The Life of Florence Nightingale, vol. 2 of 2

by Sir Edward Tyas Cook

Mr. Hardy kept his own counsel and made no sign. As the session drew near, Miss Nightingale became anxious and she poured in letters and memoranda upon him. In one of these she made what turned out to be an unfortunate mistake. She was too frank. She was pressing upon Mr. Hardy's attention the importance of the Liverpool experiment, and in the course of her exposition she said incidentally that there had been difficulties. Mr. Hardy misinterpreted the remark and made use of it to explain in the House of Commons why he did not propose to take any direct action in the matter of nursing reform. Indirectly, however, his proposals did a great deal. On February 8, 1867, Mr. Hardy introduced his Bill. So, legislation had, after all, been found necessary to meet the demand that something must be done. To that extent, then, Mr. Villiers had no need to make Mr. Hardy's life a burden to him. The question was, How much did the Bill do? and was what it did, good or bad? Those who had been working for reform were anxious to know what Miss Nightingale thought. “I should amazingly like to hear,” wrote Mr. Villiers to her, “what you say to this seven months' child born in the workhouse at Whitehall.” Mr. Ernest Hart's Association, whose attitude was summed up by Mr. Villiers as “silenced but not satisfied,” applied for her opinion. Her journalistic friends wanted hints. Dr. Sutherland was told, in a note requiring his instant attention, that “X. wants to know in what tone he is to write his article in the Daily News,” and that “Y. will write an article in the Pall Mall in any sense we wish.” Now, whenever a Bill is introduced touching a question which demands, or admits of, large reforms, there are two points of view from which it may be regarded. One man compares what is proposed with the existing state of things, and asks himself, Is there any decided improvement? Another, comparing the proposals with what might exist in the future, asks, Does the Bill approximate to the ideal? The former is the view which “practical politicians” take; the latter, the view which is apt to be taken by administrative enthusiasts. Miss Nightingale's administrative mind saw chiefly, and at first saw only, the points at which, and the measure in which, Mr. Hardy's Bill fell short of logical perfection. It was a tentative measure; it was largely permissive; it did something to separate the sick and the children from the ordinary paupers, but it did not do all. Moreover, so far as direct and express enactment went, it did nothing to improve workhouse nursing. Miss Nightingale pronounced the Bill, therefore, “a humbug.” Its principles were “none”; its details, “beastly.” She tried hard to get the Bill amended and extended. Sir Harry Verney, who might perhaps be described as “Member of Parliament for Miss Nightingale,” gave every assistance that was possible; and Mr. Mill, inspired largely by his old friend Mr. Chadwick (with whom Miss Nightingale also was in constant correspondence), took a prominent part in the debates to the same end. But he seldom pressed his points to a division, and there was little life in the opposition. Mr. Villiers was as critical as he could reasonably be, but the real fact was that the Bill made a great and a surprising step in the direction which Miss Nightingale had pressed upon him. These were days in which Disraeli was educating his party in the political art of dishing the Whigs, and the difficulty was, as Mr. Jowett wrote to Miss Nightingale, to discover any clear difference between a Tory and a Radical. Mr. Mill, with the candour that became a philosopher, “had no doubt that the Bill would effect a vast improvement”; Mr. Villiers, with the determination of the politician to score a point, admitted that “the Bill would set the ball rolling,” and reflected that anything might presently come from a party which had been converted “from pure Conservatism to Household Suffrage in 48 hours”; and Mr. Hardy, in his conduct of the measure, was careful to conciliate the other side. He agreed to all the objections “in principle,” pleaded the difficulty of doing everything in a moment, and claimed for his Bill that it was “only a beginning.” And so, in fact, it turned out; while, even at the time, the reforms made by the Bill, which became an Act on March 29, 1867, were sufficiently beneficent. The whole of the unions and parishes in London were formed, by an Order under the Act, into one district, “The Metropolitan Asylum District,” for the treatment of insane, fever, and small-pox cases, which had hitherto been dealt with in the workhouses. Separate infirmaries were formed for the non-infectious sick, with a greatly enlarged cubic space per inmate. Dispensaries were established throughout the metropolis. Above all, the “Metropolitan Common Poor Fund” (the “Hospital and Asylum Rate” of Miss Nightingale's Memorandum) was established, and to it were charged the maintenance of the “asylums,” medicines, etc., and the maintenance of pauper children in separate schools. When the battle was lost—or won—Miss Nightingale counted up the gains, and said, “This is a beginning; we shall get more in time.”[85] And such has been the case. The Act of 1867 was the foundation on which many improvements in medical relief under the Poor Law have been laid,[86] and the principles implied in the Act—the separation of the sick from the paupers, and in the case of London the making medical relief a common charge—are likely to receive yet further recognition. They are the principles for which Miss Nightingale contended. Her influence in forming the public opinion which made the legislation of 1867 possible was referred to in both Houses of Parliament.[87]

VI

Soon after the Act of 1867 came into operation, to the improvement of London workhouses, the pioneer of improved workhouse nursing died in Liverpool. The work of Miss Agnes Jones, whose early difficulties have been described above, had gone ahead with ever-increasing success. The difficulties indeed continued, and throughout 1867 Miss Nightingale was still busy in giving encouragement and advice; but the results of the work were so satisfactory that in March 1867 the Liverpool Vestry decided to extend the trained nursing to the female wards and to throw the whole cost upon the rates. When the strain of the increased work was at its severest point, Miss Jones was attacked by fever, and she died on February 19, 1868. To Good Words in the following June Miss Nightingale contributed a touching paper in memory of her friend and disciple:—

She died as she had lived, at her post in one of the largest workhouse infirmaries in the Kingdom. She lived the life, and died the death, of the saints and martyrs; though the greatest sinner would not have been more surprised than she to have heard this said of herself. In less than three years she had reduced one of the most disorderly hospital populations in the world to something like Christian discipline, such as the police themselves wondered at. She had converted a vestry to the conviction of the economy as well as humanity of nursing pauper sick by trained nurses. She had converted the Poor-Law Board—a body, perhaps, not usually given to much enthusiasm. She had disarmed all opposition, all sectarian zealotism; so that Roman Catholic and Unitarian, High Church and Low Church, all literally rose up and called her “blessed.” All, of all shades of religious creed, seemed to have merged their differences in her, seeing in her the one true essential thing, compared with which they acknowledged their differences to be as nothing. And aged paupers made verses in her honour after her death.

In less than three years—the time generally given to the ministry on earth of that Saviour whom she so earnestly strove closely to follow—she did all this. She had the gracefulness, the wit, the unfailing cheerfulness—qualities so remarkable but so much overlooked in our Saviour's life. She had the absence of all asceticism, or “mortification,” for mortification's sake, which characterized His work, and any real work in the present[141] day as in His day. And how did she do all this? She was not, when a girl, of any conspicuous ability, except that she had cultivated in herself to the utmost a power of getting through business in a short time, without slurring it over and without fid-fadding at it;—real business—her Father's business. She was always filled with the thought that she must be about her “Father's business.” How can any undervalue business-habits? as if anything could be done without them. She could do, and she did do, more of her Father's business in six hours than ordinary women do in six months, or than most of even the best women do in six days.… What she went through during her workhouse life is scarcely known but to God and to one or two. Yet she said that she had “never been so happy in all her life.” All the last winter she had under her charge above 50 nurses and probationers, above 150 pauper scourers, from 1290 to 1350 patients, being from two to three hundred more than the number of beds. All this she had to provide for and arrange for, often receiving an influx of patients without a moment's warning. She had to manage and persuade the patients to sleep three and four in two beds; sometimes six, or even eight children had to be put in one bed; and being asked on one occasion whether they did not “kick one another,” they answered, “Oh, no, ma'am, we're so comfor'ble.” Poor little things, they scarcely remembered ever to have slept in a bed before. But this is not the usual run of workhouse life. And, if any one would know what are the lowest depths of human vice and misery, would see the festering mass of decay of living human bodies and human souls, and then would try what one loving soul, filled with the spirit of her God, can do to let in the light of God into this hideous well (worse than the well of Cawnpore), to bind up the wounds, to heal the broken-hearted, to bring release to the captives—let her study the ways, and follow in the steps of this one young, frail woman, who has died to show us the way—blessed in her death as in her life.

The death of Miss Jones involved Miss Nightingale in much anxiety and additional responsibility. “The whole work of finding her successor has fallen upon me,” she wrote to Madame Mohl (March 20); “and in addition they expect me to manage the Workhouse at Liverpool from my bedroom.” And again (April 30): “I have seven or eight hours a day additional writing for the last two months about this Liverpool workhouse.” The bundle of correspondence on the subject makes this statement quite credible. “I believe I have found a successor[88] at last. I don't think anything in the course of my long life ever struck me so much as the deadlock we have been placed in by the death of one pupil—combined, you know, with the enormous jaw, the infinite female ink which England pours forth on ‘Woman's Work.’ It used to be said that people gave their blood to their country. Now they give their ink.” Miss Nightingale's first concern was to put heart and strength into the nurses who were now deprived of their Chief. Writing as their “affectionate friend and fellow-sufferer,” she called upon them to fight the good fight without flinching. “Many battles which seemed desperate while the General lived have been fought and won by the soldiers who, when they saw their General fall, were determined to save his name and win the ground he had died for. And shall we fight a heavenly battle, a battle to cure the bodies and souls of God's poor, less well than men fight an earthly battle to kill and wound?” “The nurses have been splendid,” she was able to report presently. Miss Nightingale concluded her paper in Good Words with a stirring appeal to others—Poor Law officials, on their part, and devoted women, on theirs—to go and do likewise. “The Son of God goes forth to war, who follows in his train? Oh, daughters of God, are there so few to answer?” The appeal awoke a response in at least one heart. One of the most valued of Miss Nightingale's disciples ascribed her call to this article in Good Words. “Some of us,” she says, “who were children in the days of the Crimean War when Miss Nightingale's most famous work was done, were responsible girls at home, nursing as occasion arose in our families, by the light of her Notes, to the music of Longfellow's verse, when once again she came before us, flashing out of her retirement with the trumpet-call of ‘Una.’” Many are now called to such work, but few, I suppose, are chosen—in the sense of being found worthy to do the work in the spirit of Agnes Jones. The Liverpool experiment, rendered successful by her devotion, rapidly made its mark. In ten years' time the system of employing pauper inmates as nurses had been entirely superseded, in all sick asylums and separate infirmaries, by paid nurses. In 1897 the employment of pauper nurses in any workhouse was forbidden, and the training of the paid nurses has been continuously improved.[89] To Miss Nightingale, here as in all her undertakings, each point gained was only a step on the road to perfectibility. Among some communings with herself, written in 1867, there is this entry: “Easter Sunday. Never think that you have done anything effectual in nursing in London till you nurse, not only the sick poor in workhouses, but those at home.”

CHAPTER II
ALLIANCE WITH SIR BARTLE FRERE
(1867–1868)

Truly these poor people will have cause to bless you long after English Viceroys and dynasties are of the past.—Sir Bartle Frere (Letter to Miss Nightingale, May 6, 1869).