CHAPTER VII.

CHAPTER VII.Years of preparation.

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 soughtout 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 ownNursing Notesof later years would certainly suggest that what she learned was chiefly whatnotto 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 inNursing 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 shehad 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 DeaconessHome, 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 atKaiserswerth 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 bespirituallyfulfilled.

It was after her return to England fromGermany 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 continualuse 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.

Florence Nightingale in 1854.(From a drawing by H. M. B. C.)

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 knownas 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 additionherselfand 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 calmand 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.”

“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 seekingto 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 isnotpossible; 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.

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