“It was a bold stroke, but success is said to make an insurrection into a revolution. The medical men have had two meetings upon them and approved them all, and thought they were their own. And I came off with flying colors, no one suspecting my intrigue.
“I have also carried my point of having good, harmless Mr. —— as chaplain, and no young curate to have spiritual flirtations with my young ladies. So much for the earthquakes in this little mole-hill of ours.”
Happy though Miss Nightingale was in this new work, it did not offer her the wide opportunity for training nurses, which she greatly longed to do—somewhat along the lines pursued at Kaiserwerth.
The Call to Service in the Crimean War
Chapter II.
When the Crimean war broke out in 1854, it can easily be imagined that there was no woman in England so well fitted to take charge of the chaotic situation which soon developed in regard to the care of the wounded. The employment of women nurses in the army was an entire innovation. It excited jealousy in medical men, and strong criticism from military officers. In spite of the fact that the idea was certain to be branded as unwomanly by her own sex, and by the world in general, she offered her services, and her letter crossed in the mails a formal offer from Sir Sidney Herbert of the War Department of the position of director of a party of women nurses who were to be sent to nurse the sick. From France, a devoted company of Sisters of Charity had gone, who were rendering excellent service to the wounded, and it was felt by some officials who were not bound hand and foot by routine and precedent, that a company of women nurses from England might be sent to assist in the emergency that had arisen. Her services at this time are well known. The main facts were tersely summed up in the following paragraphs, published at the time of her death:
“The death rate at Scutari was 42 per cent. In one hospital it rose to 56. Eighty per cent of those whose limbs were amputated died of gangrene. The sick list amounted to over 13,000. In the Turkish barracks on the Bosphorus there were two miles of sick beds, in a double file along the corridors. The rats ran over the wounds of the helpless patients.
“Miss Nightingale assembled a party of 41 volunteer nurses, including ten Catholic nuns and eight sisters of mercy of the Anglican church, and took them to the Crimea. Upon her arrival at Scutari the “Lady of the Lamp” went straightway to work to bring order out of confusion, life out of the jaws of death, heaven on earth from a veritable hell. The day after her arrival they brought in the wounded survivors of the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava; the next day came the wounded from the bloody field of Inkerman. ‘Red tape’ insisted that all stores should be inspected ere being issued to the troops. When she found that the inspection would take three days Miss Nightingale broke down the doors and commandeered the supplies. She had soon reduced the death rate from 42 to 2 per cent. The wounded and the dying followed her with their eyes in her progress from cot to cot, as though she were an angel visitant. When, at the close of the war, a dinner was given the military and naval officers, those present voted for the one whose services would longest be remembered by posterity. There was but one name on every slip of paper—that of Florence Nightingale.
“She went back to England under an assumed name, and reached her home before it was known that she had left Turkey. The queen sent for her and thanked her in person at Balmoral. Every soldier in the army contributed a day’s pay to a fund of $250,000 for their benefactor, but she gave it all to found the Florence Nightingale Training School for Nurses in London. The Geneva convention and the Red Cross Society were the eventual outcome of her labors in the east.”