The life of Florence Nightingale

by Sarah A. Tooley

Miss Nightingale’s defiance of red-tape made her some enemies, and the “groove-going men,” as Kinglake calls them, “uttered touching complaints, declaring that the Lady-in-Chief did not choose to give them time, and that the moment a want declared itself, she made haste to supply it herself.”

“This charge,” says the same authority in an appendix note, “was so utterly without foundation as to be the opposite of truth. The Lady-in-Chief used neither to issue her stores, nor allow any others to do so, until the want of them had been evidenced by a duly signed requisition. Proof of this is complete, and has been furnished even by adversaries of the Lady-in-Chief.”

After her improvised kitchen was in working order, Miss Nightingale next set to work to establish a laundry for the hospital and institute a system for disinfecting the clothes of fever and cholera patients. Up to the time of her arrival there was practically little washing done, the “authorities” had only succeeded in getting seven shirts washed, and no attempt was made to separate the bed-linen and garments of infectious patients from those suffering only from wounds. Washing contracts were in existence, but availed little. At the General Hospital the work was in the hands of a corps of eight or ten Armenians. There was no fault to be found with the manner in which they did the work, only they stole so habitually that when a man sent his shirt to be washed he was never sure that he would get it back again, and in consequence the sick were unwilling to part with their garments.

At the Barrack Hospital a Levantine named Uptoni had the washing contract, but broke it so repeatedly that the sick were practically without clean linen, except when they were able to get the soldiers’ wives to do a little washing for them. Such was the state of affairs in a hospital where two to three thousand men lay wounded and sick.

Miss Nightingale hired a house close to the hospital and set up an efficient laundry, partly out of her private funds, and partly out of money subscribed to The Times fund started for the relief of the soldiery. She had it fitted up with coppers and regulated under sanitary conditions, and there five hundred shirts and one hundred and fifty other articles were washed each week.

There was a further difficulty to meet, and that was to provide the men with a change of linen while the soiled went to the wash. Many of the wounded had been obliged to leave their knapsacks behind and had no clothing save the dirty and dilapidated garments in which they arrived. In the course of the first three months Miss Nightingale provided the men with ten thousand shirts from her own private sources.

There was the same scarcity in surgical dressings, and the nurses had to employ every minute that could be spared from the bedside of the sufferers in making lint, bandages, amputation stumps, and in sewing mattresses and making pillows.

Great confusion existed with regard to the dispensing of drugs. The apothecaries’ store at Scutari, which supplied the hospitals and indeed the whole army in the Crimea, was in the same state of confusion as everything else. The orderlies left to dispense often did not know what the store contained. On one occasion Mrs. Bracebridge, Miss Nightingale’s invaluable friend and helper, applied three times for chloride of lime and was told there was none. Miss Nightingale insisted on a more thorough search being made, with the result that 90 lbs. were discovered.

The defective system of orderlies was another evil which the Lady-in-Chief had to contend with. These men had been taken from the ranks, most of them were convalescents, and they did not trouble to understand the duties of an orderly because they were liable to return and serve in the ranks. The advent of the ladies had an excellent effect upon the orderlies in arousing their sense of chivalry, and they soon grew to think it an honour to serve the Lady-in-Chief. During all that dreadful period, when she had to tax the patience and devotion of the orderlies and other soldiers attending in the wards to the utmost, not one of them failed her “in obedience, thoughtful attention, and considerate delicacy.” For her they toiled and endured a strain and stress of work which mere officialdom would have failed to obtain. Yet “never,” Miss Nightingale says, “came from any one of them one word nor one look which a gentleman would not have used; and while paying this humble tribute to humble courtesy, the tears come into my eyes as I think how amidst scenes of loathsome disease and death there arose above it all the innate dignity, gentleness, and chivalry of the men (for never surely was chivalry so strikingly exemplified), shining in the midst of what must be considered as the lowest sinks of human misery, and preventing instinctively the use of one expression which could distress a gentlewoman.”

If such was the chivalrous devotion yielded by the orderlies and convalescent soldiers, it can readily be understood that the prostrate sufferers worshipped the Lady-in-Chief. Her presence in the operating room acted like magic. Case after case became amenable to the surgeon under the calming influence of her presence. It is not surprising that men prostrate with weakness and agonised with pain often rebelled against an operation. Anæsthetics were not administered as freely then as they are to-day, and many brave fellows craved death rather than meet the surgeon’s knife. But when they felt the pitying eyes of the Lady-in-Chief fixed upon them, saw her gentle face, heard her soothing words of comfort and hope for the future, and were conscious that she had set herself to bear the pain of witnessing pain, the men would obey her silent command, and submit and endure, strengthened by her presence.