Lume è lassù che visibile face
Lo Creatore a quella creatura,
Che solo in lui vedere ha la sua pace.
Perfected in weakness, she was strong in moments of illumination “to see God in all things, and all things in God, the Eternal shining through the accidents of space and time.” [147]
CHAPTER III
MISS NIGHTINGALE'S SCHOOL
(1872–1879)
Let each Founder train as many in his or her spirit as he or she can. Then the pupils will in their turn be Founders also.—Florence Nightingale.
Miss Nightingale did not do as she had planned, and go in her own person to St. Thomas's Hospital, but in another sense the year 1872 was the year of her descent upon it. Not, indeed, as we saw in the preceding Part, that she had ever abandoned a personal interest in the Training School, but there were now new conditions which called for additional care, and Miss Nightingale, being out of office, was more free to give it. Henceforth she became, in a yet more direct manner than heretofore, the head of the Nightingale School, and the Chief of the Nightingale Nurses.
The year 1871 had seen the removal of St. Thomas's Hospital from its temporary quarters in the old Surrey Gardens to the present building opposite the Houses of Parliament. The foundation-stone had been laid by Queen Victoria in 1868. Miss Nightingale had been requested to ask the Queen to do this, and she had preferred the petition through Sir James Clark. “I never pressed Her Majesty so hard upon anything before,” said he, in announcing the Royal pleasure. The Queen had again shown her interest in the Hospital by opening the new building in June 1871. The number of beds was now greatly increased, and with it the number of nurses and probationers. The control of the nurses was likely to be relaxed as it was spread over a larger number, and Miss Nightingale resolved to hold a Visitation.
First, she sent Dr. Sutherland with the consent of the hospital authorities to inspect the new buildings and to consider all the arrangements from the point of view of an expert sanitarian. She examined and cross-examined Sisters and Nurses on the same points, and put into print a list of the defects which needed remedy.[148] Then Miss Nightingale took in hand the education, technical and moral, of her own Nightingale School. She had already observed that the Lady Probationers, appointed to responsible posts, were not always adequate to their duties: the overworked Matron had perhaps sometimes recommended unsuitable persons. She found on questioning the Nurses that their technical education did not reach the high standard which she desired to maintain. She feared that the moral standard similarly fell short of her ideal; nursing was coming to be regarded too much as a business profession, and too little as a sacred calling. Miss Nightingale determined to throw herself into a sustained effort for the better realization of her ideal. Directly or indirectly, she instituted sweeping reforms. The result of them was, as she wrote to Mr. Bonham Carter (Aug. 1875), that the Training School became “a Home—a place of moral, religious and practical training—a place of training of character, habits, intelligence, as well as of acquiring knowledge.” Those who saw the Nightingale nurses in these years were struck by the bright, kindly and pleasant spirit which seemed to pervade the company of them, and could well understand that the Institution was really, as its foundress intended, a home as well as a school.
Mr. Whitfield, the Resident Medical Officer, who had acted since the foundation of the Nursing School as Medical Instructor of the Probationers, resigned that post, and Mr. J. Croft, who had lately become one of the Surgeons to the Hospital, was appointed in his stead. Miss Nightingale saw and corresponded with Mr. Croft, and liked him much. “I have always dreaded,” he wrote (Feb. 24, 1873), “remaining a ‘stagnant man.’[149] I hope to become, as you would have me, an active and faithful comrade.” He gave clinical instruction to the Probationers; delivered courses of lectures—general, medical, and surgical in the several terms—throughout the year, of which he submitted the syllabus to Miss Nightingale, and at her request drew up a “Course of Reading for Probationers.” Other members of the Medical Staff gave courses of lectures also, and examinations were made more regular and searching. The answers written by the Probationers, and their notes on the lectures, were from time to time sent in to Miss Nightingale, so that she might gain an idea of the general standard of instruction, and perhaps administer rebuke or encouragement to individual pupils. “I think,” Miss Nightingale was told on one occasion, “that the ladies are thoroughly ashamed of the appearance they made at Mr. Croft's last examination, and wish to retrieve themselves.” Their good resolutions seem to have been successful, for presently one of the Medical Officers reported that “the answers which I have received this year collectively are much better than in former years, they are indeed exceedingly good.” “I read your Case-papers,” Miss Nightingale wrote in one of her Addresses, “with more interest than if they were novels. Some are meagre, especially in the history of the cases. Some are good. Please remember that, besides your own instruction, you can give me some too, by making these most interesting cases as interesting as possible by making them accurate and entering into the full history.” The new Hospital had greatly increased the demands upon the time of the Matron, Mrs. Wardroper, and left her less able to supervise the Probationers. An Assistant-Superintendent of the School was appointed with the title of Home Sister.[150] It was one of her duties to supplement the lectures and bedside demonstration of the medical officers by regular class-teaching.
Miss Nightingale, however, attached even more importance to the Home Sister's influence on the moral and spiritual side of the School. The Home Sister was to encourage general reading, to arrange Bible classes, to give interests to the nurses in order “to keep them above the mere scramble for a remunerative place.” The two sides of the School are closely joined in the letters to Miss Nightingale from the Home Sister and Matron—letters telling on one page of the progress of Probationers in antiseptic dressing and so forth, and on another of their Bible readings or selected hymns. Miss Nightingale was especially pleased when Canon Farrar allotted some seats at St. Margaret's to her nurses and took a Confirmation class among them.