Here we have the difficulty of the situation revealed. The nurses hitherto employed in military hospitals had been of a coarse, low character. They had neither education, training, nor sympathy for their work. To compare them to “Sairey Gamp” would be an insult to that immortal lady’s memory, for she had her good points and a certain professional knowledge and respectability to maintain, while the average soldiers’ nurse was little more than a mere camp follower. On the other hand were the good, kindly ladies who felt that they had a vocation for nursing, but, alas! were absolutely devoid of training and incapable of organising and controlling subordinates. Between these two impossible classes the war authorities had come to the conclusion that the army in the Crimea would be better without female nurses.
The rousing appeal to the women of the country from Mr. Russell, The Times correspondent, already quoted, had the effect of inundating the authorities with applications from women of all classes who, moved by the harrowing accounts of the suffering soldiers, were anxious to go out as nurses. The offers of help were bewilderingly numerous, but there was no organisation and no leader.
Mr. Sidney Herbert was at the head of the War Department, and, in the midst of the excitement and general futility of things, his thoughts naturally turned to his honoured friend, Florence Nightingale. In his opinion she was the “one woman” in England who was fitted by position, knowledge, training, and character to organise a nursing staff and take them out to the aid of the suffering soldiers. He had, as we have already seen, an intimate personal knowledge of Miss Nightingale, was aware of the thorough and systematic study which she had for some years been giving to hospital nursing at home and abroad, and he knew also of the organising skill which she had been recently displaying in the management of the Harley Street Home for Sick Governesses. Mrs. Herbert, a lady of great insight and knowledge, felt with her husband that if Miss Nightingale could be induced to undertake the hazardous task of organising a band of military nurses, the success of the scheme would be ensured.
But Mr. and Mrs. Herbert had a natural hesitation in making such a suggestion. It was tantamount to asking their dear friend to go out with her life in her hands, as well as to brave the adverse criticism of a large number of short-sighted but well-meaning people, who would lift up their hands in protest at the idea of a lady of birth and breeding going out to nurse the common soldier. Poor “Tommy” had a worse character then than now.
It was clear to Mr. Herbert that if Miss Nightingale were to be asked to undertake this work, she must be placed in an undisputed position of authority and supported by the Government. Everything depended on having a recognised head. To allow bands of lady nurses to start for the seat of war, each carrying out their pet and immature notions on hospital work, would have been futile and useless. To send them to Scutari and place them under the control of the authorities then in charge of the hospital, would have defeated the chief object of the plan, which was to reform and amend the existing order of nursing prevailing at the hospital. Neither was it likely that so shrewd and capable a woman as Miss Nightingale would consent to organise a new nursing system—for it practically amounted to that—unless she was guaranteed a position of undisputed authority. How necessary that was to the success of the enterprise after events fully proved.
Fortunately, Sidney Herbert was a statesman in a position to influence his colleagues in the Government, and his recommendation of Miss Nightingale as a lady fully qualified to perform the task of Superintendent of Nurses for the Crimea was received with approval, and indeed with a sense of relief. Here was the woman whom distraught Ministers had been vainly looking for amidst the motley throng of the unfit. When things were so far arranged, Sidney Herbert addressed the following letter to his friend:—
“October 15th, 1854.
“Dear Miss Nightingale,—
“You will have seen in the papers that there is a great deficiency of nurses at the hospital of Scutari. The other alleged deficiencies—namely, of medical men, lint, sheets, etc.—must, if they ever existed, have been remedied ere this, as the number of medical officers with the army amounted to one to every ninety-five men in the whole force, being nearly double what we have ever had before; and thirty more surgeons went out there three weeks ago, and must by this time, therefore, be at Constantinople. A further supply went on Monday, and a fresh batch sail next week. As to medical stores, they have been sent out in profusion, by the ton weight—fifteen thousand pairs of sheets, medicine, wine, arrowroot in the same proportion; and the only way of accounting for the deficiency at Scutari, if it exists, is that the mass of the stores went to Varna, and had not been sent back when the army left for the Crimea, but four days would have remedied that.
“In the meanwhile, stores are arriving, but the deficiency of female nurses is undoubted; none but male nurses have ever been admitted to military hospitals. It would be impossible to carry about a large staff of female nurses with an army in the field. But at Scutari, having now a fixed hospital, no military reason exists against the introduction, and I am confident they might be introduced with great benefit, for hospital orderlies must be very rough hands, and most of them, on such an occasion as this, very inexperienced ones. I receive numbers of offers from ladies to go out, but they are ladies who have no conception of what a hospital is, nor of the nature of its duties; and they would, when the time came, either recoil from the work or be entirely useless, and consequently, what is worse, entirely in the way; nor would those ladies probably even understand the necessity, especially in a military hospital, of strict obedience to rule....”