CHAPTER XVIII
STRICKEN BY FEVER
Continued Visitation of Hospitals—Sudden Illness—Conveyed to Sanatorium—Visit of Lord Raglan—Convalescence—Accepts Offer of Lord Ward’s Yacht—Returns to Scutari—Memorial to Fallen Heroes.
Know how sublime a thing it is
To suffer and be strong.
Longfellow.
Nothing daunted by the fatiguing journey to the camp hospitals at headquarters related in the last chapter, Miss Nightingale, although she was feeling indisposed, set out the next morning to visit the General Hospital at Balaclava and the Sanatorium. She was accompanied by the ubiquitous M. Soyer, who was carrying out his culinary campaign at the Crimean hospitals, and attended by her faithful boy Thomas.
After spending several hours inspecting the wards of the General Hospital, Miss Nightingale proceeded to the Sanatorium, a collection of huts perched on the Genoese heights nearly eight hundred feet above the sea. She was escorted by Mr. Bracebridge, Dr. Sutherland, and a sergeant’s guard. The weather was intensely hot, as is usual in the Crimea during the month of May, and the journey, following on the fatigue of the previous day, proved a trying one. Half-way up the heights, Miss Nightingale stopped to visit a sick officer in one of the doctor’s huts, and afterwards proceeded to inspect the Sanatorium.
She returned to Balaclava, and next day went to install three nurses in the Sanatorium; and on her way up again visited the invalid officer in his lonely hut. During the succeeding days she continued her inspection of the hospitals in Balaclava, and also removed her quarters to the London, as the Robert Lowe, in which she sailed, was ordered home.
It was when on board the London, while she was transacting business with one of her nursing staff, that Miss Nightingale was suddenly seized with alarming illness. The doctors pronounced it to be the worst form of Crimean fever, and ordered that she should be immediately taken up to the Sanatorium. She was laid on a stretcher, and tenderly carried by sad-eyed soldiers through Balaclava and up the mountain side amid general consternation. Her own private nurse, Mrs. Roberts, attended her, a friend held a large white umbrella to protect her face from the glaring sun, and poor Thomas, the page-boy, who had proudly called himself “Miss Nightingale’s man,” followed his mistress, crying piteously. So great was the lamenting crowd that it took an hour to get the precious burden up to the heights. A hut was selected near a small stream, the banks of which were gay with spring flowers, and there for the next few days Florence Nightingale lay in a most critical condition, assiduously nursed by Mrs. Roberts and attended by Drs. Henderson and Hadley.
It seemed strange to every one that Miss Nightingale, after passing unscathed through her hard labours at Scutari, when she had been in daily contact with cholera and fever, should have succumbed to disease at Balaclava, but the fatigues of the past days, undertaken during excessive heat, accounted largely for the seizure, and some of her friends thought also that she had caught infection when visiting the sick officer on her way up to the Sanatorium.