Another of Miss Nightingale's characteristics—her taste for epigrammatic and often pungent expression—is conspicuous in Notes on Nursing. “Feverishness is generally supposed to be a symptom of fever; in nine cases out of ten, it is a symptom of bedding.” “No man, not even a doctor, ever gives any other definition of what a nurse should be than this—‘devoted and obedient.’ This definition would do just as well for a porter. It might even do for a horse. It would not do for a policeman.” “Some ‘obedient’ nurses know no medium between ‘Now no fire,’ ‘Now fire,’ as if they were volunteer riflemen.” “It seems a commonly received idea among men, and even among women themselves, that it requires nothing but a disappointment in love, or incapacity in other things, to turn a woman into a good nurse. This reminds one of the parish where a stupid old man was set to be schoolmaster because he was ‘past keeping the pigs.’” There is lively humour, too, in many of the personal descriptions. Miss Nightingale quotes Lord Melbourne's saying: “I would rather have men about me when I am ill; I think it requires very strong health to put up with women.”[334] “I am quite of his opinion,” she adds, and she gives some little word-pictures of the female nurse (old style). “Compelled by her dress, every woman now either shuffles or waddles—only a man can cross the floor of a sick room without shaking it.” She was writing in the days of crinolines, and draws a picture of “respectable elderly women stooping forward,” when invested therein. Another picture is of the nurse who is supposed, “like port-wine,” to improve with age. We are not told the circumstances, but we are assured that it was a “fact” that a nurse, when ordered to administer brandy-and-water to a fainting patient, supplied the last week's Punch. Then there is a description of the mincing nurse, with “an affectedly sympathizing voice, like an undertaker's at a funeral.” All Miss Nightingale's pictures were drawn from life. “I wonder,” wrote one of her friends, “if the originals will recognise themselves.”
No one, then, could read the Notes on Nursing without perceiving that the author was a woman of marked ability, of wisdom, and of true goodness. The book does not of itself prove Miss Nightingale's power of administration or resolute will; for a woman, or a man, may be decisive of speech without being masterful in action; but with this exception the reviewer was right who said that the book was “enough to explain the success” which Miss Nightingale had attained. The book points even more clearly to one of the main lines on which she was to work in the future. No one could read it without perceiving that nursing, as explained and taught by Miss Nightingale, must be a very delicate, and a very difficult, art. It required a sound mastery of the laws of household hygiene, some knowledge of medicine or surgery, and, above all, an acute and sympathetic faculty of observation. “Merely looking at the sick is not observing.” It was obvious that if Miss Nightingale's ideal of nursing was to be realized, the nurse required both training and inspiration. Nursing was an art, and like any other art, “from a shoemaker's to a sculptor's, needed in its votaries the sense of a ‘calling,’ and then a diligent apprenticeship.” The way in which Miss Nightingale translated her precepts into practice is the subject of the next chapter. In Notes on Nursing, as in nearly everything that came from her pen, what she wrote had direct reference to action.
In a characteristic appendix to her Notes on Nursing, Miss Nightingale discusses “Some Errors in Novels,” pointing out, among other things, the untruth of death-bed scenes in works of fiction. “Shakespeare,” she says, “is the only author who has ever touched the subject with truth, and his truth is only on the side of art.” “The best definition of a Nurse,” she wrote elsewhere,[335] “can be found, as always, in Shakespeare.” It is in Cymbeline that the ideal of a Nightingale nurse was prefigured:—
So kind, so duteous, diligent,
So tender over his occasions, true,
So feat, so nurse-like.
CHAPTER IV
THE NIGHTINGALE NURSES
(1860–1861)
Life is short and the art of healing is long.—Hippocrates.
“The value of Hospitals as schools of surgery and medicine is hardly greater than is their usefulness as a training for nurses, and the field is no less large. It is an employment suited to women. There has been an astonishing change in this matter since Miss Nightingale volunteered. This change is perhaps the best fruit the past half century has to show.”[336] So writes one who has devoted laborious years to the “Condition of England question.” If it be as Mr. Charles Booth says, then June 24, 1860, is a memorable day in the history of the nineteenth century[337]; for it is the day on which the Nightingale Training School for Nurses was opened at St. Thomas's Hospital.
This School was a direct outcome of Miss Nightingale's services in the Crimean War. The Nightingale Fund, amounting to £44,000, was a tribute from the British Empire to the Popular Heroine. The capital sum, after defrayment of some expenses, was invested in the name of trustees, and a Council[338] was nominated by Miss Nightingale for the administration of the Trusts to enable her to establish “an Institution for the training, sustenance, and protection of Nurses and Hospital attendants.” She intended, as we have heard,[339] to found or conduct such an Institution on her own lines, and her first idea had been to become the Superintendent of it herself.
On returning from the East, however, Miss Nightingale was in weak health, and she became absorbed in the large and manifold labours for the British Army which have already been described. She saw no early prospect of strength or time available for the superintendence of a new Institution; she was unwilling that money subscribed for a public purpose should longer lie idle. In March 1858 she wrote in this sense to Mr. Sidney Herbert,[340] the Chairman of the Council, begging to be relieved from further responsibility in the matter, and asking that the Council should proceed to apply the Fund to such objects as it might deem best. The Council, however, pointed out that the Fund was well invested; that further delay would be partly compensated for by accumulation of resources, and that the contributors were anxious that Miss Nightingale's “mind and intention should animate the work.” They, therefore, begged her to postpone a final decision, and to this suggestion she acceded. But Miss Nightingale's labours for the Army continued, and her health did not improve. Her life indeed seemed to her medical advisers to hang upon a slender thread; they thought that she could only live for a few months. She became apprehensive lest death should overtake her before she had impressed her mind and intention upon any application of the Nightingale Fund. In 1859 she set on foot preparations for doing something. A Sub-Committee of the Council was appointed, consisting of Mr. Herbert, Sir John McNeill, Sir James Clark, Dr. Bowman, and Sir Joshua Jebb, with Mr. A. H. Clough as Secretary.