Florence Nightingale: A Biography

by Annie Matheson

“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 an active 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 hound which 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, in the 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 of the 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.)

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 occupied with 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.