Florence Nightingale: A Biography

by Annie Matheson

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 whole status of nursing in Britain and British dominions is recognized as that of an honoured 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me that personality seems to win the heart of the coldest and dullest by its ardent enthusiasm and humility, and those unpublished letters, which I was privileged to read, brought home to me how Miss Nightingale—then an invalid of sixty-two—literally lived in the life of those pioneer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, and warmed; 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.