The life of Florence Nightingale

by Sarah A. Tooley

In May, 1860, candidates were advertised for, and on June 15th the first fifteen probationers were admitted. They were under the authority of the matron and subject to the rules of the hospital. They were provided with board and lodging, received a salary of £10 during the first year of their probation, and were to serve as assistant nurses in the wards and receive instruction from the sisters and medical officers. At the end of a year those who passed examination were certified as nurses and entered into hospital work. The first superintendent of the Nightingale Training School was Mrs. Wardroper.

During the first year of the experiment four probationers were dismissed and others received in their places. Out of those who were placed on the register as certified nurses, six received appointments in St. Thomas’s, and two entered workhouse infirmaries.

It was an anxious year for Miss Nightingale, and many heart-felt prayers went up from her sick-room that the work might be successful, while she encouraged the young probationers by friendly chats and advice. The Council considered the result of the first year satisfactory, and the scheme continued to steadily work.

It is clear, however, that the girls of England were not then all “mad to be nurses.” The profession had not become fashionable. Mrs. Grundy still shook her head over “young females” nursing in hospitals and feared wholesale elopements with medical students. Parents were afraid of infection; the fastidious thought attendance upon the sick poor incompatible with the feelings of a lady, and there was the conventional idea that it was derogatory to the position of a gentlewoman to enter a wage-earning profession.

Miss Nightingale fought steadily and patiently against criticism and prejudice, and now and again from her sick-room came stirring appeals to the young womanhood of England that they would regard the nursing of the sick as the noblest work to which they could devote themselves. “We hear so much of idle hands and unsatisfied hearts,” she wrote, “and nowhere more than in England. All England is ringing with the cry for ‘Woman’s Work’ and ‘Woman’s Mission.’ Why are there so few to do the work?... The remunerative employment is there, and in plenty. The want is the women fit to take it.”

Miss Nightingale then goes on to explain the kind of training given to her nurses at St. Thomas’s, and although this was written in the first stage of the work, when she was asking for recruits, it remains the basis upon which the Nightingale Training School in the present palatial St. Thomas’s Hospital is conducted.

“We require,” she writes, “that a woman be sober, honest, truthful, without which there is no foundation on which to build.

“We train her in habits of punctuality, quietness, trustworthiness, personal neatness. We teach her how to manage the concerns of a large ward or establishment. We train her in dressing wounds and other injuries, and in performing all those minor operations which nurses are called upon day and night to undertake.

“We teach her how to manage helpless patients in regard to moving, changing, feeding, temperature, and the prevention of bed sores.

“She has to make and apply bandages, line splints and the like. She must know how to make beds with as little disturbance as possible to their inmates. She is instructed how to wait at operations, and as to the kind of aid the surgeon requires at her hands. She is taught cooking for the sick; the principle on which sick wards ought to be cleansed, aired, and warmed; the management of convalescents, and how to observe sick and maimed patients, so as to give an intelligent and truthful account to the physician or surgeon in regard to the progress of cases in the intervals between visits—a much more difficult thing than is generally supposed.