Like other reformers, Miss Nightingale encountered an occasional defeat. One was at Manchester in a cause wherein she was enlisted by a friend of Cobden, Mr. Joseph Adshead. He saw something of Miss Nightingale during these years, and corresponded voluminously with her. He is the subject of one of her clever and vivid character-sketches—a sketch which throws interesting side-lights on her own character too:—

(Miss Nightingale to Samuel Smith.) Burlington, Feb. 25, [1861]. Dear Uncle Sam—Adshead of Manchester is dead—my best pupil.… How often I have called him my “dear old Addle-head,” and now he is dead. He was a man who could hardly write or speak the Queen's English; I believe he raised himself, and was now a kind of manufacturer's agent in Manchester. He was a man of very ordinary abilities and commonplace appearance—vulgar, but never unbusiness-like, which is, I think, the worst kind of vulgarity. Having made “a competency,” he did not give up business, but devoted himself to good works for Manchester. And there is scarcely a good thing in Manchester, of which he has not been the main-stay or the source—schools, infirmary, paving and draining, water-supply, etc., etc. At 60, he takes up an entirely new subject, Hospital Construction, fired by my book, and determines to master it. This is what I think is peculiarly Anglo-Saxon. He writes to me whether I will teach him (this is about 18 months ago), and composes some plans for a Convalescent Hospital out of Manchester, to become their main Hospital if the wind is favourable. He comes up to London to see me about these. The working plans passed eight times thro' my hands and gave me more trouble than anything I ever did. Because Adshead would not employ a proper builder, but would do them himself—which is part of the same character, I believe. The plans are now quite ready, but nothing more. He meant to beg in person all over Lancashire, and had already some promises of large sums. He had been asking for about a year, but never intermitted anything. I don't know whether you remember that I had a three-months' correspondence with him (and oh! the immense trouble he took) about the transplantation of the Spitalfields and Coventry weavers to Manchester, Preston, Burnley, etc.[311] … It never came to anything.… He was 61 when he died. This is the character which I believe is quite peculiar to our race—a man, a common tradesman, who—instead of “retiring from the world” to “make his salvation,” or giving himself up to science or to his family in his old age, or founding an Order, or building a housewill[425] patiently (at 60) learn new dodges and new-fangled ideas in order to benefit his native city.… How I do feel that it is the strength of our country and worth all the R. Catholic “Orders” put together. I hate an “Order,” and am so glad I was never “let in” to form one.…

Mr. Adshead had taken a prominent part in a movement to get the Manchester Royal Infirmary condemned as insanitary, and to rebuild it in better air outside the city boundaries. Miss Nightingale, though she did not join publicly in the controversy, plied Mr. Adshead with powder and shot. But they were defeated. Manchester decided to patch and not to rebuild.

In the case of St. Thomas's Hospital in London, which was confronted from a different cause with the same choice, she was successful. Hospital officials, when in difficulty, not infrequently “went to Miss Nightingale.” This was the case with Mr. Whitfield, the Resident Medical Officer of St. Thomas's (then on its ancient site in the Borough), when the future of the Hospital was threatened by the projected extension of the South-Eastern Railway from London Bridge to Charing Cross. The Railway Company sought powers to take some of the Hospital's land, and the opinion of the Governors was likely to be divided on the policy to be pursued. Mr. Whitfield was from the first in favour of the course which ultimately prevailed; the Railway Company should be compelled to buy all the Hospital's land or none, and in the former event the Hospital should be rebuilt on a healthier site and on an improved plan. But there were others who were disposed to take the line of least resistance, and to be content with rebuilding on the old or an adjacent site so much as the railway works made necessary. Mr. Whitfield opened the case to Miss Nightingale in February 1859, and besought her aid; she entirely agreed with him, and threw herself whole-heartedly into the matter. Among the Governors of the Hospital was the Prince Consort, to whom she sent a careful memorandum. The Prince went into the case with his usual thoroughness, and ultimately concurred in Miss Nightingale's views. He was scrupulous, as the correspondence shows, to avoid any interference with the parliamentary side of the case, but he let it be known, among his colleagues on the Board of Governors, what his opinion was upon the best policy for the Hospital to pursue, in the event of Parliament leaving it any option. “Your intervention with Prince Albert,” wrote Mr. Whitfield presently to Miss Nightingale, “has wrought wonders.” But there were still two opinions. There was a strong party which attached more importance to retaining the Hospital on its old site, “in the midst of the people whom it served,” than to removing it to one which might be more salubrious, but must be more distant. This is a controversy which continually recurs. Miss Nightingale took immense pains in working up the case for removal. She resorted, as usual, to a statistical method. She analysed the place of origin of all the cases received; tabulated the percentages in various radii; and showed that the removal of the hospital to such and such distances would affect a far smaller percentage of patients than was commonly supposed. Then she made out sums in proportion, setting, on the one side, so much inconvenience and conceivable danger in making a smaller number of patients take a little longer time in reaching the Hospital; and, on the other, the greater convenience and larger chance of recovery which all the patients alike would have in better surroundings. At the end of 1860 the critical moment arrived. The Railway Company had served the Hospital with notice to decide within twenty-one days. Mr. Whitfield wrote to Miss Nightingale in a state of considerable flurry. He was by no means certain how the voting would go; every vote and every influence were important; could she not whisper once more in the Prince Consort's ear? She wrote to the Palace forthwith; and the Prince communicated his views to the Court of Governors on her side. And not only on her side. “You will find in the Prince's letter,” she was told by one of those behind the scenes, “your own arguments and sometimes even your own words embodied.” Ultimately the Governors decided as Miss Nightingale wished. The Railway Company was required to take all or none of the Hospital's land. It took all and, as usually happens in railway cases, the price was not suffered to err on the side of moderation. St. Thomas's Hospital was removed to temporary buildings on the old Surrey Gardens, and there remained till the present Hospital was completed in 1871.

A fair American visitor, taking tea upon the terrace of the Houses of Parliament, and looking across the river to the sevenfold splendours opposite, is said to have inquired, “Are those the mansions of your aristocracy?” They are only instances of the reform which Miss Nightingale introduced in Hospital construction, being the “pavilions” of St. Thomas's. But Miss Nightingale was never consulted, I feel sure, upon the architectural ornament of the parapets. Her sense of humour would have made short work of the urns which, as some one has suggested, seem waiting for the ashes of the patients inside.

CHAPTER II
THE PASSIONATE STATISTICIAN
(1859–1861)

Full and minute statistical details are to the lawgiver, as the chart, the compass, and the lead to the navigator.—Lord Brougham.

I remember hearing the first Lord Goschen make a speech in Whitechapel many years ago, in which he avowed that for his part he was “a passionate statistician.” “Go with me,” he said, “into the study of statistics, and I will make you all enthusiasts in statistics.” Mr. Punch parodied Marlowe thereupon, and invited his readers to “all the pleasures prove That facts and figures can supply Unto the Statist's ravished eye.” I do not know whether any large response to the invitation was forthcoming from Lord Goschen's hearers or Mr. Punch's readers; though, since the day when Lord Goschen spoke, social reformers have more and more guided their schemes by the chart and compass of statistics. If Miss Nightingale saw the speech, it fell upon eyes long ago opened. A fondness for statistical method, a belief in its almost illimitable efficacy, was one of her marked characteristics.