CHAPTER XIX.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.
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 thanPunch’sgentle 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 thenickname 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 asentence 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 thescene 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.”
“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 thescene 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 hintedthat 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 littlerusehad 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.
The Nightingale Nursing Carriage.
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 whichcouldbe 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 havewritten 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.”
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 havewritten 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 anactive 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 houndwhich 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, inthe 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 ofthe 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.
Miss Nightingale visiting the Herbert Hospital, Woolwich.(Bas-relief on the pedestal—Herbert Memorial.)
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 occupiedwith 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 thework 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.”
“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.
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 wholestatusof nursing in Britain and British dominions is recognized as that of anhonoured and certified profession, and year by year, at St. Thomas’s alone, thirty probationers are trained, of whom fifteen pay £1, 1s.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 dullestby 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—literallylivedin 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, andwarmed; 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.”