse order—ill-trained, hard-hearted, immoral. There must surely
have been exceptions, but they seem to have been so rare as to have
escaped notice. Indeed, it was even said that in those days—so strong
and stupefying is the force of custom—decent girls avoided this noble
calling, fearing to lose their character if found in its ranks.
But whatever were Florence Nightingale’s faults—and she was by no means
so inhuman as to be without faults—conventionality of thought and action
certainly cannot be counted among them; and what she saw of the poor
degraded souls who waited on the sick in our hospitals did but strengthen
her resolve to become a nurse herself.
Since she found no good school of nursing in England, she went abroad,
and visited, among other places, the peaceful old hospital of St. John
at Bruges, where the nuns are cultivated and devoted women who are well
skilled in the gentle art of nursing.
To city after city she went, taking with her not only her gift of
discernment, but also that open mind and earnest heart which made of her
life-offering so world-wide a boon.
I do not think I have used too strong a word of the gift she was
preparing. For the writer of an article which appeared in _Nursing
Notes_[5] was right when, at the end of Miss Nightingale’s life, she
wrote of her:—
“Miss Nightingale belongs to that band of the great ones of
the earth who may be acclaimed as citizens of the world; her
influence has extended far beyond the limits of the nation to
which she owed her birth, and in a very special sense she will
be the great prototype for all time to those who follow more
especially in her footsteps, in the profession she practically
created. We must ever be grateful for the shining example she
has given to nurses, who in her find united that broad-minded
comprehension of the ultimate aim of all their work, with a
patient and untiring devotion to its practical detail, which
alone combine to make the perfect nurse.”
But as yet she was only humbly and diligently preparing herself for the
vocation to which she had determined, in face of countless obstacles, to
devote herself, little knowing how vast would be the opportunities given
to her when once she was ready for the work.
During the winter and spring of 1849-50 she made a long tour through
Egypt with Mr. and Mrs. Bracebridge. On her way there she met in Paris
two Sisters of the Order of St. Vincent de Paul, from whom she took
introductions to the schools and “miséricorde” in Alexandria. There she
saw the fruits of long and self-denying discipline among the Nursing
Sisters, and in the following year she visited Pastor Fliedner’s
Institute at Kaiserswerth, where, among Protestant deaconesses, the life
of ordered simplicity and service showed some of the same virtues.
Miss Nightingale’s first visit to Kaiserswerth was comparatively short,
but in the following year, 1852, she went there again and took four
months of definite training, from June to October.
A deep and warm regard seems to have arisen between the Fliedners and
their English pupil, and the pastor’s friendship for Miss Nightingale’s
revered counsellor, Elizabeth Fry, must have been one pleasant link in
the happy bond.
Fliedner was certainly a wonderful man, and Miss Nightingale’s comment on
the spirit of his work was as true as it was witty. “Pastor Fliedner,”
she said, “began his work with two beds under a roof, not with a castle
in the air, and Kaiserswerth is now diffusing its blessings and its
deaconesses over almost every Protestant land.” This was literally true.
Within ten years of founding Kaiserswerth he had established sixty
nurses in twenty-five different centres. Later he founded a Mother-house
on Mount Zion at Jerusalem, having already settled some of his nurses
at Pittsburg in the United States. The building for the Jerusalem
Mother-house was given by the King of Prussia, and, nursing all sick
people, without any question of creed, is a school of training for nurses
in the East.
Alexandria, Beyrout, Smyrna, Bucharest—he visited them all, and it is due
to his efforts nearer home that to-day in almost all German towns of any
importance there is a Deaconess Home, sending out trained women to nurse
in middle-class families at very moderate fees, and ready to nurse the
poor without any charge at all.
When, in 1864, “he passed to his glorious rest”—the words are Miss
Nightingale’s—there were already one hundred such houses, and during part
of Miss Nightingale’s visit to Kaiserswerth, Pastor Fliedner was away a
good deal on the missionary journeys which spread the Deaconess Homes
through Germany, but they met quite often enough for each to appreciate
the noble character of the other. In all his different kinds of work for
helping the poor she was eagerly interested, and it may be that some of
her wise criticisms of district visiting in later years may have been
suggested by the courtesy and good manners that ruled the visiting of
poor homes at Kaiserswerth in which she shared. It was there also that
she made warm friendship with Henrietta Frickenhaus, in whose training
college at Kaiserswerth 400 pupils had already passed muster. It should
be added that Henrietta Frickenhaus was the first schoolmistress of
Kaiserswerth.
Mr. Sidney Herbert visited Kaiserswerth while Miss Nightingale was there,
and when, in the great moment that came afterwards, he asked her to go
out to the Crimea, he knew well how detailed and definite her training
had been.
Pastor Fliedner’s eldest daughter told Mrs. Tooley how vividly she
recalled her father’s solemn farewell blessing when Miss Nightingale was
leaving Kaiserswerth; laying his hands on her bent head and, with eyes
that seemed to look beyond the scene that lay before him, praying that
she might be stablished in the Truth till death, and receive the Crown of
Life.
And even mortal eyes may read a little of how those prayers for her
future were fulfilled.
She left vivid memories. “No one has ever passed so brilliant an
examination,” said Fliedner, “or shown herself so thoroughly mistress of
all she had to learn, as the young, wealthy, and graceful Englishwoman.”
Agnes Jones, who was trained there before her work in Liverpool left a
memorable record of life spent in self-denying service, tells how the
workers at Kaiserswerth longed to see Miss Nightingale again, how her
womanliness and lovableness were remembered, and how among the sick
people were those who even in dying blessed her for having led them to
the Redeemer; for throughout her whole life her religion was the very
life of her life, as deep as it was quiet, the underlying secret of
that compassionate self-detachment and subdued fire, without which her
wit and shrewdness would have lost their absolving glow and underlying
tenderness. Hers was ever the gentleness of strength, not the easy
bending of the weak. She was a pioneer among women, and did much to break
down the cruel limitations which, in the name of affection and tradition,
hemmed in the lives of English girls in those days. Perhaps she was among
the first of that day in England to realize that the Christ, her Master,
who sent Mary as His first messenger of the Resurrection, was in a fine
sense of the word “unconventional,” even though He came that every jot
and tittle of religious law might be _spiritually_ fulfilled.
It was after her return to England from Germany that she published her
little pamphlet on Kaiserswerth, from which quotations have already been
given.
Her next visit was to the Convent of St. Vincent de Paul in Paris,
where the nursing was a part of the long-established routine, and while
there she was able to visit the hospitals in Paris, and learned much
from the Sisters in their organized work among the houses of the poor.
In the midst of all this she was herself taken ill, and was nursed
by the Sisters. Her direct and personal experience of their tender
skill no doubt left its mark upon her own fitness. On her return home
to complete her recovery, her new capacity and knowledge made a good
deal of delighted talk in the cottages, and Mrs. Tooley tells us how
it was rumoured that “Miss Florence could set a broken leg better than
a doctor,” and made the old rheumatic folk feel young again with her
remedies, to say nothing of her “eye lotions,” which “was enough to ruin
the spectacle folk.” She was always ahead of her time in her belief in
simple rules of health and diet and hatred of all that continual use
of drugs which was then so much in fashion, and she no doubt saw many
interesting experiments at Matlock Bank in helping Nature to do her own
work.
[Illustration: Florence Nightingale in 1854.
(_From a drawing by H. M. B. C._)]
As soon as her convalescence was over she visited London hospitals, and
in the autumn of 1852 those of Edinburgh and Dublin, having spent a part
of the interval in her home at Embley, where she had again the pleasure
of being near her friends the Herberts, with whose neighbourly work among
the poor she was in fullest sympathy.
Her first post was at the Harley Street Home for Sick Governesses. She
had been interested in many kinds of efforts on behalf of those who
suffer; Lord Shaftesbury’s Ragged School labours, for instance, had
appealed to her, and to that and other like enterprises she had given
the money earned by her little book on Kaiserswerth. But she always had
in view the one clear and definite aim—to fit herself in every possible
way for competent nursing. It was on August 12, 1853, that she became
Superintendent of the Harley Street institution, which is now known
as the Florence Nightingale Hospital. It was founded in 1850 by Lady
Canning, as a Home for Invalid Gentlewomen, and when an appeal was made
to Miss Nightingale for money and good counsel, she gave in addition
_herself_ and became for a time the Lady Superintendent.
The hospital was intended mainly for sick governesses, for whom the need
of such a home of rest and care and surgical help had sometimes arisen,
but it had been mismanaged and was in danger of becoming a failure. There
Miss Nightingale, we read, was to be found “in the midst of various
duties of a hospital—for the Home was largely a sanatorium—organizing the
nurses, attending to the correspondence, prescriptions, and accounts; in
short, performing all the duties of a hard-working matron, as well as
largely financing the institution.”
“The task of dealing with sick and querulous women,” says
Mrs. Tooley, “embittered and rendered sensitive and exacting
by the unfortunate circumstances of their lives, was not an
easy one, but Miss Nightingale had a calm and cheerful spirit
which could bear with the infirmities of the weak. And so she
laboured on in the dull house in Harley Street, summer and
winter, bringing order and comfort out of a wretched chaos, and
proving a real friend and helper to the sick and sorrow-laden
women.
“At length the strain proved too much for her delicate body,
and she was compelled most reluctantly to resign her task.”
She had worked very hard, and was seldom seen outside the walls of the
house in Harley Street. Though she was not there very long, the effect
of her presence was great and lasting, and the Home, which has now moved
to Lisson Grove, has increased steadily in usefulness, though it has
of necessity changed its lines a little, because the High Schools and
the higher education of women have opened new careers and lessened the
number of governesses, especially helpless governesses. It gives aid far
and wide to the daughters and other kindred of hard-worked professional
men, men who are serving the world with their brains, and nobly seeking
to give work and service of as good a kind as lies within their power,
rather than to snatch at its exact value in coin, even if that were
possible—and in such toil as theirs, whether they be teachers, artists,
parsons, or themselves doctors, it is _not_ possible; for such work
cannot be weighed in money.
Queen Alexandra is President, and last year 301 patients were treated,
besides the 16 who were already within its walls when the new year began.