Florence Nightingale: A Biography

by Annie Matheson

The Crimean muddle—Explanations and excuses.

In our last chapter we ended with a word about those sanitary reforms which were yet to come. How appalling was the ignorance and confusion in 1854, when the war in the Crimea began, has now become matter of common knowledge everywhere.

I note later, as a result of my talk with General Evatt, some of the reasons and excuses for the dire neglect and muddle that reigned. John Bull was, as usual, so arrogantly sure of himself that he had—also as usual—taken no sort of care to keep himself fit in time of peace, and there was no central organizing authority for the equipment of the army—every one was responsible, and therefore no one. The provisions bought by contract were many of them rotten and mouldy, so cleverly had the purchasers been deceived and defrauded. The clothing provided for the men before Sebastopol, where, in at least one instance, man was literally frozen to man, were such as would have been better suited to India or South Africa. Many of the boots sent out were fitter for women and children playing on green lawns than for the men who must tramp over rough and icy roads. The very horses were left to starve for want of proper hay. Proper medical provision there was none. There were doctors, some of them nobly unselfish, but few of them trained for that particular work. An army surgeon gets little practice in time of peace, and one lady, a Red Cross nurse, told me that even in our South African campaign the doctor with whom she did her first bit of bandaging out there told her he had not bandaged an arm for fifteen years! But indeed many of the doctors in the Crimea were not only badly prepared, they were also so tied up with red-tape details that, though they gave their lives freely, they quickly fell in with the helpless chaos of a hospital without a head.

England shuddered to the heart when at last she woke up under the lash of the following letter from William Howard Russell, the Times war correspondent:—

“The commonest accessories of a hospital are wanting, there is not the least attention paid to decency or cleanliness, the stench is appalling ... and, for all I can observe, the men die without the least effort to save them. There they lie just as they were let gently down on the ground by the poor fellows, the comrades, who brought them on their backs from the camp with the greatest tenderness, but who are not allowed to remain with them.”

“Are there,” he wrote at a later date, “no devoted women among us, able and willing to go forth and minister to the sick and suffering soldiers of the East in the hospitals at Scutari? Are none of the daughters of England, at this extreme hour of need, ready for such a work of mercy?... France has sent forth her Sisters of Mercy unsparingly, and they are even now by the bedsides of the wounded and the dying, giving what woman’s hand alone can give of comfort and relief.... Must we fall so far below the French in self-sacrifice and devotedness, in a work which Christ so signally blesses as done unto Himself? ‘I was sick and ye visited me.’”

What the art of nursing had fallen to in England may be guessed from the fact lately mentioned to me by a great friend of Miss Nightingale’s, that when Florence Nightingale told her family she would like to devote her life to nursing, they said with a smile, “Are you sure you would not like to be a kitchen-maid?”

Yet the Nightingales were, on other questions, such as that of the education of girls, far in advance of their time.

Possibly nothing short of those letters to the Times, touching, as they did, the very quick of the national pride, could have broken down the “Chinese wall” of that particular prejudice.

Something may be said at this point as to what had been at the root of the dreadful condition of things in the hospitals before Miss Nightingale’s arrival. I have had some instructive talk with Surgeon-General Evatt, who knows the medical administration of our army through and through, and whose friendship with Miss Nightingale arose in a very interesting way, but will be mentioned later on in its due place.