“We do not seek to make ‘medical women,’ but simply nurses acquainted with the principle which they are required constantly to apply at the bedside.
“For the future superintendent is added a course of instruction in the administration of a hospital, including, of course, the linen arrangements, and what else is necessary for a matron to be conversant with.
“There are those who think that all this is intuitive in women, that they are born so, or, at least, that it comes to them without training. To such we say, by all means send us as many such geniuses as you can, for we are sorely in want of them.”
CHAPTER XX.
William Rathbone—Agnes Jones—Infirmaries—Nursing in the homes of the poor—Municipal work—Homely power of Miss Nightingale’s writings—Lord Herbert’s death.
A word must here be said of Mr. William Rathbone’s work in Liverpool. After the death of his first wife, realizing the comfort and help that had been given during her last illness by a trained nurse, he determined to do what he could to bring aid of the same kind into the homes of the poor, where the need was often so much more terrible. This brought him into touch with Miss Nightingale, who advised him to start a school of nursing in connection with the Liverpool Hospital. These two friends—for they soon became trusted and valued friends, each to each—were both people of prompt and efficient action, and one step led to another, until Liverpool had not only an important school of nurses for the sick poor, but also led the way throughout the country in the reform of the hitherto scandalous nursing in workhouse infirmaries. Mr. Rathbone set his mind on securing the services of Miss Agnes Elizabeth Jones to help him in his work, a woman of character as saintly as his own, and the difference in their religious outlook only made more beautiful their mutual relations in this great work.
Miss Agnes Jones, who has already been mentioned more than once in these pages, left an undying record on England’s roll of honour. It was of her that in 1868 Miss Nightingale wrote[17]:—
“A woman attractive and rich, and young and witty; yet a veiled and silent woman, distinguished by no other genius but the divine genius—working hard to train herself in order to train others to walk in the footsteps of Him who went about doing good.... She died, as she had lived, at her post in one of the largest workhouse infirmaries in this kingdom—the first in which trained nursing has been introduced.... When her whole life and image rise before me, so far from thinking the story of Una and her lion a myth, I say here is Una in real flesh and blood—Una and her paupers far more untamable than lions. In less than three years she had reduced one of the most disorderly hospital populations in the world to something like Christian discipline, and had converted a vestry to the conviction of the economy as well as humanity of nursing pauper sick by trained nurses.”
And it was in introducing a book about the Liverpool Home and School for Nurses that she wrote:—