13 August: Boreham on Florence Nightingale

Sympathy and Strength
Many will give a thought today—the anniversary of her death—to Florence Nightingale. But it is curious to notice the evolution that has taken place in the estimate of her virtues. In the old days she was portrayed as the Lady of the Tender Heart; the modern interpretation presents her as the Woman of the Iron Hand. There is truth in both conceptions. Only a person of the gentlest impulses could have been moved to such activities as she undertook. Only a woman of inflexible resolution could have carried those activities to ultimate success. Her name recalls some of the most moving and tragic episodes in British history. Within the span of her own lifetime Miss Nightingale's personality became invested with an extraordinary charm. Long before she died she was enshrined in the hearts of the people with all the fondness that attaches to a beautiful tradition or a golden romance. The story of The Lady With the Lamp was rehearsed by British firesides in an atmosphere of reverential awe. Her name was uttered in accents usually reserved for the classic legends of chivalry and mythology.

A recent historian declares that, from the melancholy narrative of the Crimean War, one figure emerges enveloped in a nimbus of glory. "It is," he says, "the slender modest figure of an English lady, with downcast eyes and pensive brow, wearing the quiet garb of a nurse. Her woman's brain and woman's hand contributed an element that was singularly gracious to the gloomy memory of those sad days." Little wonder, therefore, that within a few years, statues to Miss Nightingale sprang up all over the Empire.

Good Woman Comes to Rescue of Desperate Men
Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention. Certainly a great and crying need often brings to light latent forces whose existence had never been suspected. At the moment at which Miss Nightingale emerged upon our history, the need was, in all conscience, terrible enough. The circumstances were as appalling as anything that the most vivid imagination can conceive. In his history of the 19th Century, Mr Mackenzie points out that, during the campaign in the Crimea, 2,600 British soldiers were killed in battle whilst over 18,000 died in the hospitals. The hospital, he adds, was a place immeasurably more dangerous than the battlefield. And no wonder! For, in his "History of Our Own Times," Mr. Justin McCarthy says that the world has never seen anything more revolting than the condition of the Crimean hospitals before Miss Nightingale arrived. "They were," he says, "in an absolutely chaotic condition. Medical stores, for which men were dying like flies at Scutari, were left to decay at Varna or were found lying useless in the holds of vessels in Balaclava Bay. Able and zealous as were the medical men, they were utterly helpless. Their eyes and souls were tortured by the sight of sufferings which, for want of the commonest appliances, they were unable to relieve." Confusion reigned on every hand.

In her Life of Florence Nightingale, Mrs. Tooley tells us that, when her heroine reached the scene of the conflict, there were in the hospitals no vessels for water, no utensils of any kind, no soap, no towels, no hospital clothes. The men were lying in their uniforms, matted with blood and covered with filth so disgusting as to be absolutely indescribable. In addition to the miseries entailed by overcrowding, the men lying on the floors of the corridors were tormented by vermin and their limbs were gnawed by rats as they lay helpless in their pain. Whilst the wards were filled with pestilence, the air was so polluted by cholera and fever that it was courting death to enter. Into this reeking quagmire of abominations Miss Nightingale and her heroic nurses fearlessly plunged, and they swiftly effected a transformation which earned for them the gratitude of millions and the benediction of mankind.

The Uncrowned Queen of a New Dynasty
From her earliest girlhood, Miss Nightingale displayed a passion for healing. Sick dogs, cats, rabbits and birds were her first patients. Passing from stage to stage as her mind developed, she mastered first the principles of sanitation and then the scientific aspects of nursing. Mr. Sidney Herbert, the Secretary of State for War, was impressed by her genius and offered to invest her with plenary authority over all the nurses at the front and to supply her with all the funds she needed. She accepted. The situation, in its stark grimness, was one that called for a vigorous mind, an iron will, and a steady nerve. The nettle had to be grasped firmly; and Miss Nightingale, while bringing to her titanic task all a woman's tenderness, displayed also the inflexibility and determination of a born commander. The best evidence of her aptitude, and the most complete vindication of her policy, lie in the significant circumstance that, when she arrived, she found the death rate in the great hospital at Scutari no less than 52%, and that, as a result of her wisdom, skill and labour, it fell to 2% almost immediately.

Florence Nightingale was an epoch-maker. She introduced a new era. As is invariably the case with such pioneers, her conduct needed courage. Polite society threw up its hands in horror. But time, which heals all hurts, silences also all such inanities. Looking back today, we recognise that the life and work of Florence Nightingale made the uniform of the nurse a badge of stainless honour. She founded, as Kinglake says, a gracious dynasty that still reigns supreme wherever sufferers lie. Macdonald, "The Times" correspondent, said that the wounded soldiers strained their ears to catch her soft footfall in the wards and kissed her shadow as she passed. In a similar spirit, posterity reveres her memory. She never married—a fact that conceals a secret tragedy of her own—yet her daughters have, ever since she passed, graced every battlefield on the planet, and, like angels moving in the gloom, have imparted a redeeming and softening atmosphere to those wild and sanguinary scenes.

F W Boreham

Image: Florence Nightingale