_India—Correspondence with Sir Bartle Frere—Interest in village
girls—The Lamp._
We come now to Miss Nightingale’s most monumental achievement of all,
the reform of sanitary conditions in India—a reform ever widening and
developing, branching forth and striking its roots deeper. Her interest
in that vast population, that world-old treasury of subtle religious
thought and ever-present mystical faith, may perhaps have been in part an
inheritance from the Anglo-Indian Governor who was counted in her near
ancestry. But there can be little doubt that her ardent and practical
desire to improve the conditions of camp life in India began in her
intimate care for the soldiers, and her close knowledge of many things
unknown to the ordinary English subject. The world-wide freemasonry of
the rank and file in our army enabled her to hear while at Scutari much
of the life of the army in the vast and distant dominions of Burma and
Bengal, and she had that gift for seeing through things to their farthest
roots which enabled her to perceive clearly that no mere mending of camp
conditions could stay the continual ravages of disease among our men.
The evil was deeper and wider, and only as conditions were improved in
sanitary matters could the mortality of the army be lessened. She saw,
and saw clearly, that the reason children died like flies in India, so
that those who loved them best chose the agony of years of parting rather
than take the risks, lay not so much in the climate as in the human
poisons and putrefactions so carelessly treated and so quickly raised to
murder-power by the extreme heat.
Much of this comes out clearly in her letter to Sir Bartle Frere, with
whom her first ground of friendship had arisen out of their common
interest in sanitary matters.
What manner of man Sir Bartle was may be divined from a letter to him
written by Colonel W. F. Marriott, one of the secretaries of the Bombay
Government, at the time of his leaving Bombay:—
“The scene of your departure stirred me much. That bright
evening, the crowd on the pier and shore as the boat put
off, the music from the _Octavia_, as the band played ‘Auld
Lang Syne’ as we passed, were all typical and impressive by
association of ideas. But it was not a shallow sympathy with
which I took in all the circumstances. I could divine some of
your thoughts. If I felt like Sir Bedivere, left behind ‘among
new men, strange faces, other minds,’ you must have felt in
some degree like King Arthur in the barge, ‘I have lived my
life, and that which I have done may He Himself make pure.’
I do not doubt that you felt that all this ‘mouth honour’ is
only worth so far as it is the seal of one’s own approving
conscience, and though you could accept it freely as deserved
from their lips, yet at that hour you judged your own work
hardly. You measured the palpable results with your conceptions
and hopes, and were inclined to say, ‘I am no better than my
fathers.’ But I, judging now calmly and critically, feel—I may
say, see—that though the things that seem to have failed be
amongst those for which you have taken most pains, yet they
are small things compared with the work which has not failed.
You have made an impression of earnest human sympathy with the
people of this country, which will deepen and expand, so that
it will be felt as a perpetual witness against any narrower
and less noble conception of our relation to them, permanently
raising the moral standard of highest policy towards them;
and your name will become a traditional embodiment of a good
governor.”[24]
Frere had seen that the filthy condition of many of the roads, after
the passing of animals and the failure to cleanse from manure, was of
itself a source of poison, though the relation between garbage and
disease-bearing flies was then less commonly understood, and he was never
tired of urging the making of decent roads; but this, he knew, was only
a very small part of the improvements needed.
His correspondence with Miss Nightingale began in 1867, and in that
and the five following years they exchanged about one hundred letters,
chiefly on sanitary questions.
It was part of her genius always to see and seize her opportunity, and
she rightly thought that, as she says in one of her letters, “We might
never have such a favourable conjunction of the larger planets again:
“You, who are willing and most able to organize the machinery here; Sir
John Lawrence, who is able and willing, provided only he knew what to do;
and a Secretary of State who is willing and in earnest. And I believe
nothing would bring them to their senses in India more than an annual
report of what they have done, with your comments upon it, laid before
Parliament.”
In order to set in motion the machinery of a sanitary department for all
India, a despatch had to be written, pointing out clearly and concisely
what was to be done.
Frere consulted Miss Nightingale at every point about this despatch,
but spoke of the necessity for some sort of peg to hang it on—“not,” he
said, “that the Secretary of State is at all lukewarm, nor, I think, that
he has any doubt as to what should be said, or how—that, I think, your
memoranda have fixed; the only difficulty is as to the when....
“No governor-general, I believe, since the time of Clive has had such
powers and such opportunities, but he fancies the want of progress is
owing to some opposing power which does not exist anywhere but in his own
imagination.
“He cannot see that perpetual inspection by the admiral of the drill and
kit of every sailor is not the way to make the fleet efficient, and he
gets disheartened and depressed because he finds that months and years of
this squirrel-like activity lead to no real progress.”
The despatch with its accompanying documents went to Miss Nightingale for
her remarks before it was sent out. Her commentary was as follows:—
“I find nothing to add or to take away in the memorandum
(sanitary). It appears to me quite perfect in itself—that is,
it is quite as much as the enemy will bear, meaning by the
enemy—not at all the Government of India in India, still less
the Government of India at home, but—that careless and ignorant
person called the Devil, who is always walking about taking
knowledge out of people’s heads, who said that he was coming to
give us the knowledge of good and evil, and who has done just
the contrary.
“It is a noble paper, an admirable paper—and what a present to
make to a government! You have included in it all the great
principles—sanitary and administrative—which the country
requires. And now you must work, work these points until they
are embodied in local works in India. This will not be in our
time, for it takes more than a few years to fill a continent
with civilization. But I never despair that in God’s good time
every man of us will reap the common benefit of obeying all the
laws which He has given us for our well-being.
“I shall give myself the pleasure of writing to you again about
these papers. But I write this note merely to say that I don’t
think this memorandum requires any addition.
“God bless you for it! I think it is a great work.”[25]
It _was_ a great work, and it might have been delayed for scores of
years, with a yearly unnecessary waste of thousands of lives, if she had
not initiated it.
[Illustration: Florence Nightingale in her Last Days.
(_From a drawing from memory. Copyright A. Rischgitz._)]
Her words to Sir Bartle Frere at the outset had been: “It does seem that
there is no element in the scheme of government (of India) by which the
public health can be taken care of. And the thing is now to create such
an element.”
As early as 1863, in her “Observations on the Sanitary State of the Army
in India,” she had written:—
“Native ‘caste’ prejudices appear to have been made the excuse
for European laziness, as far as regards our sanitary and
hospital neglects of the natives. Recent railroad experience is
a striking proof that ‘caste,’ in their minds, is no bar to
intercommunication in arrangements tending to their benefit.”
Sir C. Trevelyan justly says that “a good sanitary state of the military
force cannot be secured without making similar arrangements for the
populations settled in and around the military cantonments; that sanitary
reform must be generally introduced into India for the civil as well as
the military portion of the community.”
And now that the opportunity arrived, all was done with wise and swift
diplomacy. The way was smoothed by a call from Frere on his old friend
Sir Richard Temple, at that time Finance Minister at Calcutta, asking him
to help.
Those who know India best, and know Miss Nightingale best, are those who
are most aware of the mighty tree of ever-widening health improvement
that grew from this little seed, and of the care with which Miss
Nightingale helped to guard and foster it.
“She was a great Indian,” her friend General Evatt repeated to me more
than once, “and what a head she had! She was the only human being I
have ever met, for instance, man or woman, who had thoroughly mastered
the intricate details of the Bengal land-purchase system. She loved
India, and she knew it through and through. It was no wonder that every
distinguished Indian who came to England went to see Miss Nightingale.”
She bore her ninety years very lightly, and made a vision serene and
noble, as will be seen from our picture, though that does not give the
lovely youthful colouring in contrast with the silvery hair, and we read
of the great expressiveness of her hands, which, a little more, perhaps,
than is usual with Englishwomen, she used in conversation.
It was a very secluded life that she lived at No. 10 South Street; but
she was by no means without devotees, and the bouquet that the German
Emperor sent her was but one of many offerings from many high-hearted
warriors at her shrine.
And when she visited her old haunts at Lea Hurst and Embley she delighted
in sending invitations to the girls growing up in those village families
that she had long counted among her friends, so that to her tea-table
were lovingly welcomed guests very lowly, as well as those better known
to the world.
Her intense and sympathetic interest in all the preparations for nursing
in the South African campaign has already been touched upon, as well as
her joy that some of her own nurses from among the first probationers at
St. Thomas’s were accepted in that enterprise with praise and gratitude.
It would be a serious omission not to refer my readers to a very moving
letter which she wrote to Cavaliere Sebastiano Fenzi, during the Italian
War of Independence in 1866, of which a part is given in Mrs. Tooley’s
book, and from which I am permitted to quote the following:—
“I have given dry advice as dryly as I could. But you must
permit me to say that if there is anything I could do for you
at any time, and you would command me, I should esteem it
the greatest honour and pleasure. I am a hopeless invalid,
entirely a prisoner to my room, and overwhelmed with business.
Otherwise how gladly would I answer to your call and come and
do my little best for you in the dear city where I was born. If
the giving my miserable life could hasten your success but by
half an hour, how gladly would I give it!”
How far she was ahead of her time becomes every day more obvious; for
every day the results of her teaching are gradually making themselves
felt. For example, it can no longer, without qualification, be said,
as she so truly said in her own day, that while “the coxcombries of
education are taught to every schoolgirl” there is gross ignorance, not
only among schoolgirls, but also even among mothers and nurses, with
regard to “those laws which God has assigned to the relations of our
bodies with the world in which He has put them. In other words, the laws
which make these bodies, into which He has put our minds, healthy or
unhealthy organs of those minds, are all but unlearnt. Not but that these
laws—the laws of life—are in a certain measure understood, but not even
mothers think it worth their while to study them—to study how to give
their children healthy existences. They call it medical or physiological
knowledge, fit only for doctors.”
In her old age, loved and honoured far and wide, she toiled on with all
the warm enthusiasm of a girl, and the ripe wisdom of fourscore years and
ten spent in the service of her one Master, for she was not of those who
ever tried to serve two. And when she died at No. 10 South Street, on
August 10, 1910—so peacefully that the tranquil glow of sunset descended
upon her day of harvest—the following beautiful incident was recorded in
_Nursing Notes_, to whose editor I am specially indebted for bringing to
my notice the verses in which the story is told[26]:—
“At Chelsea, under the lime tree’s stir,
I read the news to a pensioner
That a noble lord and a judge were dead—
‘They were younger men than me,’ he said.
“I read again of another death;
The old man turned, and caught his breath—
‘She’s gone?’ he said; ‘she too? In camp
We called her the Lady of the Lamp.’
“He would not listen to what I read,
But wanted it certain—‘The Lady’s dead?’
I showed it him to remove his doubt,
And added, unthinking, ‘The Lamp is out.’
“He rose—and I had to help him stand—
Then, as he saluted with trembling hand,
I was abashed to hear him say,
‘The Lamp she lit is alight to-day.’”
F. S.