Sixty odd years ago, at the outbreak of the Crimean war there were no women nurses to minister to those who had been wounded in the service of their country. Woman’s ministry was sorely needed but not wanted by those in active command of military affairs at the seat of war. It remained for Florence Nightingale to teach the world one of its greatest lessons—a lesson from which future generations will reap increasing benefits. When the Crimean war closed, the foundation was begun on which the structure of modern nursing was to be reared.
In every age, the world has had its heroes, and Florence Nightingale would have been the last to wish to give the impression that there were not many splendid women devoting themselves to the care of the sick long before she was born. They were not trained women according to modern ideals of training, but there were women of gentle birth and breeding, refined and accomplished who served the sick with singleness of heart and rare devotion. The world will always owe its debt of gratitude to the Roman Catholic Sisters and the Deaconesses of other churches, whose tender ministries to the sick in hospitals and home, did much to lessen the sum of human suffering in the years before Miss Nightingale’s great work was begun.
No one who reads the story of the beautiful life of Florence Nightingale can fail to be impressed with the fact that the dominant motive of that life was—SERVICE. It has been aptly said that one of the first and most important lessons that a nurse needs to learn, is to spell SELF with a little s. In this she has a worthy example for forgetfulness of self seems to have been characteristic of Florence Nightingale all through her life. Service to humanity—especially service to the sick and distressed part of humanity—seems to have made its strong appeal to her almost from childhood. Organization for service, education and training for service, plans for service in a hundred different ways—filled her life, and the story of her many-sided activities, as revealed by her official biographer—has been a surprise to those who have thought of her only in connection with nursing. While she will always be best remembered as the founder of modern nursing, her great efforts in improving sanitary conditions in India, in which she labored unceasingly for many years with officials in the War Department, and her work in behalf of reform in the management of workhouses in England, were closely interwoven with her work in behalf of better nursing for the sick. Her voluminous correspondence and her literary work seem in themselves to have been sufficient to occupy her full time, after her return from the Crimea.
The popular idea of Florence Nightingale has been drawn largely from the pen picture of Longfellow in Santa Filomena, but it is far from being a true picture of her life. To fully appreciate her character and influence one must study to some extent, not alone the social and sanitary conditions that prevailed in her earlier life, but the habits of thought and even the etiquette of the times, during which her chief work was being accomplished. Of these conditions her biographer says:
“Now that the fruits of Florence Nightingale’s pioneer work have been gathered, and that nursing is one of the recognized occupations for gentlewomen, it is not altogether easy to realize the difficulties which stood in her way. The objections were moral and social, in large measure rooted to conventional ideas. Gentlewomen, it was felt, would be exposed, if not to danger and temptations, at least to undesirable and unfitting conditions. ‘It was as if I had wanted to be a kitchen maid,’ Miss Nightingale herself said in later years. Nothing is more tenacious than social prejudice. But the prejudice was in part founded on very intelligible reasons and in part was justified by the level of nursing as an occupation at that time. It will suffice to say that though there were better-managed and worse-managed hospitals, yet there was strong evidence to show that hospital nurses had opportunities which they freely used, for ‘putting the bottle to their lips’ when so disposed, also that other evils were more or less prevalent.
“The more she heard of the worst, the more was Florence Nightingale resolved to make things better; but the more her parents heard, the greater and more natural was their repugnance. Somebody must do the rough pioneer work of the world; but one can understand how the parents of an attractive daughter, to whom their own life at home seemed to them to open many possibilities of comfortable happiness, came to desire that in this case the somebody should be somebody else.”
It is difficult to study her life without feeling that she was sent into the world especially to accomplish the great tasks to which in early middle life, her powers were chiefly devoted. It should, however, be always remembered that during this period others besides Miss Nightingale were making their contribution to better nursing and better sanitary conditions in hospitals, and in the world outside. Lord Lister, who ushered in the new era of antiseptic surgery, was seven years younger than Florence Nightingale. “He and she, each in the manner in which Nature or Providence fitted them, were simultaneously inaugurating the new era, he the foster father, she the foster mother of myriads of this generation and unthinkable millions of those who are to be. His methods demanded the trained nurse both for surgery and midwifery, both for the battlefield where life is destroyed, and for the lying-in room where it is ushered into separate existence. Her work was to provide the training and the principles, the ideals, the enthusiasm, and the tiniest, humblest details, whereby the modern nurse is made.”
LORD LISTER
Apart entirely from the generally undesirable type of women (there were many exceptions) found in charge of the care of the sick when Florence Nightingale began her work, were the generally undesirable conditions which existed before Lord Lister’s antiseptic methods were inaugurated in 1868. Erysipelas, gangrene, pyemia, and septicemia were common complications of surgery and the death rate of maternity patients in hospitals was appalling. A nurse who was one of the pioneers in improving the care of the sick, thus describes her experience when she entered for training in an English hospital: