It was at this critical period of her life, when her mind was shaping itself to such high purpose, that Florence Nightingale met Elizabeth Fry. The first grasping of hands of these two pioneer women would serve as subject for a painter. We picture the stately and beautiful old Quakeress in the characteristic garb of the Friends extending a sisterly welcome to the young and earnest woman who came to learn at her feet. The one was fast drawing to the close of her great work for the women prisoners, and the other stood on the threshold of a philanthropic career to be equally distinguished. We have no detailed record of what words were spoken at this meeting, but we know that the memory of the heavenly personality of Elizabeth Fry was an ever-present inspiration with Florence Nightingale in the years which followed.
It was a meeting of kindred spirits, but of distinct individualities. We do not find Miss Nightingale making any attempt to take up the mantle fast falling from the experienced philanthropist: she had her own line of pioneer work forming in her capable brain, but was eager to glean something from the wide experience through which her revered friend had passed. Mrs. Fry had during the past few years been visiting prisons and institutions on the Continent, and had established a small training home for nurses in London. She was a friend of Pastor Fliedner, the founder of Kaiserswerth, and had visited that institution. The account of his work, and of the order of Protestant deaconesses which he had founded for tending the sick poor, given by Mrs. Fry, made a profound impression on Florence Nightingale, and resulted a few years later in her enrolment as a voluntary nurse at that novel institution.
In the meantime she studied the hospital system at home, spending some months in the leading London hospitals and visiting those in Edinburgh and Dublin. Then she undertook a lengthened tour abroad and saw the different working of institutions for the sick in France, Germany, and Italy. The comparison was not favourable to this country. The nursing in our hospitals was largely in the hands of the coarsest type of women, not only untrained, but callous in feeling and often grossly immoral. There was little to counteract their baneful influence, and the atmosphere of institutions which, as the abodes of the sick and dying, had special need of spiritual and elevating influences, was of a degrading character. The occasional visits of a chaplain could not do very much to counteract the behaviour of the unprincipled nurse ever at the bedside. The habitual drunkenness of these women was then proverbial, while the dirt and disorder rampant in the wards was calculated to breed disease. The “profession,” if the nursing of that day can claim a title so dignified, had such a stigma attaching to it that no decent woman cared to enter it, and if she did, it was more than likely that she would lose her character.
In contrast to this repulsive class of women, whom Miss Nightingale had encountered to her horror in the hospitals of London, Edinburgh, and Dublin, and to the “Sairey Gamps” who were the only “professional” nurses available for the middle classes in their own homes, she found on the Continent the sweet-faced Sister of Charity—pious, educated, trained.
For centuries the Roman Catholic community had trained and set apart holy women for ministering to the sick poor in their own homes, and had established hospitals supplied with the same type of nurse. A large number of these women were ladies of birth and breeding who worked for the good of their souls and the welfare of their Church, while all received proper education and training, and had abjured the world for a religious life. An excellent example of the work done by the nun-nurses is seen in the quaint old-world hospital of St. John, with which visitors to Bruges are familiar. It was one of the institutions visited by Miss Nightingale, and, religious differences apart, she viewed with profound admiration the beneficent work of the sisters.
After pursuing her investigations from city to city, Miss Nightingale decided to take a course of instruction at the recently founded institution for deaconesses at Kaiserswerth on the Rhine. There a Protestant sisterhood were working on similar lines to Sisters of Charity, and had already done much to mitigate the poverty, sickness, and misery in their own district, and were beginning to extend their influence to other German towns. At Kaiserswerth the ideal system of trained sick nursing which Miss Nightingale had been forming in her own mind was an accomplished fact.
CHAPTER VI
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE’S ALMA MATER AND ITS FOUNDER
Enrolled a Deaconess at Kaiserswerth—Paster Fliedner—His Early Life—Becomes Pastor at Kaiserswerth—Interest in Prison Reform—Starts a Small Penitentiary for Discharged Female Prisoners—Founds a School and the Deaconess Hospital—Rules for Deaconesses—Marvellous Extension of his Work—His Death—Miss Nightingale’s Tribute.
Just precepts thus from great examples given,
She drew from them what they derived from Heaven.