The life of Florence Nightingale

by Sarah A. Tooley

However, all honour to the noble pioneers who sank personal considerations and effaced self in a desire to discharge their errand of mercy.

A powerful sidelight is thrown on the work of the Lady-in-Chief by the experiences of her subordinates. Sister Mary Aloysius writes: “Where shall I begin, or how can I ever describe my first day in the hospital at Scutari? Vessels were arriving and orderlies carrying the poor fellows, who with their wounds and frost-bites had been tossing about on the Black Sea for two or three days and sometimes more. Where were they to go? Not an available bed. They were laid on the floor one after another, till the beds were emptied of those dying of cholera and every other disease. Many died immediately after being brought in—their moans would pierce the heart—and the look of agony on those poor dying faces will never leave my heart. They may well be called ‘the martyrs of the Crimea.’

“The cholera was of the very worst type, and the attacked men lasted only four or five hours. Oh, those dreadful cramps! You might as well try to bend a piece of iron as to move the joints. The medical staff did their best, and daily, hourly, risked their own lives with little or no success. At last every one seemed to be getting paralysed and the orderlies indifferent as to life or death.... The usual remedies ordered by the doctors were stuping and poultices of mustard. They were very anxious to try chloroform, but did not trust any one with it except the sisters.”

If the Lady-in-Chief and her nurses had been at first rather coldly welcomed in the surgery wards, their presence when the epidemic of cholera set in was indeed counted a blessing. These trained and devoted women could be entrusted with applying the desperate remedies needed for the disease, which the medical staff would have felt it useless to leave in the hands of orderlies. The stuping, for example, required the most careful attention to have any chance of success. The method of the sisters was to have a large tub of boiling water, blankets torn in squares, and a piece of canvas with a running at each end to hold a stick. The blankets were put into the boiling water, lifted out with tongs and put into the canvas. An orderly at each end wrung the flannel out so dry that not a drop of moisture remained. Then chloroform was sprinkled on the hot blanket, which was then applied to the patient’s stomach. Rubbing with mustard and even with turpentine followed, until the iron grip which had seized the body was released or the end had come.

The nurses fought with the dread disease in the most heroic manner, but the proportion saved among the stricken was small indeed. The saddest thing was that it was generally the strong and healthy soldier who was attacked.

“One day,” says Sister Aloysius, “a fine young fellow, the picture of health and strength, was carried in on a stretcher to my ward. I said to the orderlies, ‘I hope we shall be able to bring him through.’ I set to work with the usual remedies; but the doctor shook his head, and said, ‘I am afraid it’s all no use, sister.’ When the orderlies, poor fellows, were tired, I set to work myself, and kept it on till nearly the end—but you might as well rub iron; no heat, no movement from his joints. He lived about the usual time—four or five hours.”

Week after week the fearful scourge continued, until the avenues to the wards were never free from the two streams of stretchers, one bringing in the stricken, the other carrying out the dead. The spread of the infection was thought to be largely due to the graves not being deep enough, and the air surrounding the hospitals had become putrid.

Scarcely less dreadful than the cholera patients were the men suffering from frost-bite, who arrived in hundreds from the trenches before Sebastopol. Nothing enables one to realise their terrible condition like the narrative of one on the spot. Referring to her experience amongst the frost-bitten patients, Sister Aloysius says: “The men who came from the ‘Front,’ as they called it, had only thin linen suits—no other clothing to keep out the severe Crimean frost. When they were carried in on the stretchers, which conveyed so many to their last resting-place, their clothes had to be cut off. In most cases the flesh and clothes were frozen together; and, as for the feet, the boots had to be cut off bit by bit—the flesh coming off with them; many pieces of the flesh I have seen remain in the boot. Poultices were applied with some oil brushed over them. In the morning, when these were removed—can I ever forget it?—the sinews and bones were seen to be laid bare. We had surgical instruments; but in almost every case the doctors or staff-surgeons were at hand, and removed the diseased flesh as tenderly as they could. As for the toes, you could not recognise them as such.”

One could multiply these ghastly descriptions if further evidence was needed to show the terrible sufferings endured by officers and men alike in the trenches before Sebastopol. Mention the famous siege to any of the old Crimean veterans as they sit beneath the trees in the grounds of Chelsea Hospital, and they will tell you stories of hardships endured which makes one regard their still living bodies with amazement. And they are not mere soldiers’ tales: the old heroes could scarcely invent greater horrors than history has recorded. The weary weeks were passed for the most part by the men sitting or lying in holes dug in the frozen ground deep enough to shelter their heads from the flying bullets and bursting bombs. If a poor fellow decided to stretch his numbed and cramped legs, he was more than likely to have his head blown off. Lord Wolseley bears to-day the marks of his experiences as a venturesome young subaltern in the trenches at Sebastopol, when, riddled with bullets and a part of his face blown away, he was laid on one side by the surgeons as a “dead un.” Fortunately he managed to prove that he was yet alive. The Life of Captain Hedley Vicars reveals also the privations of the time. He himself lay in the open air on a bed of stones and leaves, having given up his tent to men who were sick.

The cold was so intense that in a sudden skirmish the men were often unable to draw their triggers. A frost-bitten soldier lying ill at Balaclava, when he tried to turn in the night, found that his feet were frozen to those of another soldier lying opposite.