Virgin Saints and Martyrs

by S. Baring-Gould

A boy who had received an injury was taken to the hospital. One night, when he was recovering, Sister Dora found him crying. She asked him what was the matter. At last it came out: “Sister, I shouted after you in the street, ‘Sister of Misery!’”

“I knew you when you came in,” she said; “I remembered your face.”

This is the true version of a story Miss Lonsdale gives.

Mr. Welsh says: “When the cottage hospital—which was the second of its kind in England—was opened, the system of voluntary nursing was unknown; the only voluntary nurses heard of then being those who had gone out to the Crimea with Miss Florence Nightingale; consequently the dress of the Sisters was uncommon, and the name of Sister strange. Therefore, a good deal of misunderstanding was the result; but in course of time people began to judge the institution by its results. Still, when Sister Dora came to the hospital, there lingered doubts and suspicions that the nurses were Romanists in disguise, come to entrap and ruin souls rather than cure bodies. But Sister Dora, by her frank, open manner, disarmed suspicion, while the sublime eloquence of noble deeds silenced slanderous tongues, put all opposition to shame, and won for the hospital the confidence of the public, and for herself the admiration and affection of the people.”

In 1866 she had a serious illness, brought on by exposure to wet and cold. She would come home from dressing wounds in the cottages, wet through and hot with hurrying along the streets, to find a crowd of out-patients awaiting her return at the hospital, and she would attend to them in total disregard of herself, and allow her wet clothes to dry on her.

This neglect occurred once too often; a chill settled on her, and for three weeks she was dangerously ill. Then it was that the people of Walsall began to realise what she was, and the door of the hospital was besieged by poor people come to inquire how their “Sister Dora” was.

At some time previous to her going to Walsall, her faith had been somewhat disturbed by one who ought not to have endeavoured to subvert her trust in Christianity. This gave her inexpressible uneasiness and unhappiness. There seems to have been always in her a keen sense of God’s presence, and confidence in the efficacy of prayer. She now went through this terrible inner trial. An unbelieving artisan who was once nursed by her, and had observed her critically and suspiciously, said, when he left, “She is a noble woman; but she would have been that without her Christianity.” There he was mistaken. It was precisely her fast hold, which she regained, of Christianity that made her what she was.

Happily she had one now of great assistance to her as a guide—a very remarkable man, the Rev. Richard Twigg, of St. James’s, Wednesbury. Every Sunday morning, when able, she walked over to St. James’s to Early Communion. She found in Mr. Twigg a man of deep spiritual insight, and with a heart overflowing with the love of God, and consumed with a desire to win souls to Christ. He was a man with the spirit, and some of the power, of an Apostle—a man who left his stamp on Wednesbury, that will not soon be obliterated.

The struggle through which she had passed, the sense of need in her own soul for all that the Christian Church supplies in teaching and in Sacraments had a great strengthening and confirming effect that never left her; and the love of Jesus Christ became an absorbing personal devotion that nothing could shake. It was this—the love of God—that made her what she was, and endure what she did.

Some time after this she became deeply attached to a gentleman who was connected with the hospital, and he was devotedly fond of her, and proposed to her. But he was an unbeliever. Again she had to pass through an agonising struggle. She felt, as Mr. Twigg pointed out, that to unite her destinies with him was to jeopardise her recovered faith, and she was convinced that to be true to her profession, above all true to her Master, she must refuse the offer. She did so, and probably felt in the end that peace of mind which must ensue whenever a great sacrifice has been made for duty.