“Nursing, especially that most important of all its branches—nursing of the sick poor at home—is no amateur work. To do it as it ought to be done requires knowledge, practice, self-abnegation, and, as is so well said here, direct obedience to and activity under the highest of all masters and from the highest of all motives. It is an essential part of the daily service of the Christian Church. It has never been otherwise. It has proved itself superior to all religious divisions, and is destined, by God’s blessing, to supply an opening the great value of which, in our densely populated towns, has been unaccountably overlooked until within these few years.”
As early as 1858 Miss Nightingale published “Notes on Matters affecting the Health, Efficiency, and Hospital Administration of the British Army,” and the commission on this subject appointed in 1857 set a high value on her evidence.
Something of the development that followed along both these lines—that of army reform and of nursing among the submerged—may be gleaned from the following clear statement of fact which appeared during the South African War, on May 21, 1900, in a great London daily:—
“In the forty and more years that have elapsed since her return, Miss Nightingale has seen the whole system of army nursing and hospitals transformed. Netley, which has been visited by the Queen again this week, was designed by her, and for the next largest, namely, the Herbert Hospital, Woolwich, she assisted and advised Sir Douglas Galton in his plans.
“There is not a naval or military hospital on any of the foreign stations or depôts on which she has not been consulted, and matters concerning the health and well-being of both services have been constantly brought before her. District nursing owes much to her, and in this connection may be cited a few lines from a letter which she wrote when Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll, was initiating a movement to establish a home for the Queen’s Jubilee Nurses in Chiswick and Hammersmith. ‘I look upon district nursing,’ she wrote, ‘as one of the most hopeful of the agencies for raising the poor, physically as well as morally, its province being not only nursing the patient, but nursing the room, showing the family and neighbours how to second the nurse, and eminently how to nurse health as well as disease.’”
“Everywhere,” we read in Mr. Stephen Paget’s contribution to the “Dictionary of National Biography,” “her expert reputation was paramount,” and “during the American Civil War of 1862-4, and the Franco-German War of 1870-1, her advice was eagerly sought by the governments concerned.” The “Dictionary of National Biography” also assures us that “in regard to civil hospitals, home nursing, care of poor women in childbirth, and sanitation, Miss Nightingale’s authority stood equally high.”
In what she wrote there was a homely directness, a complete absence of anything like pose or affectation, which more than doubled her power, and was the more charming in a woman of such brilliant acquirements and—to quote once more Dean Stanley’s words—such “commanding genius”; but, then, genius is of its nature opposed to all that is sentimental or artificial.
I believe it is in her “Notes on Nursing for the Labouring Classes” that she writes to those who are “minding baby”: “One-half of all the nurses in service are girls of from five to twenty years old. You see you are very important little people. Then there are all the girls who are nursing mother’s baby at home; and in all these cases it seems pretty nearly to come to this, that baby’s health for its whole life depends upon you, girls, more than upon anything else.” Simple rules, such as a girl of six could understand, are given for the feeding, washing, dressing, nursing, and even amusement of that important person, “baby.”
And it is in her best known book of all that she says: “The healthiest, happiest, liveliest, most beautiful baby I ever saw was the only child of a busy laundress. She washed all day in a room with the door open upon a larger room, where she put the child. It sat or crawled upon the floor all day with no other playfellow than a kitten, which it used to hug. Its mother kept it beautifully clean, and fed it with perfect regularity. The child was never frightened at anything. The room where it sat was the house-place; and it always gave notice to its mother when anybody came in, not by a cry, but by a crow. I lived for many months within hearing of that child, and never heard it cry day or night. I think there is a great deal too much of amusing children now, and not enough of letting them amuse themselves.”
What, again, could be more useful in its simplicity than the following, addressed to working mothers:—