The life of Florence Nightingale

by Sarah A. Tooley

With the return of Lord Palmerston to power in the summer of that year, Sidney Herbert again took office as Secretary for War. He now laboured more assiduously than ever in army reform, and in the furthering of those schemes which he had been compelled to abandon on the outbreak of hostilities. To his efforts were due the constitution of the militia, the reconstruction of the artillery system, the amalgamation of the Indian and the general forces, and the consolidation of what were then the “new” volunteers. At Aldershot he established instruction in barrack and hospital cookery, and in place of that peculiar method which required that the soldier should fit his foot to the boot, had the machinery of the boot-factory constructed to secure a variety of sizes to suit different feet, thereby adding to the comfort and marching power of the troops.

Sidney Herbert began the overwhelming task of reorganising the War Office, but the strain of work unfortunately compelled him to retire from active official position, and in 1859 he accepted a peerage and entered the House of Lords as Baron Herbert of Lea.

Lord Herbert still continued his efforts on behalf of bettering the condition of the soldier morally and physically, but his beneficent career was soon to be cut short. To the deep regret of all classes in the country Lord Herbert of Lea died on August 2nd, 1861, at Wilton House, Salisbury. Just before his death he had reformed the Hospital Corps, and the very day on which he died saw the opening of the General Hospital at Woolwich, which had been planned under his auspices as a model of what a military hospital should be. It was ultimately transformed into the present magnificent building, on which Queen Victoria fittingly bestowed the name of the Herbert Hospital.

Next to his devoted widow and children there was no one who felt more keenly the loss of Lord Herbert of Lea than Florence Nightingale. To his inspiration and support she owed in great measure the success of her mission to the Eastern hospitals, and since her return she had laboured with him to promote the betterment of the soldier’s condition. How much the nation really owes to Miss Nightingale for her labours in the sanitary and educational reform of the army during the years 1857–60 in which, though a prisoner in her sick-room, she toiled with Lord Herbert, will not be known until the private records of that period are published. At the request of the War Office she drew up an exhaustive and confidential report on the working of the Army Medical Department in the Crimea, which materially assisted in the reorganisation of the medical branch of the service then taking place.

In writing on “The Sanitary Condition of the Army” in The Westminster Review for January, 1859, Lord Herbert frequently quotes the opinions of Miss Nightingale, based on her experiences of the defects of the military hospitals’ nursing system, and mentions her recommendations for reform.

Her services and advice were not only highly valued by Lord Herbert, but were acknowledged by the first statesmen of the day. In the tributes paid to the memory of Lord Herbert at the time of his death, the name of Florence Nightingale was coupled with his in the work of army reform.

At a meeting held in Willis’s Rooms on November 28th, 1861, to consider the erection of a memorial in London to Lord Herbert of Lea, Lord Palmerston, then Prime Minister, speaking of the work in army reform accomplished by Lord Herbert, with the assistance of the Duke of Cambridge, Commander-in-Chief, said: “There were not only two; there was a third engaged in these honourable exertions, and Miss Nightingale, though a volunteer in the service, acted with all the zeal of a volunteer and was greatly assistant.”

Mr. Gladstone, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, followed with a similar appreciation. Referring to the above remarks of Lord Palmerston, he said: “My noble friend who moved the first resolution directed attention to one name in particular that ought never to be mentioned with any elaborate attempt at eulogy; for the name of Miss Nightingale by its own unaided power becomes a talisman to all her fellow-countrymen.”

Mr. Gladstone then proceeded to summarise the work of Lord Herbert in which our heroine had so signally helped. “To him we owe the Commission for Inquiry into Barracks and Hospitals, to him we are indebted for the reorganisation of the Medical Department of the Army. To him we owe the Commission of Inquiry into and remodelling the medical education of the army. And lastly we owe him the Commission for presenting to the public the vital statistics of the army in such a form, from time to time, that the great and living facts of the subjects are brought to view.”

Such was the perfect knight, the gallant gentleman, and the high-souled reformer whose loss Florence Nightingale now deplored. From her sick-room she followed with interest the schemes to honour his memory. It was proposed to erect his statue outside the War Office in Pall Mall, and to endow an exhibition of gold medals in connection with the Army Medical School at Chatham, which had been founded under his auspices. At Salisbury, the city where the names of Lord and Lady Herbert were household words as benefactors to the sick and distressed, a public meeting was held to promote a fund for erecting a bronze statue to Lord Herbert and for the support of a Convalescent Hospital at Charmouth as a branch of the Salisbury Hospital, to which he had been such a liberal benefactor.