Hitherto the workhouse nurses were the pauper women, untrustworthy and unskilled. At Brownlow Hill, Liverpool, Infirmary Mr. Rathbone relates that there were twelve hundred beds occupied by people in all stages of every kind of disease, and the only assistants of the two women officers who superintended the nursing were pauper women who were as untrustworthy as they were unskilful. This was a fair example of workhouse infirmaries all over the country.
The Select Vestry of Liverpool, having received an anonymous offer to defray the cost of the experiment for three years, consented to try Miss Nightingale’s plan. With her assistance, Miss Agnes Jones, a lady who had been trained at Kaiserswerth like Miss Nightingale, and also at the Nightingale School at St. Thomas’s, was appointed Lady Superintendent, and she brought with her a staff of twelve nurses from St. Thomas’s. At first Miss Jones tried to get extra help by training the able-bodied pauper women as nurses, but out of fifty-six not one proved able to pass the necessary examination and, worse still, the greater number used their first salary to get drunk. The painful fact was established that not a single respectable and trustworthy nurse could be found amongst the workhouse inmates, and the infirmary nursing had to be taken entirely out of their hands.
After a two years’ trial Miss Jones’s experiment with her trained and educated nurses proved so satisfactory that the guardians determined never to return to the old system, and to charge the rates with the permanent establishment of the new one. To the deep regret of every one, however, Miss Agnes Jones sank under the labours which she had undertaken, and died in February, 1868.
Miss Nightingale contributed a beautiful tribute to the memory of her friend and fellow worker in Good Words for June, 1868, under the title “Una and the Lion,” which subsequently formed the “Introduction” to The Memorials of Agnes Elizabeth Jones, by her sister.
“One woman has died,” writes Miss Nightingale, “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.”
We must refrain from quoting more of this singularly fine tribute of the Chief to one of her ablest generals in the army of nursing reform, with the exception of the beautiful closing words: “Let us add living flowers to her grave, ‘lilies with full hands,’ not fleeting primroses, not dying flowers. Let us bring the work of our hands and our heads and our hearts to finish her work which God has so blessed. Let us not merely rest in peace, but let hers be the life which stirs up to fight the good fight against vice and sin and misery and wretchedness, as she did—the call to arms which she was ever obeying:—
The Son of God goes forth to war,
Who follows in His train?
Oh, daughters of God, are there so few to answer?”
