Miss Nightingale often sought, as every good School Preacher seeks, to arrest the attention of the young by topical allusions, especially to stirring and heroic deeds. She often compared Hospital Nurses to missionaries, and held up Livingstone as an example. He was one of the best of missionaries, not as going about “with a Bible in his hand and another in his pack,” but by the influence of his own purity, fidelity, and uprightness. She introduced, in similar fashion, stories of Rorke's Drift, of Tel-el-Kebir, and of Gordon at Khartoum. More rarely she referred to incidents in her own career, and such passages, one can understand, must have sent a thrill through an audience in which most of the Nurses looked up to Florence Nightingale as their “honoured Chief” or “Queen.” But when she thus referred to herself, it was only to say that any success or repute she had attained was due to faithful attention to the smallest details. “The greatest compliment,” she said, “I ever received as a Hospital nurse was this: that I was put to clean and ‘do’ every day the Special Ward, with the severest medical or surgical case which I was nursing, because I did it thoroughly and without disturbing the patient. That was at the first Hospital I ever served in. I think I could give a lesson in Hospital housemaid's work now.” “I have had more experience,” she said in another discourse, “in all countries and in different ways of Hospitals than almost any one ever had before; but if I could recover strength so much as to walk about, I would begin all over again. I would come for a year's training to St. Thomas's Hospital under your admirable Matron (and I venture to add that she would find me the closest in obedience to all our rules), sure that I should learn every day, learn all the more for my past experience, and then I would try to be learning every day to the last hour of my life—‘And when his legs were cuttit off, He fought upon his stumps.’”
The reading of the “Address from Miss Nightingale” was one of the events of the nursing year. Sir Harry Verney, as chairman of the Nightingale Fund, often read the addresses to the assembled Probationers, but they were also printed, and a copy was given to each nurse. For the most part they were written for the Probationers at St. Thomas's, but from time to time Miss Nightingale sent a similar address to the Nightingale Nurses serving in Edinburgh. “The Nurses had been asking me only a few days before,” wrote the Lady Superintendent (Jan. 6, 1875), “whether you had remembered them this year, and were going to write to them. Most of them prize your letters very much. They are trumpet-calls to duty and to greater efforts for a higher standard.” In some years there was another “field-day” for the Nightingale Nurses, when a party of them were invited by Sir Harry and Lady Verney to Claydon, and a long summer day, passed in sauntering in the grounds or in lawn-tennis, ended with a short service in the Church. On one or two of these occasions, Miss Nightingale was able to be present, and photographs were taken of her seated in the midst of the nurses.
V
The high ideal of the Nurse's calling which Miss Nightingale cherished throughout her life, and strove to inculcate upon her disciples, explains her dislike of schemes of certification, registration, orders, and other professional organization. She was indeed much interested in, and she did much to promote, the practice of thrift and provident assurance among the Nurses.[161] But further than this, in the organization of nursing as a kind of trade union, Miss Nightingale was never inclined to go, and, as we shall hear in a later chapter, she was altogether opposed to a professional “register.” There were those who maintained that the problem of improving Nursing was an economic problem; that good pay would attract good nurses; that the market was spoiled by the intrusion of “lady” volunteers. But to Miss Nightingale Nursing was a Sacred Calling, only to be followed by those who felt the vocation, and only followed to good purpose by those who pursued it as the service of God through the highest kind of service to man. There were those, again, who approached the problem from a point of view the opposite of the economic, and thought that a “religious” motive (in the ordinary sense of the term) was the sure way to good nursing, and who thus attached supreme importance to organization in “Orders,” “Companies,” and the like. To this view Miss Nightingale was equally opposed, because to her Nursing was an Art, and the essence of success was artistic training. A collection of passages, taken from a mass of correspondence, etc., on the subject,[162] may serve to make her point of view clear. “The Supply and Demand principle, taken alone, is a fallacy. It leaves out altogether the most important element, viz. the state of public opinion at the time. You have to educate public opinion up to wanting a good article. Patent pills are not proved to be good articles because the public pays heavily for them. Many matrons are dear at £30 a year. Do you suppose that if we were to offer £150 we should get a good article at once? I trow not; and I say this from no theory, but from actual experience. It is very easy to pay. It is very difficult to find good Nurses, paid or unpaid. It is trained Nurses, not paid nurses, that we want. It is not the payment which makes the doctor, but the education.—It is a question of no importance in regard to any art, whether the painter, sculptor, or poet is a ‘lady’ or a person working for her bread, a volunteer, or a person of the ‘lower middle class.’ Some thirty years ago I remember reading Rejected Addresses. A gentleman, endeavouring to explain how a certain lady ‘became the mother of the Pantalowski’ observes, ‘The fineness of the weather, the blueness of her riding-habit all conspired to interest me’ (I quote from memory). We are pleased to hear that the weather was fine and that the habit was blue, but we do not see what they have to do with it. I am neither for nor against ‘Lady Nurses’ (what a ridiculous term! what would they say if we were to talk about ‘Gentlemen Doctors’?). I am neither for nor against ‘Paid Nurses.’ My principle has always been: that we should give the best training we could to any woman of any class, of any sect, paid or unpaid, who had the requisite qualifications, moral, intellectual, and physical, for the vocation of a Nurse. Unquestionably, the educated will be more likely to rise to the post of Superintendents, not because they are ladies, but because they are educated.—The relation of a nursing staff to the medical officers is that of the building staff to an architect. And neither can know its business if not trained to it. To pit the medical school against the nurse-training school is to pit the hour-hand against the minute-hand. The worst nursing in Europe is that of Sisterhoods, where no civil administration or medical school is admitted. The worst hospitals in Europe are those where no nurse-training schools are admitted, where the doctor is, in fact, the matron.—You ask me whether it is possible to follow out successfully the profession of Nursing except from ‘higher motives.’ What are the ‘higher motives’? That is what I want to know. Nearly all the Christian Orders will tell you: the first is to save your soul. The Roman Catholics will tell you, to serve God's Church. But they do not infer that you are to strain mind and soul and strength in finding out the laws of health. The religious motive is not higher, but lower, if the element of religion enters in to impede this search. In the perfect nurse, there ought to be what may be called (1) the physical (or natural) motive, (2) the intellectual (or professional) motive, and (3) the religious motive—all three. The natural motive is the love of nursing the sick, which may entirely conquer (as I know by personal experience) a physical loathing and fainting at the sight of operations, etc., and I do not believe that the ‘higher motive’ (as it is usually called) can so disguise a natural disinclination as to make a nurse acceptable to the patients. The good nurse is a creature much the same all the world over, whether in her coif and cloister, or taking her £20 or £50 a year. The professional motive is the desire and perpetual effort to do the thing as well as it can be done, which exists just as much in the Nurse, as in the Astronomer in search of a new star, or in the Artist completing a picture. These may be thought fine words. I can only say that I have seen this professional ambition in the nurse who could hardly read or write, but who aimed just as much at perfection in her care and dressings as the surgeon did in his operation. The ‘professional’ who does this has the higher motive; the ‘religious’ who thinks she can serve God ‘anyhow’ has not. But I do entirely and constantly believe that the religious motive is essential for the highest kind of nurse. There are such disappointments, such sickenings of the heart, that they can only be borne by the feeling that one is called to the work by God, that it is a part of His work, that one is a fellow-worker with God. ‘I do not ask for success,’ said dear Agnes Jones, even while she was taking every human means to ensure success, ‘but that the will of God may be done in me and by me.’”
Holding these convictions, Miss Nightingale believed much in individual influence, and little in organized institutions. “For my part,” she said, “I think that people should always be Founders. And this is the main argument against Endowments. While the Founder is there, his or her work will be done, not afterwards. The Founder cannot foresee the evils which will arise when he is no longer there. Therefore let him not try to establish an Order. This has been most astonishingly true with the Order of the Jesuits as founded by S. Ignatius Loyola, and with S. Vincent de Paul's Sœurs de la Charité. It is quite immeasurable the breadth and length which now separates the spirit of those Orders from the spirit of their Founders. But it is no less true with far less ambitious Societies.” So, then, Miss Nightingale had little faith in forms and institutions, and in one of her later Addresses (1888) she expressed herself in terms of apprehensive scepticism about the validity of nursing Certificates and Associations, and of the importance attached to making nursing a “Profession.” It was the higher motive (as interpreted above) to which she attached supreme importance, and for inculcating it she believed that only individual influence could avail. Did she succeed or fail herein? It may be that, in dearth of inspiring individuals, professional organization is the second best thing, and fills a useful place. Miss Nightingale herself was always more conscious of her failures than of her successes. But it is impossible for anyone who has been privileged to read the correspondence between Miss Nightingale and her pupils not to feel assured that the spirit of the Founder was imparted to other high-minded women who carried the work into many fields. The best of her pupils were the most conscious, like their Mistress, of shortcomings. “I have failed,” wrote one of them, in pouring out her soul during a holiday retrospect, “failed in the thing you most speak of, failed in carrying on my Nurses ‘in the path towards perfection.’” “But the Master whisper'd, ‘Follow the Gleam.’” Of one of her best pupils it was recorded that “she never spoke or cared to be reminded of what she had done; her constant cry was ‘How many things still remain to be done.’”[163] This lady was a true disciple of the Founder. To the end of her life it was on the path towards perfection that Miss Nightingale's heart and mind were set. In her last years, when her secretary sought to interest her by talk about hospitals and nurses, she was never greatly pleased by any record of things well done. “Tell me,” she would say, “of something which might be made better.”
CHAPTER IV
AN INDIAN REFORMER
(1874–1879)
Never to know that you are beaten is the way to victory. To be before one's Government is an honourable distinction. What greater reward can a good worker desire than that the next generation should forget him, regarding as an obsolete truism work which his own generation called a visionary fanaticism?—Florence Nightingale (1877).
Miss Nightingale was in one sense never more in office than when she was “out of office.” The passion of her later life was the redress of Indian sufferings and grievances, and during the years 1874–79, and for many years afterwards, she did an enormous amount of work to that end. It was the kind of work which a Minister does, or sets his subordinates to do, when he is getting up a subject for parliamentary debate, or framing a project of legislation. The milieu in which Miss Nightingale did this work was also in a sense official. Her excursions into difficult problems of Indian policy and administration were regarded by many people as unsafe and inexpedient, and this view was not confined to such officials as disagreed with her conclusions. Mr. Jowett was alternately overborne by her enthusiasm into trying to help her Indian work, and insistent upon her giving up most of it. The latter attitude predominated. Indian land questions were not her special subjects; she could never hope to know the ins and outs of them. Her sister was uniformly of the same opinion: “What can you know about such things, my dear?” But, after all, how much does a minister know at first-hand of the business of a Department new to him? Generally, far less than Miss Nightingale knew of Indian business. A minister either accepts the views of his subordinates, or becomes himself a master of his subject by using access to the best sources of information. Miss Nightingale, to a considerable extent, had access to the same sources. She corresponded with successive Secretaries of State and Viceroys. She was in close touch during many years with the Permanent Under-Secretary, Sir Louis Mallet, who, though he did not always agree with her particular conclusions, was entirely sympathetic in her general aims, and, so far as official propriety admitted, gave her every facility for pursuing her researches. Indian Governors and ex-Governors were at her service for information or discussion. There is voluminous correspondence during these years with her old friends, Lord Napier and Ettrick and Sir Bartle Frere, and with new friends, Sir George Campbell and Sir Richard Temple. With Sir George, a frequent visitor at South Street, she was especially well pleased. “Not for years,” she wrote to M. Mohl (Aug. 10, 1874), “have I seen a man in such heroic passion against oppression.” Anglo-Indians, when in retirement in South Kensington, are seldom averse from imparting their views, and Miss Nightingale had a retinue of them, pleased to give her information. Those who had inside experience knew how much she had done for India, and took it as a compliment that she should notice their work and ask them for advice. “Accept my most grateful thanks,” wrote General Baker, on retiring from the India Office Council (Oct. 11, 1875), “not only for your very kind letter[164] and important pamphlet, but also for one of the most complete and agreeable surprises that I have ever met with. It never occurred to me for a moment that my humble efforts for the sanitation of India were so indulgently watched by the High Priestess of the Science.” Colonel Yule, the member of Council who succeeded Sir Bartle Frere in the charge of sanitary affairs, and Mr. W. T. Thornton, the Secretary for Public Works, were in frequent correspondence with her. On the special subject of irrigation, she was “coached,” not only by a leading authority presently to be mentioned, but by General Rundall (ex-Inspectorgeneral of Indian irrigation), Colonel J. G. Fife, Colonel F. T. Haig, and many other experts. When she turned to Indian education, Mr. A. W. Croft, the Director of Public Instruction, corresponded freely with her. Of her private studies, there is evidence in a great accumulation of Indian Blue-books, Proceedings, Minutes, pamphlets, and other papers, of which many are annotated, abstracted, collated. She had, too, a network of correspondents in India. There were in various parts of the country Sanitary Commissioners, doctors, engineers, Irrigation officers, who wrote to her constantly, and sometimes more freely than in official reports. There were occasions—as in a dispute, once hot, now as dead as the unhappy subjects of it[165]—when her friends in the India Office had to admit that her information was earlier and better than theirs. So, then, if her friends asked why she meddled in affairs of which she could not really know anything, she only set the harder to work in mastering the voluminous information at her disposal.
Yet, all the while, she was “out of office.” The conjunction of circumstances which gave her much immediate power at the War Office, through Sidney Herbert, and afterwards in the earlier stages of Indian sanitary reform, was no longer operative; and there was now disproportion between her expenditure of effort and the immediate effect which it produced. In this part of her life's work Miss Nightingale suffered from some confusion of aim. Her official connections, though they gave her the advantage of some good information, interfered with the effect of her work as a publicist. Her work as a publicist made her distrusted in some official circles. She would perhaps have done better to confine her exertions to the influencing of public opinion by more consistent and sustained writing. The pity of it is, as we shall learn presently, that the book which she designed as a permanent contribution to the Indian question was never completed in her life-time. Still, in spite of all, Miss Nightingale's work as an Indian Reformer, which absorbed many hours of every day in her life for twenty-five years, was not without effect. In various specific matters she exerted some influence at the time; whilst her personal influence and her writings did something to form the public opinion which made later reforms possible.