The life of Florence Nightingale

by Sarah A. Tooley

“We do not seek to make ‘medical women,’ but simply nurses acquainted with the principle which they are required constantly to apply at the bedside.

“For the future superintendent is added a course of instruction in the administration of a hospital, including, of course, the linen arrangements and what else is necessary for a matron to be conversant with.

“There are those who think that all this is intuitive in women, that they are born so, or, at least, that it comes to them without training. To such we say, by all means send us as many such geniuses as you can, for we are sorely in want of them.”

While Miss Nightingale was thus piloting nursing reform in the country and endeavouring to enlist recruits, she was also actively engaged in assisting the Hon. Sidney Herbert in carrying out his important schemes for the improvement of the condition of the soldier, a work to which Mr. Herbert devoted himself most strenuously in the last years of his life.

Up to the period of the Crimean War the sanitary condition of the soldier was utterly neglected. He was as a general rule left to his chance. At home in barracks he was ill-lodged and ill-fed, and during active service was practically uncared for. He was a constant victim to preventable disease by reason of unhealthy camps and ill-managed and defective hospitals. Fever and dysentery slew their tens of thousands. The mortality returns showed a deplorable death rate. Seventeen out of every thousand soldiers died annually at home as against eight in every thousand of civilians. It was calculated at this period that of every two soldiers who died, one died from causes which a proper attention to his surroundings would have removed.

Miss Nightingale had probably the best first-hand knowledge of any person in the country of the ills to which the soldiers in camp and hospital were subjected during active warfare, and the wealth of her experience and knowledge were given to Mr. Sidney Herbert when he started on his campaign of reform.

We have already seen the marvellous change which Miss Nightingale had been instrumental in bringing about in the military hospitals in the East, and the useful work she had accomplished during the last months in the Crimea by providing useful occupation and recreation for the convalescent soldiers and the men in camp, and by furthering reforms in the cooking and diet of the soldiers. The war was ended, the army was home again, and it now remained to see that the men who took up arms for their country should have their lives protected by the ordinary rules of health and sanitation, and that they should be educated, encouraged to live like self-respecting citizens of the Empire for which they fought, and that their wives and children should be cared for. Our heroine was not actuated by mere passing emotions easily roused and as readily quieted. Florence Nightingale had sacrificed her own health to cure the ills arising from the soldiers’ neglected condition and now turned her attention to prevention.

The horrors of the Crimean War impelled Sidney Herbert to concentrate his attention on army reform, a matter upon which he had been engaged before the outbreak of hostilities. Now he returned to it with redoubled vigour. Barracks as well as hospitals must be reorganised, the soldier preserved in health as well as tended in sickness. There must be good sanitary regulations, improved military cookery, and the soldier must have some enjoyment in life.

Mr. Sydney Herbert had to endure his share of blame with the other members of Lord Aberdeen’s Government for the terrible sufferings of the troops during the Crimean War, but for which in the light of history no one seemed less to blame than he, if blame there was, and he atoned for it now by a long penance of work for the good of the soldier. For every man who had perished in those bitter trenches before Sebastopol, died in the ill-fed camps of hunger or disease, or groaned his life away in the crowded and pestilential hospitals, Sidney Herbert saved at least the life of one British soldier by his labours.

He was the mainspring of the Royal Commission which, after the return of the troops from the Crimea, was appointed to inquire into the sanitary condition of the army, and on his suggestion and with his assistance four supplementary Commissions were issued on the subjects of Hospitals and Barracks, Army Medical Department, Army Medical Statistics, and on a Medical School at Chatham, and he drafted the code of regulations for the Army Medical Department which appeared in October, 1859.