MRS. DACRE CRAVEN (NÉE FLORENCE LEES).
(From a drawing by the Crown Princess of Germany (the late Empress Frederick), when Miss Lees had charge of the Crown Princess’s Lazaretto at Homburg during the Franco-German War.)
[To face p. 304.
One cannot leave the subject without a reference to the influence which Miss Nightingale’s own early example had had on the gifted woman whose memory she extolled. On the eve of going into training at St. Thomas’s Miss Agnes Jones wrote: “It is well that I shall, at my first outset in hospital work, bear the name of ‘Nightingale Probationer,’ for that honoured name is associated with my first thought of hospital life. In the winter of ’54, when I had those first earnest longings for work, and had for months so little to satisfy them, how I wished I were competent to join the Nightingale band when they started for the Crimea! I listened to the animadversions of many, but I almost worshipped her who braved all, and I felt she must succeed.”
The system inaugurated by Miss Agnes Jones at Liverpool Infirmary spread over the country, and Miss Nightingale had the satisfaction of seeing in a comparatively short time a great improvement in the nursing and treatment of the sick in workhouses. Gaols had long been visited and reformed, lunatic asylums opened to inspection, and it seemed unaccountable that the misery of sick workhouse paupers should have been so long overlooked.[B]
[B] Miss Louisa Twining in 1854 began her pioneer efforts in workhouse reform, which resulted in 1874 in the establishment of the Workhouse Nursing Association.
The success of the introduction of trained nurses into workhouses gave an impulse to sick poor nursing generally, and in 1868 the East London Nursing Society was founded by the Hon. Mrs. Stuart Wortley and Mr. Robert Wigram. In 1874 the movement received a further important impulse from the formation of the National Nursing Association, to provide skilled nurses for the sick poor in their own homes, to establish district organisations in London and in the country, and to establish a training school for district nurses in connection with one of the London hospitals.
This work appealed most strongly to Miss Nightingale, and she expressed her sympathy in the following letter to that devoted pioneer of district nursing, Miss Florence Lees,[C] now Mrs. Dacre Craven, who was the indefatigable honorary secretary of the newly founded National Nursing Association.
[C] Miss Lees was described by Kinglake as “the gifted and radiant pupil” of Florence Nightingale. She was a probationer at the St. Thomas’s Training School when it was temporarily located in the old Surrey Gardens.
“As to your success,” writes Miss Nightingale, “what is not your success? To raise the homes of your patients so that they never fall back again to dirt and disorder: such is your nurses’ influence. To pull through life and death cases—cases which it would be an honour to pull through with all the appurtenances of hospitals, or of the richest in the land, and this without any sick-room appurtenances at all. To keep whole families out of pauperism by preventing the home from being broken up, and nursing the bread-winner back to health.”