The Life of Florence Nightingale, vol. 1 of 2

by Sir Edward Tyas Cook

II

Miss Nightingale's work in the Crimea was attended by ceaseless worry. She had to fight her way into full authority. She knew that she would win, but her enemies were active, and were for the moment in possession of the field. “There is not an official,” she said, “who would not burn me like Joan of Arc if he could, but they know that the War Office cannot turn me out because the country is with me.” She was beset with jealousies in the Crimea, both in military and in medical quarters; and to make matters worse, religious, and even racial animosities mixed themselves up in the disputes. Lord Raglan, who believed in her and always supported her, was now dead; and by some strange omission, the instructions which had been sent to him from London at the time of her original appointment were unknown to his successors in the command. The words in the published instructions—“in Turkey”—gave a sort of technical excuse (as already mentioned) to jealous officials for regarding Miss Nightingale as an interloper in the Crimea. The point, however, had no substance; for there was a female nursing establishment already in the Crimea, which had received no separate or independent instructions, and which was yet supported by Government. By what authority could it be there, except as delegated from the Lady Superintendent in Chief? But the intrusion of Miss Nightingale was, I suppose, resented by some military officers the more at Balaclava than at Scutari, in proportion as the scene was nearer to the front; how keen the resentment was, we have heard from Colonel Sterling. And as Headquarters were unsympathetic also, Miss Nightingale had an uphill task. “We get things done all the same,” she wrote to Mrs. Herbert, “only a little more slowly. When we have support at Headquarters matters advance faster, that is all. The real grievance against us is that, though subordinate to the Medical Chiefs in Office, we are superior to them in influence and in the chance of being heard at home. It is an anomaly, but so is war in England.” There had been in England no due provision for all the needs of the war. Miss Nightingale, seeing things that needed to be done, preferred to get them done by anomalous means rather than that by rule they should not be done at all.

That her analysis of the situation correctly explains the jealousy and opposition of the Medical Chiefs in Office may be gathered from their correspondence. The personal situation in the Crimea had not been eased by the statements of Mr. Bracebridge, already mentioned (p. [213]). On his return home, he had not only extolled Miss Nightingale, but had made severe strictures upon the whole medical service in the East. His speech, delivered at a public meeting, was reported very fully in the Times (Oct. 16, 1855). Miss Nightingale was doubtless suspected of complicity in this attack; but in fact she was innocent, and she was quite as angry as were the doctors when she saw the report. Mr. Bracebridge was her friend, but truth and expediency were greater friends; and she proceeded to give Mr. Bracebridge a trenchant piece of her mind (Nov. 4). She objected to his speech: “First, because it is not our business, and I have expressly denied being a medical officer, and rejected all applications both of medical men and quacks to have their systems examined[200]; secondly, because it justifies all the attacks made against us for unwarrantable interference and criticism; and, thirdly, because I believe it to be utterly unfair.” And she proceeded in much detail to defend the doctors against Mr. Bracebridge's aspersions. His indiscretion doubtless raised prejudice in medical quarters against Miss Nightingale; but there were other and deeper causes at work. Dr. Hall, the Principal Medical Officer in the Crimea, was, in some sort, the person most responsible, individually, for the state of things which had stirred so much outcry in England; and Mr. Sidney Herbert at a very early stage had put his finger on Dr. Hall's touchy spot. “I cannot help feeling,” he had written to Lord Raglan in December 1854, “that Dr. Hall resents offers of assistance as being slurs on his preparations.”[201] Dr. Hall wrote fiercely about “a system of detraction against our establishments kept up by interested parties under the garb of philanthropy.” Some became detractors, he went on, “to make their mission of importance, and they wish the world to believe that all the ameliorations in our institutions are entirely owing to their own exertions or those of a few nurses; and I am sorry to say some of our own department have pandered to this, and have been rewarded for it.” Miss Nightingale's remark upon this tirade was characteristic: “One is tempted to ask, have no others been rewarded who have nothing to show for the result of this same boasted hospital system, but the wreck of an Army, which they did not advise even the most ordinary precautions (as to diet and clothing) to prevent, and the graves at Scutari.”[202] To me, after much reading of the documents, it seems that Dr. Hall was the victim of a false position. He had been appointed Medical Inspector-General in the Crimea when he was still in India, and he did not arrive on the scene in time to think out the preparations properly. Miss Nightingale never allowed personal feeling to affect the impartiality of her judgments. Dr. Hall disputed her authority and resented her interference. She fought him, and in the end she beat him; but there are passages in her letters which bear testimony to his good services and high capacity in many respects. Nor were their personal relations unfriendly; but she saw in him throughout an antagonist influence. The Deputy Purveyor-in-Chief, Mr. David Fitz-Gerald, regarded her coming to the Crimea with equal, or greater, suspicion and dislike, and he sent home to the War Office a Confidential Report, criticizing the female nursing establishment, and making out an argumentative case against the desirability of sanctioning Miss Nightingale's claim to be the Lady Superior of the Crimean nurses. Miss Nightingale had been shown these reports by a friend, and she was angry at what she considered a campaign of secret hostility against her.

To add to the mischief, the professional difficulty (as I may call it) became entangled with the religious difficulty. Some of the nuns who had previously been assigned to the hospitals at Koulali, proceeded in October 1855, at Dr. Hall's instance, to the General Hospital at Balaclava. This was naturally regarded by Miss Nightingale as an act of usurpation upon her authority; it gave an undue proportion of Roman Catholics to a particular hospital; and, moreover, she did not consider these particular ladies, or their Reverend Mother, Mrs. Bridgeman, wholly efficient. They were most devoted and self-sacrificing, and their spiritual ministrations were admirable, but as nurses and administrators she thought less highly of them. Mr. Fitz-Gerald, on the other hand, was strongly prepossessed, as independent observers thought, in their favour. As ill-luck would have it, these ladies were for the most part Irish, and the matter was made to assume the aspect of a racial-religious feud. People who could not understand Miss Nightingale's single-minded devotion to efficient and business-like administration supposed that she was actuated by prejudice. Dr. Hall was not moved by any such suspicion; but the ladies, whom Miss Nightingale regarded as not among the more efficient of her staff of nurses, were his nominees, and he strongly backed them. There was a somewhat similar dispute about another transference of nurses in the Crimea made without Miss Nightingale's sanction; and some of the women, taking their cue from their superiors, were inclined to question and flout her authority. “I don't know what she wants here,” said one, when the Lady Superintendent appeared on the scene.[203]

III

All this controversy raised Miss Nightingale's vexation to white heat. On January 7, 1856, she wrote an official letter to the War Office, complaining of the encroachment on her department by the Medical Officer. In semi-private letters to Mr. Sidney Herbert (Feb. 20, 21, 1856) she formulated her grievances. Dr. Hall was “attempting to root her out of the Crimea.” Other officials were traducing her behind her back. The War Office was not adequately supporting her. “It is profuse,” she said, “in tinsel and empty praise which I do not want, and does not give me the real business-like efficient standing which I do want.” She begged Mr. Herbert to move in the House of Commons for the production of correspondence, so that the public might be able to judge between her and those who were traducing her, and striving to thwart her work. Mr. Herbert, in a reply[204] marked alike by good sense and good feeling, ventured “to criticize and to scold” his friend. “You have been overdone,” he said, “with your long, anxious, harassing work. You see jealousies and meannesses all round you. You hear of one-sided, unfair, and unjust reports made of your proceedings and of those under you. But you over-rate their importance, you attribute too much motive to them, and you write upon them with an irritation and vehemence which detracts very much from the weight which would attach to what you say.” There are letters to show that this was the opinion also of the more sagacious among Miss Nightingale's nearest friends. To move for papers would, Mr. Herbert added, be very injudicious. There was no public attack, and the publication of papers would call needless attention to disputes. The answers to her critics, which she had sent home, appeared to Mr. Herbert to be complete, and he understood that the War Office so considered them. Moreover the Secretary of State was about to issue orders which would clear up Miss Nightingale's position once and for all. And her own letters, though conclusive as to the facts, had in their tone done herself “less than justice.”

All this was excellent advice, and Miss Nightingale took it in good part, but not, in a phrase now sanctioned in high politics, “lying down.” She replied at great length and with full vigour. The gist of her letter was that it was easy to be calm and “statesmanlike” at a distance, but difficult not to be angry and downright when you were on the spot finding your work for the sick and wounded hampered at every turn. She had been criticized, among other things, for interference in the Purveyor's sphere. Her reply to Mr. Herbert on this point is decidedly effective, and incidentally throws light on the hardness of her life in the Crimea. Happily, she said, she had brought with her adequate supplies for herself and her staff. If she had not, they would have been in danger of starvation:—

(Miss Nightingale to Sidney Herbert.) Crimea, April 4 [1856]. I arrived here March 24 with Nurses for the two Land Transport Hospitals required by Dr. Hall in writing on March 10.[205] We have now been ten days without rations. Lord Cardigan was surprised to find his horses die at the end of a fortnight because they were without rations, and said that they “chose” to do it, obstinate brutes! The Inspector-General and Purveyors wish to see whether women can live as long as horses without rations. I thank God my charge has felt neither cold nor hunger (and is in efficient working order, having cooked and administered in both Hospitals the whole of the extras for 260 bad cases ever since the first day of their arrival). I have, however, felt both. I do not wish to make a martyr of myself; within sight of the graves of the Crimean Army of last winter (too soon forgotten in England), it would be difficult to do so. I am glad to have had the experience. For cold and hunger wonderfully sharpen the wits.… During these ten days I have fed and warmed these women at my own private expense by my own private exertions. I have never been off my horse till 9 or 10 at night, except when it was too dark to walk home over these crags even with a lantern, when I have gone on foot. During the greater part of the day I have been without food necessarily, except a little brandy and water (you see I am taking to drinking like my comrades of the Army). But the object of my coming has been attained, and my women have neither starved nor suffered.

The memory of the petty persecution to which she was subjected by hostile and jealous officials in the Crimea never faded from Miss Nightingale's mind. A reference to it will be found in a much later chapter,[206] and she often mentioned it in her notes and letters. But, though she fought the officials hard, she never showed temper in public, and she did not allow either the obstruction itself or her vexation at it to impede her work. She had come to the Crimea prepared, and her private stores sufficed to feed her staff till official obstruction was removed; whilst as for her vexation, she was careful not to show it lest her work should suffer.