“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 sought out 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 own Nursing Notes of later years would certainly suggest that what she learned was chiefly what not to 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.