So in that house of misery,
A lady with a lamp I see
Pass through the glimmering gloom,
And flit from room to room.
Longfellow.
The New Year of 1855 brought no mitigation in Florence Nightingale’s arduous task. Though there was no longer the influx of wounded from the battlefields, disease was making fearful ravages amongst the soldiers now engaged in the prolonged siege of Sebastopol. Miss Nightingale thus described the hardships endured by the men in a letter to a friend. “Fancy,” she writes, “working five nights out of seven in the trenches! Fancy being thirty-six hours in them at a stretch, as they were all December, lying down, or half lying down, after forty-eight hours, with no food but raw salt pork sprinkled with sugar, rum, and biscuit; nothing hot, because the exhausted soldier could not collect his own fuel, as he was expected to do, to cook his own rations; and fancy through all this the army preserving their courage and patience as they have done. There is something sublime in the spectacle.”
The result of this life of exposure in the trenches during the rigours of the Crimean winter was terrible suffering amongst the soldiers from frost-bite and dysentery, and there was a great increase in cholera and fever, which kept the hospitals more crowded than ever.
At the beginning of the year a further staff of fifty trained nurses under Miss Stanley, the sister of the late Dean, arrived at Scutari and were distributed amongst the various hospitals in the East. Miss Nightingale had now five thousand sick and wounded under her supervision, and eleven hundred more were on their way from the Crimea. Under her immediate personal care in the Barrack Hospital were more than two thousand wounded, all severe cases. She had also now established her régime in the General Hospital at Scutari, and some of the new nurses were installed there under Miss Emily Anderson, while others went to Kullali Hospital on the other side of the Bosphorus and worked under Miss Stanley until she returned to England.
Sisters of mercy from some of the Irish convents were among the new nurses, and one of the number, Sister Mary Aloysius, is still at the time of writing living in her convent home at Gort, Co. Galway. Her “Memories” of the Crimea afford a graphic picture of the state of the General Hospital at Scutari and of the arduous toil of the nurses.
The aged sister has a keen sense of humour, and in describing the departure of Miss Stanley’s company from London Bridge for Scutari, evidently derived some satisfaction that her nun’s garb was less extraordinary than the dresses provided by the Government for its nurses. “The ladies and the paid nurses,” she relates, “wore the same uniform—grey tweed wrappers, worsted jackets, white caps and short woollen cloaks, and a frightful scarf of brown holland embroidered in red with the words ‘Scutari Hospital.’ The garments were contract work and all made the same sizes. In consequence the tall ladies appeared to be attired in short dresses and the short ladies in long.” It was a similar evidence of official blundering to that which sent a cargo of boots for the soldiers in the Crimea all shaped for the left foot. “That ladies could be found to walk in such a costume was certainly a triumph of grace over nature,” adds Sister Aloysius. The fact is interesting as showing the advance made in modern times in a nurse’s official dress as exemplified in the charming though useful costumes worn by military nurses in the South African war.