The interview with Lord Mayo was on the 28th, and a few days later Miss Nightingale saw Lady Mayo also. On the morning of the 28th Dr. Sutherland was summoned to South Street. He was in a hurry and hoped there was “nothing much on to-day.” “There is a ‘something,’” ran the message sent down to him, “which most people would think a very big thing indeed. And that is seeing the Viceroy or Sacred Animal of India. I made him go to Shoeburyness yesterday and come to me this afternoon, because I could not see him unless you give me some kind of general idea what to state.” Dr. Sutherland, thus prettily flattered, stayed, and they discussed what should be said to the Sacred Animal. Next day she reported the conversation to Dr. Sutherland:—
What he said was not unsensible but essentially Irish. He said that he should see Sir J. Lawrence for two days before he (Sir J. L.) left. And he said he should ask Sir J. L. to call upon me the moment he returned, and to ask me to write out to him (Lord Mayo) anything that Sir J. L. thought “a new broom” could do. That was clever of him. But he asked me (over and over again) that I should now at once before he goes write down for him something (he said) “that would guide me upon the sanitary administration as soon as I arrive.” And “especially (he said) about that Executive.” He asked most sagacious questions about all the men.
Miss Nightingale took counsel with Sir Bartle Frere and Dr. Sutherland and then wrote a Memorandum for the new Viceroy. She covered the whole ground of sanitary improvement, dwelling much on questions of irrigation and agricultural development as aids thereto. “A noble and a most complete Paper,” said Sir Bartle Frere (Nov. 1), “and it will be invaluable to India.” Perhaps it impressed the new Viceroy also. At any rate Lord Mayo's administration was marked by some improvement in sanitary conditions, and by extension of irrigation works.[104] He also initiated two of the indispensable preliminaries to sanitary progress: the Census, and a statistical survey of the country. In an autobiographical note detailing her relations with successive Viceroys, Miss Nightingale says that Lord Mayo's policy in sanitary and agricultural matters was in accord with lines which Sir Bartle Frere and she desired. “I say nothing,” she adds, “of his splendid services in foreign policy, in his Feudatory States and Native Chiefs policy, in which doubtless Sir B. Frere helped him. I saw him more than once before he started, and he corresponded with me all the time of his too brief Viceroyalty. I think he was the most open man, except Sidney Herbert, I ever knew. I think it was Lord Stanley who said of him, ‘He did things not from calculation, but from the nature of his mind.’ Lord Mayo said himself that his Irish experience with ‘a subject race’ was so useful to him in India. He said that he was certainly the only Viceroy who had sold his own cattle in the market.” “Florence the First, Empress of Scavengers, Queen of Nurses, Reverend Mother Superior of the British Army, Governess of the Governor of India” was Mr. Jowett's address when he heard of the interviews with Lord Mayo. “Empress of Scavengers” was M. Mohl's title for her at this time. “Rather,” she said, “Maid of all (dirty) work; or, The Nuisances Removal Act: that's me.”
Miss Nightingale's greatest ally in India at this time was, however, Lord Napier, Governor of Madras. “I remember Scutari,” he wrote (June 24, 1868), “and I am one of the few original faithful left, and I think I am attached to you irrespective of sanitation.” He was firm in her cause even where Sir John Lawrence had seemed unfaithful. The Governor-General had abandoned a scheme for female nursing (p. [157]); Lord Napier carried one through in Madras, and corresponded at some length with Miss Nightingale on the subject. Sir John Lawrence had refused her advice to send some Engineer Officers home to study sanitary works; he had “none to spare.” Lord Napier adopted the advice, and sent Captain H. Tulloch, whose visit to England and association with Mr. Rawlinson resulted in reports on urban drainage and the utilization of sewage. Lady Napier gave letters of introduction to Miss Nightingale to other officials from Madras, and Lord Napier reported progress to her constantly:—
(Lord Napier to Miss Nightingale.) Kodaikanal, Sept. 22 [1867]. I write to you from one of the Arsenals of Health in Southern India, from the Palni Hills, the most romantic and least visited of these salubrious and beautiful places.… I have deferred writing to you till I could announce that some sanitary good had really been secured worthy of your attention. I cannot say that such is yet the case, but something has been proposed and designed. We are building central jails to empty the district jails, and we are remodelling the district jails and rebuilding two or three. We are aerating and enlarging the lock-ups. I have stirred up the doctors in the general hospital at Madras. I have proposed to take the soldiers out of it and build them a new separate military Hospital (not yet sanctioned). I have endeavoured to raise the little native dispensaries and hospitals out of their sordid baseness and poverty. I am trying to get a new female hospital sanctioned for women, both European and native, with respectable diseases, and the others taken out and settled apart. I don't think my action has gone beyond a kind of impulse and movement. But we may effect something more important in the coming year. My wife has taken an active interest in the Magdalen Hospital, the Lying-in Hospital, and the orphanages of various kinds. We want money, zeal, belief; and knowledge in many quarters.
(Lord Napier to Miss Nightingale.) Madras, Sept. 3 [1868]. I am truly happy to find that I can do something to please you and that you will count me as a humble but devoted member of the Sanitary band, of your band I might more properly say! Do you know that I was sent by Lord Stratford to salute and welcome you on your first arrival at Scutari and that I found you stretched on the sofa where I believe you never lay down again? I thought then that it would be a great happiness to serve you, and if the Elchi would have given me to you I would have done so with all my heart and learned many things that would have been useful to me now. But the Elchi would never employ any one on serious work who was at all near himself, so I spent the best years of my life at a momentous crisis doing nothing when there was enough for all! But if I can do something now it will be a late compensation … [report on various sanitary measures then in hand]. I have read the beautiful account of “Una” last evening driving along the melancholy shore. I send it to Lady Napier, who is in the Hills. I will write again soon, as you permit and even desire it, and I am ever your faithful, grateful and devoted Servant, Napier.
(Lord Napier to Miss Nightingale.) Madras, June 3 [1869].[171] … Now I have a good piece of news for you. We are framing a Bill for a general scheme of local taxation in this Presidency, both in municipalities and in villages, and the open country, to provide for three purposes—local roads, primary education, and Sanitation—such as improvement of wells, regulation of pilgrimages and fairs, drainage, &c. It will be very unpopular I fear in the first instance, for the people wish neither to be taught nor cured, but I think it is better on the whole to force their hands. We are driven to it, for I see clearly that we must wait a long time for help from the Supreme Government.… I was pleased and flattered to be mentioned by you in the same sentence with Lord Herbert. Indeed I am not worthy to tie the latchet of his shoe, but there are weaknesses and illusions which endure to the last, and I suppose I never shall be indifferent to see myself praised by a woman and placed in connection, however remote, with a person of so much virtue and distinction. You shall have the little labour that is left in me.[105]
A subject on which Miss Nightingale wrote both to Lord Napier and to Lord Mayo was the inquiry into cholera in India ordered by the Secretary of State in April 1869. She had made the proposition many months before. Indian medical officers were absorbed in propounding theories; Miss Nightingale wanted first an exhaustive inquiry into the facts. Even if such an inquiry did not establish any of the rival theories, it must lead, she thought, to much sanitary improvement. Sir Bartle Frere strongly supported the idea, and it was arranged that the War Office Sanitary Committee should make the suggestion and elaborate the scheme of procedure to be followed in India. The Committee meant for such a purpose Dr. Sutherland, and Dr. Sutherland meant in part Miss Nightingale. Sir Bartle Frere constantly wrote to her to know when the India Office might expect the Instructions, and Miss Nightingale as constantly applied the spur to Dr. Sutherland. On April 3 she delivered an ultimatum: “Unless the Cholera Instructions are sent to me to-day, I renounce work and go away.” At last they arrived, and her friend received a withering note: “April 13, 1869. I beg leave to remark that I found a letter of yours this morning dated early in Dec., which I mean to show you, in which, with the strongest objurgations of me, you told me that you could not come because you intended to get the Cholera Instructions through by December 12, 1868. My dear soul, really Sir B. Frere could not have known the exhausting labour he has put you all to; to produce that in four months must prove fatal to all your constitutions! He is an ogre.” Dr. Sutherland's Instructions are admirably exhaustive, and may well have taken some time to prepare. The remaining stages of the affair were quick, and the Secretary of State's dispatch went out to the Government of India on April 23, followed by private letters from Miss Nightingale. The Sanitary Blue-books of successive years contain copious reports and discussions upon this “Special Cholera Inquiry.” It furnished much material for scientific discussion, by which Miss Nightingale sometimes feared that what she regarded as the essence of the matter was in danger of being overlaid. She and the Army Sanitary Committee took occasion more than once to point out that “whatever may be the origin of cholera, or whatever may ultimately be found to be its laws of movement, there is nothing in any of the papers except what strengthens the evidence for the intimate relation which all previous experience has shown to exist between the intensity and fatality of cholera in any locality and the sanitary condition of the population inhabiting it.”[106] The origin of cholera is now said to be a micro-organism identified by Koch, but the laws of its movement and activity remain inscrutable. Meanwhile, all subsequent experience has confirmed the doctrine which Miss Nightingale continually preached, that the one protection against cholera consists in a standing condition of good sanitation.