_Her citizenship—Her initiative—Public recognition and
gratitude—Her return incognito—Village excitement—The country’s
welcome—Miss Nightingale’s broken health—The Nightingale
Fund—St. Thomas’s Hospital—Reform of nursing as a profession._
It may be fairly supposed that even those benighted Philistines whose
mockery had at the outset been of a less innocent quality than _Punch’s_
gentle fun, now found it expedient to alter their tone, and if their
objections had been mere honest stupidity, they were probably both
convinced of their past folly and a good deal ashamed.
For Britain was very proud of the daughter who had become so mighty a
power for good in the State. The Sister of Mercy whom Miss Nightingale
used laughingly to call “her Cardinal” had responded on one occasion by
addressing her with equal affection as “Your Holiness,” and the nickname
was not altogether inappropriate, for her advice in civic and hygienic
matters had an authority which might well be compared with that which the
Pope himself wielded on theological questions.
Among the doctors at Scutari was a friend of General Evatt, from whom he
had many facts at first-hand, and it was therefore not without knowledge
that, in his conversation with me on the subject, the latter confirmed
and strengthened all that has already been written of Miss Nightingale’s
mental grasp and supreme capacity. To him, knowing her well, and knowing
well also the facts, she was the highest embodiment of womanhood and of
citizenship. Yet, while he talked, my heart ached for her, thinking of
the womanly joys of home and motherhood which were not for her, and all
the pure and tender romance which woman bears in her inmost soul, even
when, as in this noble instance, it is transmuted by the will of God and
the woman’s own obedient will into service of other homes and other lives.
Perhaps I may here be allowed to quote a sentence from Mrs. Tooley’s
admirable life of our heroine; for it could not have been better
expressed: “No one would wish to exempt from due praise even the humblest
of that ‘Angel Band’ who worked with Florence Nightingale, and still less
would she, but in every great cause there is the initiating genius who
stands in solitary grandeur above the rank and file of followers.”
Nor was official recognition of the country’s debt to Miss Nightingale in
any wise lacking. When the Treaty of Peace was under discussion in the
House of Lords, Lord Ellesmere made it an opportunity for the following
tribute:—
“My Lords, the agony of that time has become a matter of
history. The vegetation of two successive springs has obscured
the vestiges of Balaclava and of Inkermann. Strong voices now
answer to the roll-call, and sturdy forms now cluster round
the colours. The ranks are full, the hospitals are empty. The
Angel of Mercy still lingers to the last on the scene of
her labours; but her mission is all but accomplished. Those
long arcades of Scutari, in which dying men sat up to catch
the sound of her footstep or the flutter of her dress, and
fell back on the pillow content to have seen her shadow as it
passed, are now comparatively deserted. She may probably be
thinking how to escape, as best she may, on her return, the
demonstrations of a nation’s appreciation of the deeds and
motives of Florence Nightingale.”
And in the House of Commons Mr. Sidney Herbert said: “I have received,
not only from medical men, but from many others who have had an
opportunity of making observations, letters couched in the highest
possible terms of praise. I will not repeat the words, but no higher
expressions of praise could be applied to woman, for the wonderful
energy, the wonderful tact, the wonderful tenderness, combined with
the extraordinary self-devotion, which have been displayed by Miss
Nightingale.”
Lord Ellesmere was right when he hinted that Miss Nightingale would
be likely to do her best to escape all public fuss on her return. The
Government had offered her a British man-of-war to take her home; but
it was not her way to accept any such outward pomp, and, almost before
people knew what had happened, it was found that she had travelled
quietly home as Miss Smith in a French vessel, visiting in Paris her old
friends the Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul, and finding that by having
embarked at night, at a moment when Scutari was not looking for her
departure, her little _ruse_ had been very successful. An eager people
had not recognized under the passing incognito of Miss Smith, travelling
with her aunt, Mrs. Smith, the great Florence Nightingale whose return
they had wished to celebrate. The village gossips at Lea Hurst have it
that “the closely veiled lady in black, who slipped into her father’s
house by the back door, was first recognized by the family butler,” and
it seems a pity to spoil such a picturesque tradition by inquiring into
it too closely.
[Illustration: The Nightingale Nursing Carriage.]
There was great joy among the villagers that “Miss Florence had come
home from the wars,” but it was understood that she wished to be quiet,
and that bonfires and such-like rejoicings were out of the question.
Along the roads near Lea Hurst came troops of people from Derby and
Nottingham, and even from Manchester, hoping to catch a glimpse of her;
and there is in one of the biographies a vivid account, given by the old
lady who kept the lodge gates, of how the park round Lea Hurst was beset
by these lingering crowds, how men came without arms or without legs,
hoping to see the Queen of Nurses. “But,” added the old lady, “the squire
wasn’t a-going to let Miss Florence be made a staring-stock of.” And,
indeed, “Miss Florence” must have been in great need of repose, though
never to the end of her life would it seem that she was allowed to have
much of it; for the very fruitfulness of her work made work multiply upon
her hands, and her friend Mrs. Sidney Herbert knew her well when she said
that to Florence Nightingale the dearest guerdon of work already done was
the gift of more work still to do.
Perhaps we shall never any of us fully know what it must have been to one
so abounding in spiritual energy and world-wide compassion to have to
learn slowly and painfully, through the years that followed, what must
henceforth be the physical limitations of her life. When we think of
the long, careful training that had been given to her fine gifts of eye
and hand in the art that she loved—for she rightly regarded nursing as
an art—an art in which every movement must be a skilled and disciplined
movement—we may divine something of what it cost to bear, without one
murmur of complaint, what she might so easily have been tempted to regard
as a lifelong waste of faculty. Instead of allowing herself to dwell on
any such idea, gradually, as the knowledge dawned on her of what she must
forego, she gave herself, with tenfold power in other directions, to work
which _could_ be achieved from an invalid’s couch, and thus helped and
guided others in that art all over the world.
Among the greetings which pleased her most on her first return to England
was an address from the workmen of Newcastle-on-Tyne, to whom she
replied in the following letter:—
_August 23, 1856._
“MY DEAR FRIENDS,—I wish it were in my power to tell you what
was in my heart when I received your letter.
“Your welcome home, your sympathy with what has been passing
while I have been absent, have touched me more than I can tell
in words. My dear friends, the things that are the deepest
in our hearts are perhaps what it is most difficult for us
to express. ‘She hath done what she could.’ These words I
inscribed on the tomb of one of my best helpers when I left
Scutari. It has been my endeavour, in the sight of God, to do
as she has done.
“I will not speak of reward when permitted to do our country’s
work—it is what we live for—but I may say to receive sympathy
from affectionate hearts like yours is the greatest support,
the greatest gratification, that it is possible for me to
receive from man.
“I thank you all, the eighteen hundred, with grateful, tender
affection. And I should have written before to do so, were not
the business, which my return home has not ended, been almost
more than I can manage.—Pray believe me, my dear friends, yours
faithfully and gratefully,
“FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.”
Among the tokens of regard which the late Duke of Devonshire brought to
his old friend on her return, when he drove over from Chatsworth to Lea
Hurst to see her after her long, eventful absence, was a little silver
owl, a sort of souvenir, I suppose, of her beloved little “Athena,”
whose death she had felt so keenly when leaving for the Crimea. Queen
Victoria and the young princesses were eager to welcome Miss Nightingale
to Balmoral; and in looking back on her little visit there, which seems
to have been a happiness on both sides, it is interesting to see how her
influence told upon the Crown Princess and Princess Alice in their later
organization of hospital work, and to be reminded by Mrs. Tooley, whose
words we here venture to quote, that the “tiny Princess Helena was to
become in after years an accomplished nurse, and an active leader in the
nursing movement of this country; and, alas, to yield her soldier son on
the fatal field of South Africa.”
Meanwhile, before and after this visit, Miss Nightingale was quietly
receiving her own friends and neighbours at Lea Hurst, and entertaining
little parties of villagers from among the rustics she had so long known
and loved. Rich and poor alike were all so eager to do her honour that
it is impossible to speak separately of all the many forms which their
expressions of gratitude took. They included a gift from the workmen of
Sheffield as well as from her own more immediate neighbours, and found
their climax in the fund pressed upon her by a grateful nation, and for
convenience called the Nightingale Fund, which was still awaiting its
final disposal.
Meanwhile, imagine the importance of the ex-drummer-boy Thomas, her
devoted servant and would-be defender at Balaclava, promoted now to
be “Miss Nightingale’s own man” in her home at Lea Hurst—an even more
exciting presence to the villagers than the Russian hound which was
known through the country-side as “Miss Florence’s Crimean dog.”
There were still living, we are told, when Mrs. Tooley wrote her
delightful record, a few old people round about Lea Hurst who remembered
those great days of “Miss Florence’s return,” and the cannon balls and
bullets they had seen as trophies, the dried flowers gathered at Scutari,
and Thomas’s thrilling stories, for if he had not himself been present
in the famous charge at Balaclava, he did at least know all about it at
first-hand.
So little did any one dream that Miss Nightingale’s health had been
permanently shattered that when the Indian Mutiny broke out in 1857, she
offered to go out to her friend Lady Canning, and organize a nursing
staff for the troops. And while, with her customary business-like
clearness, she proceeded to draw up a detailed account of all the
private gifts entrusted to her for the Crimea, and took the opportunity
of putting on record her tribute to Lord Raglan, the final arrangements
with regard to the Nightingale Fund were still for a time held in
suspense, in the hope that she would so far recover strength as to be
able to take into her own hands the government of that institution for
the training of hospital nurses, to which it was to be devoted. When her
friend Mr. Herbert talked gaily in public of chaining her to the oar
for the rest of her life, that she might “raise the system of nursing
to a pitch of efficiency never before known,” he did not foresee that
the invisible chain, which was to bruise her eager spirit, was to be of
a kind so much harder to bear. But when, in 1860, her health showed no
signs of recovery, she definitely handed over to others the management
of the fund, only reserving to herself the right to advise. Her friend
Mr. Herbert was, up to the time of his death, the guiding spirit of the
council, and it gave Miss Nightingale pleasure that St. Thomas’s Hospital
should from the outset be associated with the scheme, because that
hospital had originated in one of the oldest foundations in the country
for the relief of the sick poor, and in choosing it for the training of
lay sisters as nurses, its earliest tradition was being continued. The
work of the fund began at St. Thomas’s in 1860, in the old building near
London Bridge, before it moved into its present palace at Westminster,
of which the Nightingale Training Home is a part. In those first early
days an upper floor was arranged for the nurses in a new part of the
old hospital, with a bedroom for each probationer, two rooms for the
Sister-in-charge, and a sitting-room in which all shared. As the result
of the advertisement for candidates in 1860, fifteen probationers were
admitted in June, the first superintendent being Mrs. Wardroper. The
probationers were, of course, under the authority of the matron, and
subject to the rules of the hospital. They were to give help in the wards
and receive teaching from the Sisters and medical staff, and if at the
end of the year they passed their examination, they were to be registered
as certified nurses.
[Illustration: Miss Nightingale visiting the Herbert Hospital, Woolwich.
(_Bas-relief on the pedestal—Herbert Memorial._)]
Thanks to Miss Nightingale and other pioneers, the fifty years that have
passed since then have made Mrs. Grundy a little less Grundyish, but in
those days she considered the whole business a terrible venture, and was
too much occupied with the idea of possible love affairs between the
doctors and nurses to realize what good work was being done. The first
year was a very anxious one for Miss Nightingale, but all the world
knows now how her experiment has justified itself and how her prayers
have been answered; for it was in prayer that she found her “quietness
and confidence” through those first months of tension when the enemy was
watching and four probationers had to be dismissed, though their ranks
were speedily filled up by others.
At the end of the year, from among those who were placed on the
register, six received appointments at St. Thomas’s and two took work
in infirmaries. There was special need of good nurses in workhouse
infirmaries, and there was also throughout the whole country a crying
need for nurses carefully trained in midwifery: lack of knowledge, for
instance, had greatly increased the danger of puerperal fever, a scourge
against which Miss Nightingale was one of the first to contend; and it
had been wisely decided that while two-thirds of the fund should go to
the work at St. Thomas’s, one-third should be used for special training
of nurses in these branches at King’s College.
“How has the tone and state of hospital nurses been raised?”
Miss Nightingale asks in her little book on “Trained Nursing
for the Sick Poor,” published in 1876.
“By, more than anything else, making the hospital such a home
as good young women—educated young women—can live and nurse
in; and, secondly, by raising hospital nursing into such a
profession as these can earn an honourable livelihood in.”
In her “Notes on Hospitals,” published in 1859, she pointed out what she
considered the four radical defects in hospital construction—namely:—
1. The agglomeration of a large number of sick under the same
roof.
2. Deficiency of space.
3. Deficiency of ventilation.
4. Deficiency of light.
How magnificently builders have since learned to remedy such defects may
be seen in the Nightingale Wing of St. Thomas’s Hospital.
The block system on which St. Thomas’s Hospital is built is what Miss
Nightingale has always recommended, each block being divided from the
next by a space of 125 feet, across which runs a double corridor by means
of which they communicate with one another. Each has three tiers of wards
above the ground floor.
The six blocks in the centre are those used for patients, that at the
south for the lecture-rooms and a school of medicine, the one at the
north, adjoining Westminster Bridge, for the official staff. From Lambeth
Palace to Westminster Bridge, with a frontage of 1,700 feet, the hospital
extends; and there would be room in the operating theatre for 600
students. In the special wing in one of the northern blocks, reserved for
the Nightingale Home and Training School for Nurses, everything has been
ordered in accordance with Miss Nightingale’s wishes.
To-day the whole _status_ of nursing in Britain and British dominions
is recognized as that of an honoured and certified profession, and
year by year, at St. Thomas’s alone, thirty probationers are trained,
of whom fifteen pay £1, 1_s._ a week for the privilege, whereas to the
other fifteen it is given gratuitously. At St. Thomas’s were trained
nurses who were among the earliest to be decorated with the Red Cross,
that international badge of good army nursing throughout the world
which, indirectly as well as directly, owed much to Miss Nightingale.
How warmly, even arduously, Miss Nightingale shared in the trials and
joys and adventures of her nurses, comes out very clearly in some of
her letters to one of them, whom, as a personal friend and one of the
first nine to receive the Red Cross, she playfully named “her Cape of
Good Hope.” Those tender and intimate letters, which I will not name
emotional, because she who wrote them had justified emotion by ever
translating it into useful work, made me feel to an almost startling
degree her warm, eager, dominating personality with its extraordinary
mingling of utmost modesty and pleading authority. To me that personality
seems to win the heart of the coldest and dullest by its ardent
enthusiasm and humility, and those unpublished letters, which I was
privileged to read, brought home to me how Miss Nightingale—then an
invalid of sixty-two—literally _lived_ in the life of those pioneer
nurses whom she had inspired and sent forth.
It is easy to see in them how much she feared for her nurses any innocent
little trip of the tongue, with regard to the rest of the staff, which
might set rolling the dangerous ball of hospital gossip. She puts the
duty of obedience and forbearance on the highest grounds, and she draws
a useful distinction between the sham dignity which we all know in the
hatefulness of “the superior person,” and the true dignity which tries to
uplift those less fortunate, rather than self-indulgently to lean on them
or make to them foolish confidences.
And while she is all aglow with sympathy for every detail of a nurse’s
work, she entreats her friend to “let no want of concord or discretion
appear to mar that blessed work. And let no one,” she adds, “be able
justly to say what was said to me last month, ‘It is only Roman Catholic
vows that can keep Sisters together.’”
What she wrote when asking for recruits for St. Thomas’s at the outset
still remains the basis of the ideal held there. “We require,” she wrote,
“that a woman be sober, honest, truthful, without which there is no
foundation on which to build.
“We train her in habits of punctuality, quietness, trustworthiness,
personal neatness. We teach her how to manage the concerns of a large
ward or establishment. We train her in dressing wounds and other
injuries, and in performing all those minor operations which nurses are
called upon day and night to undertake.
“We teach her how to manage helpless patients in regard to moving,
changing, feeding, temperature, and the prevention of bedsores.
“She has to make and apply bandages, line splints, and the like. She must
know how to make beds with as little disturbance as possible to their
inmates. She is instructed how to wait at operations, and as to the kind
of aid the surgeon requires at her hands. She is taught cooking for the
sick; the principle on which sick wards ought to be cleansed, aired, and
warmed; the management of convalescents; and how to observe sick and
maimed patients, so as to give an intelligent and truthful account to the
physician or surgeon in regard to the progress of cases in the intervals
between visits—a much more difficult thing than is generally supposed.
“We do not seek to make ‘medical women,’ but simply nurses acquainted
with the principle which they are required constantly to apply at the
bedside.
“For the future superintendent is added a course of instruction in
the administration of a hospital, including, of course, the linen
arrangements, and what else is necessary for a matron to be conversant
with.
“There are those who think that all this is intuitive in women, that they
are born so, or, at least, that it comes to them without training. To
such we say, by all means send us as many such geniuses as you can, for
we are sorely in want of them.”