The Life of Florence Nightingale, Volume 1 quotes

To Miss Nightingale's executors I am indebted for the confidence which they have shown in entrusting her Papers to my discretion.

A biography is worth nothing unless it is sincere.

The aim of the present book has been to tell the truth about the subject of it, and I have done my work under no conscious temptation to suppress, exaggerate, extenuate, or distort.

She wanted to know at every stage precisely what a person, or a book, or an institution was driving at.

“Of all human sounds,” she said, “I think the words I don't know are the saddest.”

Unless a book had something of definite importance to say, it had better, she thought, not be written; and in order to save the reader's time and fix his attention, he should be told at once wherein the significance of the book consists.

Be it better or worse than the real one, it is always unlike the real one.” Of no one is this saying more true than of herself.

“It has been your fate,” said Mr. Jowett to her once, “to become a Legend in your lifetime.”

Now, nothing is more persistent than a legend; and the legend of Florence Nightingale became fixed early in her life—at a time, indeed, antecedent to that at which her best work in the world, as she thought, had begun.

It was as Administrator and Reformer, more than as Angel, that she showed her peculiar powers. Queen Victoria, with native shrewdness and a touch of humour, hit off the truth about Miss Nightingale's services in the Crimea in concise words:

“Such a clear head. I wish we had her at the War Office.”

The influence of Miss Nightingale's service in the Crimea was great. Some of it is obvious, and on the moral side Longfellow's poem said the first, and the last, word.

… which has the strongest claim after education on the resources of the Government is sanitation,” and explained that “the Budget estimate of expenditure for sanitation comes this year to nearly £2,000,000, showing an increase of 112 per cent over the expenditure of three years ago.”

So perhaps Cinderella is to go to the ball; if ever the glass slipper is found, let it be remembered, as this Memoir will show, that Miss Nightingale was the good fairy.

Her Indian work continued as long as she was able to work at all, and from 1862 onwards it forms one of the recurring themes in our story.

Miss Nightingale has been given a place among the saints in the popular calendars of many nations; and she deserves the canonisation, but not entirely for the popular reasons.

Her character, as I have endeavoured to depict it, was stronger, more spacious, and, as I have felt, more lovable than that of The Lady with the Lamp.

… affairs, who in the course of a long and varied life had come in contact with many of the acutest intellects and greatest administrators of the time, said of Miss Nightingale that hers was the clearest brain he had ever known in man or woman.

Strength of head was quite as marked in her as goodness of heart, and she had at least as much of adroitness as of simplicity.

Her character was in fact curiously many-sided. A remarkable variety of interests, motives, methods will be found coming into play in the course of this record.

The place, it seems, was “more picturesque than habitable,” and negotiations for the purchase of it, with a view to improvements, fell through. Mr. Nightingale liked Derbyshire, and was fond of his new house; but the rich, as well as the poor, have their perplexities.

“The difficulty is,” wrote Mr. Nightingale to his wife, “where is the county that is habitable for twelve successive months?”

And, again, “How would you like Leicestershire?

“The more I see of men,” wrote a cynic, “the more I love dogs.” Florence Nightingale, in the same piece from which I have just quoted, drew a like moral from her experience of some nurses.

“An invalid,” she said, “in giving an account of his nursing by a nurse and a dog, infinitely preferred that of the dog. ‘Above all,’ he said, ‘it did not talk.’”

[7] There were no babies in the Nightingale family after the arrival of Florence herself, but most of her mother's many brothers and sisters married and had families; and as Mr. and Mrs.

She had a pet pig, a pet donkey, a pet pony. She was fond of riding, and fond of dogs. “A small pet animal,” she said many years afterwards, “is often an excellent companion for the sick, for long chronic cases especially.”

“The more I see of men,” wrote a cynic, “the more I love dogs.”

Florence Nightingale, in the same piece from which I have just quoted, drew a like moral from her experience of some nurses. “An invalid,” she said, “in giving an account of his nursing by a nurse and a dog, infinitely preferred that of the dog.

I was afraid of speaking to children because I was sure I should not please them.” Meanwhile, she was perhaps at times, even as a child, a little “difficult” at home.

“Ask Flo,” wrote her father to his wife in 1832, “if she has lost her intellect. If not, why does she grumble at troubles which she cannot remedy by grumbling?”

The appeal to his daughter's intellect was characteristic of Mr. Nightingale. He was himself a well-informed man, educated at Edinburgh, and Trinity, Cambridge;

and then for yet another period of time because, when she knew what she was called to do, she could not compass the means to do it.

Her faculties were not brought outwards, but were left, by the conditions of her life, to devour themselves inwardly.

The discovery of her true vocation belongs, then, to a later period of our story; and it was not the result of childish fancy, or the accomplishment of early incident; it was the fruit of long and earnest study.

The conscientious Florence made a full note in her diary of the great man's discourse. “All Sismondi's political economy,” she also noted, “seems to be founded on the overflowing kindness of his heart.

He gives to old beggars on principle, to young from habit.

At Pescia he had 300 beggars at his door on one morning. He feeds the mice in his room while he is writing his histories.” Presently there was a new excitement in Geneva. “What a stirring time we live in,” Florence wrote on September 18;

M. Mohl was once asked by Queen Victoria why, loving Germany so much, he had given up his native country for France.

“Ma foi, madame,” he replied, “j'ètais amoureux.”

With M. Mohl, no less than with his wife, Florence Nightingale was on terms of affectionate friendship.

Hilaire, and Thiers. The last-named was one of Miss Clarke's earliest admirers; and many years later, after the Franco-German war, when Thiers was at the head of affairs, Lady Verney heard M. Mohl say to his wife,

“Madame, why did you not marry M. Thiers instead of me, for now you would have been Queen of France?”

In such circles as that which gathered around Miss Clarke, Florence Nightingale was well qualified to hold her own and even to play a brilliant part.

but it was at a great price, and after long and weary struggles, that she herself attained such freedom. During the years with which, in this Part, we shall be concerned, she lived in some sort the life of a caged bird.

The cage, however, was pleasantly gilded.

Florence was not always insensible of the gilding; there were times when she was tempted to chafe no longer at its bars, and to accept a restricted life within the conventional lines.

Shaw Lefevre is a great friend of ours, and a very agreeable man, which is his chief qualification for the chair. Macaulay is not likely to come into the Ministry;

Lord Melbourne says that it is impossible to get on with a man who talks so fast.

So he is now writing history, and saying that it is the only thing worth doing, except, however, standing for Edinburgh in Abercromby's room[26] against Crawford. Macaulay has made an admirable speech in favour of ballot there.

He enlarged it into an ornate mansion in the Elizabethan style. His wife and elder daughter were much occupied with the interest of furnishing it appropriately, and Mr. Nightingale was greatly pleased with his alterations.

“Do you know,” said Florence, as she walked with an American friend on the lawn in front of the drawing-room, “what I always think when I look at that row of windows? I think how I should turn it into a hospital, and just how I should place the beds.”

[16]

That clever man of Thebes, one Cadmus, need never have existed, for any good that that cold pen and ink of his ever did, in the way of expressing oneself.

The iron pen seems to make the words iron, but words are what always takes the dust off the butterfly's wings.

… What nights we have had this last month, though when one thinks that there are hundreds and thousands of people suffering in the same way, and when one sees in every cottage some trouble which defies sympathy—and there is all the world putting on …

It is odd what want of faith one has for one's friends.

We know what soft lots we would have made for them if we could; and that we should believe ourselves so infinitely more good-natured than God, that we cannot trust their lots with Him!

It must not be supposed, however, that Florence was in request among the family circle only at times of sad emergency. She sometimes took her place no less effectually on festive occasions.

I am sure this is the only thing worth living for, and

I do so believe that every tear one sheds waters some good thing into life.

… Dear Miss Clarke, I wish we had you here, or at least could see you and pour out something of what our hearts are full of.

but when she began quoting Lepsius, which she had been studying in the original, he was in the same case as Sir Henry. When the ladies left the room, Sir Henry said to Smythe, ‘

A capital young lady that, if she hadn't floored me with her Latin and Greek.

’”[25] “I have been dowagering out with Papa,” wrote Florence to Miss Clarke (March 1843), “in the big coach to a formal dinner-party, where, however, Mr. Gerard Noel and I were very thick, he inquiring tenderly after you and your whereabouts.”

“but there you can at least have your mornings to yourself. To me the country is the place of ‘row.’ Since we came home in September, how long do you think we have been alone? Not one fortnight.

A country-house is the real place for dissipation.

Sometimes I think that everybody is hard upon me, that to be for ever expected to be looking merry and saying something lively is more than can be asked mornings, noons, and nights.”

“Ask me,” she wrote to “Aunt Hannah,” “to do something for your sake, something difficult, and you will see that I shall do it regularly, which is for me the most difficult thing of all.”

Let those who reproach themselves for a desultoriness, seemingly incurable, take heart again from the example of Florence Nightingale!

No self-reproach recurs more often in her private outpourings at this time than that of irregularity and even sloth. She found it difficult to rise early in the morning;

she went on with her drawing; but for me, who had no such cover, the thing was boring to desperation.” “To be read aloud to,” she wrote, “is the most miserable exercise of the human intellect. Or rather, is it any exercise at all?

It is like lying on one's back, with one's hands tied, and having liquid poured down one's throat.

Worse than that, because suffocation would immediately ensue, and put a stop to this operation. But no suffocation would stop the other.”[28] As the younger daughter of a busily efficient mother, Florence was not often entrusted with household duties;

The first scene of the poem—“Paracelsus Aspires”—contains many a passage which aroused a sympathetic echo in her heart. The key-note is struck early.

“Pursuing an aim not to be found in life,” is her comment, “is its true misery.”

Then she kept commonplace-books, in which, under heads alphabetically arranged—such as Age of Reason, Bigotry, Creeds, Death, Education, and so forth—she copied out passages which struck her. She was accumulating stores of information and reflection.

Oh for some strong thing to sweep this loathsome life into the past.

And so ended for the time the dash of the caged bird for liberty.

Though the outward man may perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory;

And I too went away to dream about a great many things which I had much better not think about.

Oh, how I did laugh at the results of all our feelings! To think and to be are two such different things!

”

… and of His laws, that falsehood against them must work misery, and misery is perhaps here the strongest proof that His loving hand is present,—yet all our powers, hopes, and fears must, it seems to me, be engrossed by doing His work for its relief.

Life is no holiday game, nor is it a clever book, nor is it a school of instruction, nor a valley of tears; but it is a hard fight, a struggle, a wrestling with the Principle of Evil, hand to hand, foot to foot.

Every inch of the way must be disputed. The night is given us to take breath, to pray, to drink deep at the fountain of power.

The night is given us to take breath, to pray, to drink deep at the fountain of power. The day, to use the strength which has been given us, to go forth to work with it till the evening.

The Kingdom of God is coming; and “Thy Kingdom come” does not mean only “My salvation come.”

“To find out what we can do,” she wrote as an annotation in Browning's Paracelsus, “one's individual place, as well as the General End, is man's task. To serve man for God's sake, not man's, will prevent failure from being disappointment.”

Embley, Feb. 7 [1851].… I suppose you know how the two churches have been convulsing themselves in England in a manner discreditable to themselves and ridiculous to others.

The Anglican Ch. screamed and struggled as if they were taking away something of hers, the Catholic Ch. sang and shouted as if she had conquered England—neither the one nor the other has happened.

Only a good many people (in our Church) found out they were Catholics and went to Rome, and a good many other people found out they were Protestants, which they never knew before, and left the Puseyite pen, which has now lost half its sheep.

For women she has—what? I had no taste for theological discoveries. I would have given her my head, my heart, my hand. She would not have them. She did not know what to do with them.

She told me to go back and do crochet in my mother's drawing-room; or, if I were tired of that, to marry and look well at the head of my husband's table.

You may go to the Sunday School, if you like it, she said. But she gave me no training even for that. She gave me neither work to do for her, nor education for it.”

“The Catholic orders,” she wrote, “offered me work, training for that work, sympathy and help in it, such as I had in vain sought in the Church of England.

The Church of England has for men bishoprics, archbishoprics, and a little work (good men make a great deal for themselves). For women she has—what?

I had no taste for theological discoveries. I would have given her my head, my heart, my hand. She would not have them. She did not know what to do with them. She told me to go back and do crochet in my mother's drawing-room;

“In all the dens of disgrace and disease,” she wrote in one of her note-books (1849), “the only clergy who deserve the name of pastors are the Roman Catholic. The rest, of all denominations—Church of England, Church of Scotland, Dissenters—are only theology or tea mongers.”

“It will never do,” she once said to a friend, “unless we have a Church of which the terms of membership shall be works, not doctrines.”

[33]

The more she heard of the worst, the more was Florence Nightingale resolved to make things better; but the more her parents heard, the greater and the more natural was their repugnance.

Somebody must do the rough pioneer work of the world; but one can understand how the parents of an attractive daughter, for whom their own life at home seemed to them to open many possibilities of comfortable happiness, came to desire that in this case the somebody should be somebody else.

Miss Nightingale herself was so much impressed by the difficulties and dangers in the way of women nurses, that she was inclined at first to the idea that the admission of gentlewomen into the calling could best be secured, either in special hospitals connected with …

The objections were moral and social, rooted to large measure in conventional ideas. Gentlewomen, it was felt, would be exposed, if not to danger and temptations, at least to undesirable and unfitting conditions.

“It was as if I had wanted to be a kitchen-maid,” she said in later years.

Nothing is more tenacious than a social prejudice. But the prejudice was in part founded on very intelligible reasons, and in part was justified by the level of the nursing profession at the time.

Gentlewomen, it was felt, would be exposed, if not to danger and temptations, at least to undesirable and unfitting conditions. “It was as if I had wanted to be a kitchen-maid,” she said in later years.

Nothing is more tenacious than a social prejudice.

But the prejudice was in part founded on very intelligible reasons, and in part was justified by the level of the nursing profession at the time.

If I were in Rome, I should be the first to fire the Sistine, turning my head aside, and Michael Angelo would cry, ‘Well done,’ as he saw his work destroyed.”

It was not only in relation to the restraints of conventional domesticity that Florence Nightingale was a rebel.

During her own stay in Rome, however, there was something which interested her more than Roman politics or Roman monuments. It was the philanthropic work of a Convent School. Every visitor to Rome knows the Trinità de' Monti.

She heard the famous Father Gavazzi preach the crusade in the Colosseum. She cheered as the Tricolor of Italy was hoisted on the Capitol.

“I certainly was born,” she wrote to her cousin Hilary, “to be a tag-rag-and-bob-tail, for when I hear of a popular demonstration, I am nothing better than a ragamuffin.”

She heard the rumble of a distant drum, and rushed up for Mr. Bracebridge, and he and she broke their own windows because they were not illuminated;

In the autumn of 1849 the distraction of another foreign tour was offered. Her parents and her sister hoped once more that Florence would return a different and a more comfortable woman.

Those with whom we are cast into the nearest intimacy sometimes understand us least.

In the autumn of 1849 Mr. and Mrs. Bracebridge, who were to spend some months in the East, again proposed that Miss Nightingale should travel with them, and again the offer was gladly accepted. Her sister was delighted.

But these unconventional attractions of the London season set her all the more against the life of country houses. “Ought not one's externals,” she wrote in her diary (July 2, 1849), “to be as nearly as possible an incarnation of what life really is?

Life is not a green pasture and a still water, as our homes make it.

Life is to some a forty days' fasting, moral or physical, in the wilderness; to some it is a fainting under the carrying of the crop; to some it is a crucifixion; to all, a struggle for truth, for safety.

to some it is a fainting under the carrying of the crop; to some it is a crucifixion; to all, a struggle for truth, for safety. Life is seen in a much truer form in London than in the country.

In an English country place everything that is painful is so carefully removed out of sight, behind those fine trees, to a village three miles off.

In London, at all events if you open your eyes, you cannot help seeing in the next street that life is not as it has been made to you.

on the return journey they spent several days at Thebes. The letters which Florence sent home show that Egypt appealed strongly to her imagination. What struck her most was the solemnity of the country.

“Nothing ever laughs or plays. Everything is grown up and grown old.”

The letters are full too of Egyptology; for she had made tables of dynasties, copied plans of temples, and analysed the leading ideas in Egyptian mythology as expounded by the best writers of the time:—

Miss Nightingale was fond of escaping from the dahabiah in order to wander about the desert, “poking my own nose,” as she wrote home, “into all the villages,” and seeing for herself how “these poor people” lived.

“They call me ‘the wild ass of the wilderness, snuffing up the wind,’ because I am so fond of getting away.”

Egyptian impressions stayed long in her memory, and they recurred to her thirty years later in connection with her Indian studies.[45] As on her earlier visit to Rome, so now in Egypt she utilized all such opportunities as came in her way for studying the …

and that ridge between the flutes, what is it doing there? It looks like the interval while the next interlocutor is thinking of a repartee. Then that rich beading round the base, like one of Euripides' choruses which have nothing to do with the piece.

Give me the Ionic to amuse me, but the Doric to interest me.

The Corinthian is like the worship of Dionysus, like the illustration of Nature by Art—a bad conjunction, I think, which in any other hands would become Art run mad, but modified by the exquisite artistic perceptions of the Greeks is exquisitely beautiful, but it is …

Like one of George Eliot's heroines, “she did not want to deck herself with knowledge—to wear it loose from the nerves and blood that fed her action.” “You ask me,” she had written to Miss Clarke in 1844, “why I do not write something.

I think what is not of the first class had better not exist at all; and besides I had so much rather live than write; writing is only a supplement for living.

Would you have one go away and ‘give utterance to one's feelings’ in a poem to appear (price 2 guineas) in the Belle Assemblée? I think one's feelings waste themselves in words;

and besides I had so much rather live than write; writing is only a supplement for living. Would you have one go away and ‘give utterance to one's feelings’ in a poem to appear (price 2 guineas) in the Belle Assemblée?

I think one's feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions, and into actions which bring results.

Do you think a babe would ever learn to walk if it were to talk about its living in such ‘strange times,’ ‘I must learn to use my legs,’ and so on?

In one of the many pages of autobiographical notes which she preserved in relation to this episode in her life, Miss Nightingale thus explained her refusal to marry. “

I have an intellectual nature which requires satisfaction, and that would find it in him. I have a passional nature which requires satisfaction, and that would find it in him.

I have a moral, an active nature which requires satisfaction, and that would not find it in his life. I can hardly find satisfaction for any of my natures.

I could not satisfy this nature by spending a life with him in making society and arranging domestic things.… To be nailed to a continuation and exaggeration of my present life, without hope of another, would be intolerable to me.

Voluntarily to put it out of my power ever to be able to seize the chance of forming for myself a true and rich life would seem to me like suicide.

”

Florence Nightingale was no vestal ascetic. A true and perfect marriage was, she thought, the perfect state. “Marrying a man of high and good purpose, and following out that purpose with him is the happiest” lot.

“The highest, the only true love, is when two persons, a man and a woman, who have an attraction for one another, unite together in some true purpose for mankind and God.”

[53] The thought of God in instituting marriage was “that these two, when the right two are united, shall throw themselves fearlessly into the universe, and do its work, secure of companionship and sympathy.”

“the age at which Christ began His mission. Now no more childish things, no more vain things, no more love, no more marriage. Now, Lord, let me only think of Thy will.” And amongst her sayings in another book, I find this: “

Strong passions to teach the secrets of the human heart, and a strong will to hold them in subjection, these are the keys of the kingdom in this world and the next.

” Florence Nightingale turned away from marriage in order that she might remain entirely free to fulfil her vocation.

“I have never known a happy time,” she exclaimed to herself, “except at Rome and that fortnight at Kaiserswerth.

It is not the unhappiness I mind, it is not indeed; but people can't be unhappy without making those about them so.

”

In my 31st year I see nothing desirable but death.” She was perishing, as she put it, for want of food; and she could find no impulse to activity. Her habit of late rising grew upon her; for what had she to wake for? “

Starvation does not lead a man to exertion, it only weakens him.

O weary days, O evenings that seem never to end! For how many long years, I have watched that drawing-room clock and thought it would never reach the ten! And for 20 or 30 more years to do this!”

then perhaps go abroad; then three months of company at Lea Hurst; next the same round of Embley company.” And then, with a humorous transition not infrequent in her musings, she asks, “But why can't you get up in the morning?

I have nothing I like so much as unconsciousness, but I will try.

” As the year advanced a more decided spirit of revolt begins to appear in her diaries.

There is a long letter of 1850 from her to her father in which she argues the point, not specifically with reference to herself, but as a general proposition. Something more than good intention is necessary in order to do good.

Philanthropy is a matter of skill, and an apprenticeship in it is necessary.

An opportunity occurred sooner than she had dared to hope which enabled her to serve such an apprenticeship. Her sister was still in bad health, and a visit to Carlsbad was again proposed.

Eschew Prospectuses; they're the devil, and make one sick.

It is like making out a bill of fare when you have not a single pound of meat. What do the cookery books say? First catch your hare. All the instances on the Continent have begun in one of two ways.

Eschew Prospectuses; they're the devil, and make one sick.

It is like making out a bill of fare when you have not a single pound of meat.

What do the cookery books say? First catch your hare. All the instances on the Continent have begun in one of two ways.

They return and open a hospital with two rooms, increase their funds, others join them and are taught by them.… To publish first is as bad a practical bull as is the name of the Prospective Review.

A few years were to pass, and Florence Nightingale herself was to begin her work in the world not with a programme, but with a deed.

The institutions of Kaiserswerth, when she was there in 1851, were still on a comparatively modest scale. They comprised, as she enumerates them, a Hospital (with 100 beds), an Infant School, a Penitentiary (with 12 inmates), an Orphan Asylum, and a Normal School for schoolmistresses.

Bracebridge alludes was an amputation at which I was present, but which I did not mention to——, knowing that she would see no more in my interest in it than the pleasure dirty boys have in playing in the puddles about a butcher's shop.

I find the deepest interest in everything here, and am so well in body and mind. This is Life.

Now I know what it is to live and to love life, and really I should be sorry now to leave life. I know you will be glad to hear this, dearest Mum.

(To her Father.) May 12 [1852]. On my 32nd birthday I think I must write a word of acknowledgment to you.

I am glad to think that my youth is past, and rejoice that it never, never can return—that time of follies and bondage, of unfulfilled hopes and disappointed inexperience, when a man possesses nothing, not even himself.

I am glad to have lived; though it has been a life which, except as the necessary preparation for another, few would accept. I hope now that I have come into possession of myself.

Her observation of some of the patients there, as in a former year at Malvern, was the origin of an epigrammatic definition which I find in one of her note-books: “

The water-cure: a highly popular amusement within the last few years amongst athletic invalids who have felt the tedium vitae, and those indefinite diseases which a large income and unbounded leisure are so well calculated to produce.

” Then, again, towards the end of the year, her kinswoman, “Aunt Evans,” was smitten down. She was the sister of her father's mother, and died at the age of ninety.

Amen.

From Committees, charity, and Schism—from the Church of England and all other deadly sin—from philanthropy and all the deceits of the Devil, Good Lord, deliver us.

In great haste, ever yours overflowingly. It will do me so much good to see a good man again.

When I entered into service here, I determined that, happen what would, I never would intrigue among the Committee.

Now I perceive that I do all my business by intrigue.

I propose in private to A, B, or C the resolution I think A, B, or C most capable of carrying in committee, and then leave it to them, and I always win.

Whereupon I wrote to the Treasurer to refuse it me. Lady——, who was my greatest enemy, is now, I understand, trumpeting my fame through London. And all because I have reduced their expenditure from 1s. 10d. per head per day to 1s.

The opinions of others concerning you depend, not at all, or very little, upon what you are, but upon what they are.

Praise and blame are alike indifferent to me, as constituting an indication of what myself is, though very precious as the indication of the other's feeling.…

All these I proposed and carried in Committee, without telling them that they came from me and not from the Medical Men; and then, and not till then, I showed them to the Medical Men, without telling them that they were already passed in committee.

It was a bold stroke, but success is said to make an insurrection into a revolution.

The Medical Men have had two meetings upon them, and approved them all nem. con., and thought they were their own.

A famous writer has said of the saints, that the greatest and most helpful of them have always shown some wit or humour;[67] and of Florence Nightingale Mrs. Gaskell noted further: “

She has a great deal of fun, and is carried along by that, I think. She mimics most capitally.

”

She must be a creature of another race, so high and angelic, doing things by impulse or some divine inspiration, not by effort and struggle of will. But she seems almost too holy to be talked about as a mere wonder.

Mrs. Nightingale says with tears in her eyes (alluding to Andersen's Fairy Tales), that they are ducks, and have hatched a wild swan.

She seems as completely led by God as Joan of Arc. I never heard of any one like her.

She was quiet because, like Wordsworth's Happy Warrior, in the heat of excitement, she “kept the law in calmness made, and saw what she foresaw.”

Like the character drawn by another master-hand, “in the tumult she was tranquil,” because she had pondered when at rest.

A small black pocket-book is preserved in which were found, at Miss Nightingale's death, a few of the many letters received just before she left England for the East. Perhaps they were the very last letters received; perhaps they were there for other reasons.

It was embalmed, and “the only tear its mistress shed through that tremendous week,” says her sister, “was when I put the little body into her hands. ‘

Poor little beastie, it was odd how much I loved you.

’”[76] For the rest, she was “as calm and composed in this furious haste,” wrote her sister (Oct.

I cannot forget how you went to the East once before, and here am I writing quietly to you about what you are going to do now.

You can undertake that, when you could not undertake me. God bless you, dear Friend, wherever you go.

”

It is tremendous; however, having reached No. 276, we are going to shut the door. Mary Stanley and I sit daily at the receipt of custom, and funny things do we see and hear!

Human nature is a wondrous work, whether of God Almighty I sometimes begin to doubt.

”

And there was a third danger which she foresaw also. Not only had she to overcome military prejudice and to avert medical jealousy, but she had also to prevent religious disputation.

This last task was beyond her powers, as it has ever proved beyond those of men, women, and angels; for by this cause even the angels fell.

No work, however beneficent, has ever yet been found beyond the capacity of the odium theologicum to mar and embitter. Miss Nightingale's mission did not escape the common lot, as we shall hear; but she was keenly sensible of the danger.

Miss Nightingale was happily possessed of an original mind and a resolute will.

She saw evils which cried out for remedies; and new occasions taught new duties.

Dearth of creative brain-power showed itself in our Levantine hospitals, for there industrious functionaries worked hard at their accustomed tasks, and doggedly omitted to innovate at times when not to be innovating was surrendering, as it were, at discretion to want and misery.

The state of the hospitals when Miss Nightingale arrived requires some description, which, however, need not be long.

The treatment of the sick and wounded during the Crimean War was the subject of Departmental Inquiries, Select Committees, and Royal Commissions, which, when they had finished sitting upon the hospitals, began sitting upon each other.

Enormous piles of Blue-books were accumulated, and in the course of my work I have disturbed much dust upon them. The conduct of every department and every individual concerned was the subject of charge, answer, and countercharge innumerable.

Enormous piles of Blue-books were accumulated, and in the course of my work I have disturbed much dust upon them. The conduct of every department and every individual concerned was the subject of charge, answer, and countercharge innumerable.

Each generation deserves, no doubt, the records of mal-administration which it gets; but one generation need not be punished by having to examine in detail the records of another.

Some of the details of the Crimean muddle will indeed necessarily be disinterred in the course of our story; but all that need here be collected from the heaps aforesaid are three general conclusions.

but I am writing only the life of Miss Nightingale, and all that under this head the reader need be asked to bear in mind is this:

That the root of the evils which had to be dealt with was division of responsibility, and reluctance to assume it.

The third conclusion of the official inquiries, which I want to emphasize, is contained in a passage in the Roebuck Committee's Report, which prefaced a reference to Miss Nightingale's mission:

But oh! you Gentlemen of England who sit at Home in all the well-earned satisfaction of your successful cases, can have little Idea from reading the newspapers of the Horror and Misery (in a Military Hospital) of operating upon these dying, exhausted men.

A London Hospital is a Garden of Flowers to it.

We have had such a Sea in the Bosphorus, and the Turks, the very men for whom we are fighting, carry in our Wounded so cruelly, that they arrive in a state of Agony.

… a message came to me to prepare for 510 wounded[184] on our side of the Hospital who were arriving from the dreadful affair of the 5th November from Balaklava, in which battle were 1763 wounded and 442 killed, besides 96 officers wounded and 38 killed.

I always expected to end my Days as Hospital Matron, but I never expected to be Barrack Mistress.

We had but half an hour's notice before they began landing the wounded. Between one and 9 o'clock we had the mattresses stuffed, sewn up, laid down—alas! only upon matting on the floor—the men washed and put to bed, and all their wounds dressed.

The Dysentery Cases have died at the rate of one in two. Then the day of operations which follows.…

We are very lucky in our Medical Heads. Two of them are brutes, and four are angels—for this is a work which makes either angels or devils of men and of women too.

As for the assistants, they are all Cubs, and will, while a man is breathing his last breath under the knife, lament the “annoyance of being called up from their dinners by such a fresh influx of wounded”!

Ball lodged just in the head of the joint and fracture starred all round. The next poor fellow has two Stumps for arms, and the next has lost an arm and a leg.

As for the Balls they go in where they like and come out where they like and do as much harm as they can in passing. That is the only rule they have.

…

The wounded are now lying up to our very door, and we are landing 540 more from the Andes.

I take rank in the Army as Brigadier General, because 40 British females, whom I have with me, are more difficult to manage than 4000 men.

Let no lady come out here who is not used to fatigue and privation.… Every ten minutes an Orderly runs, and we have to go and cram lint into the wound till a Surgeon can be sent for, and stop the Bleeding as well as …

We hear there was another engagement on the 8th and more wounded, who are coming down to us.

This is only the beginning of things.

The Senior Chaplain had the sense, among other things, to appreciate Miss Nightingale. “The Chaplain says,” wrote Mr. Nightingale to a friend (Dec. 12), “‘Miss Nightingale is an admirable person; none of us can sufficiently admire her.

Percy made a grievance of it in England. Mrs. Herbert, in reporting all this to Mrs. Bracebridge (Jan. 7, 1855), made the final reflection: “

Perhaps it is wholesome for us to be reminded that Flo is still a mortal, which we were beginning to doubt.

” Mortals have to deal with entanglements as best they may on the spur of the moment; and those at a distance hardly made enough allowance for the difficulties with which Miss Nightingale was suddenly confronted, for the danger which Mr.

We remember that a staff of nearly 800 female nurses was maintained for service in the South African War, and may be tempted to smile at the question between 20 and 40, or 40 and 90 for the Crimea.

But it was Miss Nightingale who showed the way, and the way of the pioneer is rough.

No one who reads this volume will suspect her of timidity, or think her wanting in self-confidence;

During the voyage out, as the ship was approaching Constantinople, one of the party went up to her and said earnestly, “Oh, Miss Nightingale, when we land, don't let there be any red-tape delays, let us get straight to nursing the poor fellows!” “

The strongest will be wanted at the wash-tub,

” was the reply. Until Miss Nightingale arrived, the number of shirts washed during a month was six.[110] Up to the date of her arrival, the Purveyor-General had contracted for the washing of the hospital bedding, and of the linen of the patients.

“Nothing is needed,” said Lord Stratford, and the only suggestion he could make to the Times was that it should devote its fund to building an English Church at Pera.

Miss Nightingale thought that the service of God included the service of man, and Mr. Macdonald, the Times Commissioner, agreed with her. Between them, they established not a church, but a store.

The Ambassador of course formed his conclusions from what he was told; and the Principal Medical Officer at Scutari “stated that he wanted nothing in the shape of stores or medical comforts at a time when his patients were destitute of the commonest necessaries.

“This is the first time,” he said, “I have had it in writing that I was not to spare expense. I never knew that I might not be thrown overboard.” “Your name,” she had told Mr. Herbert (Nov. 25), “is continually used as a bug-bear.

They make a deity of cheapness, and the Secretary at War stands as synonymous here with Jupiter Tonans, whose shafts end only in a brutum fulmen.

The cheese-paring system, which sounds unmusical in British ears, is here identified with you by the officers who carry it out. It is in vain to tell the Purveyors that they will get no kudos by this at home.”

The Inspector-General consented. These little incidents[123] throw a flood of light upon the difficulties through which Miss Nightingale had to thread her way.

She was a firm believer in rules; but she was one of those able administrators who have the sense to know, and the courage to act upon the knowledge, that rules sometimes exist only to be broken.

And this was precisely the kind of initiative that the state of things in the hospitals at Scutari demanded. Miss Nightingale's adherence to rules may have brought unpopularity upon her from some of her subordinates or subscribers;

Let those who believe that it is possible to make a sharp delimitation between the “masculine” and the “feminine mind” settle this matter as they may.

It seems to me that as there are old women of both sexes, so in both sexes there are men of business.

My object in this chapter has been to show that Miss Nightingale brought to bear upon the task which confronted her at Scutari those high powers of the administrative mind, be they masculine or feminine, which, in moments of emergency, are capable of resource, initiative, …

And then something must be allowed to the caustic humour which, when Miss Nightingale had a pen in her hand, could not be denied.

“I shall make no further remark about him,” she writes of a certain individual, “than that he is a fossil of the pure Old Red Sandstone.”

“Some newspaper has said of me,” she writes on another occasion, “that I am the fourth woman (query, Old Woman) that has had to do with the war. Who are the other three?” And she goes on for Mr.

Packages, intended for the army or the hospitals, if they arrived in merchant vessels, were detained in the Turkish Custom House, from which they were never extracted without much delay, difficulty, and confusion; many were partially or entirely destroyed; and many abstracted and totally lost.

“The Custom House,” said Miss Nightingale, “was a bottomless pit, whence nothing ever issued of all that was thrown in.”

In the case of ships chartered by the Government, great masses of goods were necessarily landed together and stowed away promiscuously for want of time and space for sorting, and were often delayed by an unnecessary trip to Balaclava and back again.

… dresses, or they must have gone naked.[225] The consequence is that not one single Hospital dress is now left in store, and I have substituted Turkish dressing-gowns from Stamboul (three bales in the passage are marked Hospital Gowns, but have not yet been “sat upon”).

To purvey this Hospital is like pouring water into a sieve; and will be, till regimental stores have been sent out from England enough to clothe the naked and refill the kit.

I have requisitions for Uniform trousers, for each and all of the articles of a kit, sent in to me.

In a time of such calamity, unparalleled in the history, I believe, of calamity, I have a little compassion left even for the wretched Purveyor, swamped amid demands he never expected.

But I have no compassion for the men who would rather see hundreds of lives lost than waive one scruple of the official conscience.

(3) The Hospital and Army Stores come out in the same vessels—and up go our stores to Balaclava, and down they never come again, or have not yet.

(3) The daily routine of the Hospital. This is now performed, or rather not performed by the Purveyor.

I am really cook, housekeeper, scavenger (I go about making the Orderlies empty huge tubs), washer-woman, general dealer, store-keeper.

The Purveyor is supposed to do all this, but it is physically impossible. And the filth, and the disorder, and the neglect, let those describe who saw it when we first came.…

Every day had its peculiar trial to one who had taken such a load of responsibility, in an untried field, and with a staff of her own sex, all new to it.

Hers was a post requiring the courage of a Cardigan, the tact and diplomacy of a Palmerston, the endurance of a Howard, the cheerful philanthropy of a Mrs. Fry.

Miss Nightingale fills that post;

In the letters to Sidney Herbert she sometimes bids him know that what she says does not merely come from “poor me,” but represents the views “of all the best men here.”

But she, I think, was the best man of them all.

[142] Such was the opinion, at any rate, of a man among men, the redoubtable Sydney Godolphin Osborne. “Every day,” he wrote in describing his experience at Scutari, “brought some new complication of misery to be somehow unravelled.

Famous, too, became the words which one poor fellow sent home. “What a comfort it was to see her pass even. She would speak to one and nod and smile to as many more; but she could not do it to all, you know.

We lay there by hundreds; but we could kiss her shadow as it fell, and lay our heads on the pillow again, content.

” “Before she came,” said another soldier's letter, “there was cussin' and swearin', but after that it was holy as a church.” Mr. Sidney Herbert read out these letters at a public meeting in November 1855.[154] Lord Ellesmere used Mr.

but she could not do it to all, you know. We lay there by hundreds; but we could kiss her shadow as it fell, and lay our heads on the pillow again, content.”

“Before she came,” said another soldier's letter, “there was cussin' and swearin', but after that it was holy as a church.”

Mr. Sidney Herbert read out these letters at a public meeting in November 1855.[154] Lord Ellesmere used Mr.

The men idolized her. They kissed her shadow, and they saluted her as she passed down their wounded ranks.

“If the Queen came for to die,” said a soldier who lost a leg at the Alma, “they ought to make her queen, and I think they would.”

Her lively sense of humour, which Mr. Osborne had discerned in talks with her in the hospital, was appreciated also by the patients.

Augustus Stafford, went out during the recess of 1854 to Scutari, and made himself very useful to Miss Nightingale. “He says,” wrote Monckton Milnes (Jan. 1855), “that Florence in the Hospital makes intelligible to him the Saints of the Middle Ages.

If the soldiers were told that the roof had opened, and she had gone up palpably to Heaven, they would not be the least surprised. They quite believe she is in several places at once.

”[158] They were impressed by her power, no less than they were touched by her tenderness, and ascribed to the Lady-in-Chief the gifts of leadership in the field. “If she were at their head, they would be in Sebastopol in a week;”

Miss Nightingale tended two of the doctors in their last moments, and the thinning, for a while, of the medical ranks increased her labours. The amount of clerical work which devolved on her was, it may be well imagined, enormous.

Lady Alicia Blackwood records that when she was starting a school in the women's and children's quarters at Scutari, Miss Nightingale said laughingly, “Oh, are you really going to do that unkind thing—to teach children to write? I am so tired of writing, I sometimes wish I could not write!”

The laugh must have had a certain grimness in it, I fear.

… innate dignity, gentleness, and chivalry of the men (for never, surely, was chivalry so strikingly exemplified), shining in the midst of what must be considered as the lowest sinks of human misery, and preventing instinctively the use of one expression which could distress a gentlewoman.”[160]

Even in the lowest sinks of human misery there are chords which will respond to a sympathetic touch.

It was the innate dignity of her bearing that struck every one who saw Florence Nightingale; and, amidst those scenes of loathsome disease and death, she was herself “the sweet presence of a good diffused.”

“Excellent, gentle, self-devoted women,” Miss Nightingale said in a note upon some of her staff, “fit more for Heaven than for a Hospital, they flit about like angels without hands among the patients, and soothe their souls, while they leave their bodies dirty and neglected.

They never complain, they are eager for self-mortification. But I came not to mortify the nurses, but to nurse the wounded.

” Therefore if a nurse was a good woman and knew her business, it was nothing that she was Romanist, Anglican, High Church, Low Church, or Unitarian.

Herbert (Jan. 28, 1855), “that there is a religious war about poor me in the Times, and that Mrs. Herbert has generously defended me. I do not know what I have done to be so dragged before the Public.

But I am so glad that my God is not the God of the High Church or of the Low, that He is not a Romanist or an Anglican—or a Unitarian.

I don't believe He is even a Russian, though His events go strangely against us. (N.B.—A Greek once said to me at Salamis, ‘I do believe God Almighty is an Englishman.’)”

(N.B.—A Greek once said to me at Salamis, ‘I do believe God Almighty is an Englishman.’)” Excellent, too, was the answer given by an Irish clergyman when asked to what sect Miss Nightingale belonged.

“She belongs to a sect which, unfortunately, is a very rare one—the sect of the Good Samaritan.”

Miss Nightingale was by descent a Unitarian, by practice a communicant of the Church of England; but she was addicted neither to High Church nor to Low.

“Such a tempest,” she wrote (Dec. 25, 1854), “has been brewed in this little pint pot as you could have no idea of.

But I, like the Ass, have put on the Lion's skin, and when once I have done that (poor me, who never affronted any one before), I can bray so loud that I shall be heard, I am afraid, as far as England.

However, this is no place for lions; and as for asses, we have enough.”

and presently she had to inform Mr. Herbert (Feb. 15, 1855) of “a charge of converting and rebaptizing before death, reported to me by the Senior Chaplain, by him to the Commandant, by him to the Commander-in-Chief.” She promptly exchanged the suspected nun.

The ingenuity of theological rancour was infinite.

Having caught wind of the fact that there was some difference of view among the Roman Catholic Sisters, an Evangelical writer sought to fan the flame by denouncing the absurdity of “Catholic Nuns transferring their allegiance from the Pope of Rome to a Protestant Lady.”

… cooks, and a boy to Crim Tartary (to overhaul the Regimental Hospitals) in the Robert Lowe or Robert Slow (for an exceedingly slow boat she is), taking back 420 of her patients, a draught of convalescents returning to their regiments to be shot at again.

‘A Mother in Israel,’ Pastor Fliedner called me; a Mother in the Coldstreams, is the more appropriate appellation.

What suggestions do the above ideas make to you in Embley drawing-room?

What the[256] disappointments of the conclusion of these six months are no one can tell.

But I am not dead, but alive.

”

When, after many hours, he recovered his senses, I believe after trepanning, his first words were to ask after his comrade, ‘Is he alive?’ ‘Comrade, indeed! yes, he's alive, it is the General.’ At that moment the General, though badly wounded, appeared at the bedside.

‘Oh, General, it's you, is it, I brought in, I'm so glad. I didn't know your honour, but if I'd known it was you, I'd have saved you all the same.’

This is the true soldier's spirit.”[174]

“My effigies and praises,” she wrote in reply, “were less welcome. I do not affect indifference to real sympathy, but I have felt painfully, the more painfully since I have had time to hear of it, the éclat which has been given to this adventure.

The small still beginning, the simple hardship, the silent and gradual struggle upwards, these are the climate in which an enterprise really thrives and grows.

Time has not altered our Saviour's lesson on that point, which has been learnt successively by all reformers from their own experience.

Give them opportunity promptly and securely to send money home and they will use it. Give them schools and lectures and they will come to them. Give them books and games and amusements and they will leave off drinking.

Give them suffering and they will bear it. Give them work and they will do it.

I had rather have to do with the Army generally than with any other class I have ever attempted to serve.” It was a common belief of the time that it was in the nature of the British soldier to be drunken.

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.

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;

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 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.

but in reputation she saw nothing except an opportunity for further work. “The abilities which she has displayed,” said Mr. Sidney Herbert in Willis's Rooms, “cannot be allowed to slumber. So long as she lives, her labours are marked out for her.

The diamond has shown itself, and it must not be allowed to return to the mine.

” Her friend well knew that he was only expressing the feelings of her own mind. What she sought on her return to England was to utilize her reputation and her experience for the furtherance of her ideals.

She felt that she had made none. Rather had she been privileged to attain that harmony between the soul of a human being and its appointed work, in which, according to her philosophy, lay the union of man with the Divine Spirit.

She shrank from glory in dread of vain-glory.

“‘Paid by the world, what dost thou owe Me?’ God might question.”

Whenever the British people have muddled through a war, there is a time of repentance and heart-searching.

England the Unready turns round uneasily and thinks that she must now mend her ways.

The lessons of the war must be learnt. The word “efficiency” is blessed in every mouth. Radical reforms, with a view to ensuring a better state of preparedness next time, are canvassed, and a few of them are sometimes carried out.

Radical reforms, with a view to ensuring a better state of preparedness next time, are canvassed, and a few of them are sometimes carried out. And then to the hot fit, a cold fit succeeds. War and its lessons fade into the past.

Economy displaces efficiency as the favourite word.

Peace seems to be more likely than another war, and, if war should unhappily come, it is cheerily hoped that England will again “muddle through somehow.”

But this was not the whole case. Miss Nightingale carried further the principle, which in these days is perhaps at last coming to be understood, that success in war depends upon preparation in peace.

“You cannot improvise an Army,” says Lord Roberts. “You cannot improvise the sanitary care of an Army in the field,” said Miss Nightingale.

If the medical service in the field were deficient, if the lessons of sanitary science were neglected in war hospitals, it was probable, she perceived, that there were like defects at home.

but what should we feel if we were told that 1100 men are annually doomed to death in our Army at home by causes which might be prevented?

The men in the Birkenhead went down with a cheer. So will our men fight for us to the last with a cheer.

The more reason why all the means of health which Sanitary Science has put at our command, all the means of morality which Educational Science has given us, should be given them.”

Truly were the Sebastopol trenches, to our men, like the gate of the Infernal Regions—Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch' entrate. And yet these men would refuse to report themselves sick, lest they should throw more labour on their comrades.

They would draw their blankets over their heads and die without a word.

Well may it be said that there is hardly an example in history to compare with this long and silent fortitude.

They would draw their blankets over their heads and die without a word. Well may it be said that there is hardly an example in history to compare with this long and silent fortitude.

But surely the blood of such men is calling to us from the ground, not to avenge them, but to have mercy on their survivors!

”[227] To that cry, Florence Nightingale, at least, responded through every fibre of her being. She was resolved to be “a saviour,” and to press home every lesson of the Crimean campaign.

She had nothing to gain, nothing to lose, nothing to fear. She stood only for a cause; and, come what might, she was resolved to fling every power of mind and body into it. Among her private notes of 1856 I find this: “

I stand at the altar of the murdered men, and, while I live, I fight their cause.

”

There were few who could exercise the same influence, and perhaps there was not one who could judge the facts with the same disinterestedness. She was not a politician. She had no party to defend, no officials to shield, no susceptibilities to consider.

She had nothing to gain, nothing to lose, nothing to fear.

She stood only for a cause; and, come what might, she was resolved to fling every power of mind and body into it. Among her private notes of 1856 I find this:

She speaks of these things sadly and quietly as some one from another world might do, seeing so plainly the excuses for the wrong-doers, while the personal part never seems to come in, and there is such a charm about her perfect simplicity.

There is not the smallest particle of the martyr about her; she is as merry about little things as ever, in the intervals of her great thought

, and with as much interest about the little things of home as if she had not been wielding the management and organization of the material and spiritual comfort of the 50,000 men passing through hospital and out.

“I hope,” he wrote (Sept. 9), “that your Highland foray will do you good. I am sure it will, if you find help and encouragement for your plans. I hope you will talk fully, and illustrate by facts and details. They explain best.

Men and women require picture-books, just as much as children, when they are to learn something of which they know nothing previously.

” She armed herself, by study of statistics, by collection of her notes and memoranda, by inquiries on all sides, for every occasion which the sympathetic interest of the Queen or the Prince might give her.

I earnestly hope that your interviews with the Queen and Lord Panmure may be the means of leading both to interest themselves effectually in the vital reforms required.

The axe has to be laid to the root of the tree yet.

Various friends tendered advice as to what Miss Nightingale should say if she were to be asked what the Queen could “do for her.”

they do not mind what I say,” showing that even he cannot always overcome the vis inertiae of Departmental indifference or prevail on people to move. It may be so in any question of medical reform.

Lord Panmure hates detail, and does not appreciate system. He can reform but not organise.

It is organisation we want, but which arouses every instinct of resistance in the British bosom, and it is this which can be least influenced by H.M.'s personal interest in it.

“I have had most satisfactory interviews,” she wrote to her Uncle Sam (Sept. 25), “with the Queen, the Prince, and Sir George Grey. Satisfactory, that is, as far as their will, not as their power is concerned.”

Miss Nightingale is not the only impatient reformer who has been tempted to wish that knots of red tape could be cut by a direct exercise of the Royal Prerogative.

The Prince knew “in what limits” he and the Queen moved. Nothing could be done except through Ministers, and the Minister for War would shortly be in attendance at Balmoral.

2), “that the Bison wrote to me very much pleased with his interview with you. He says that he was very much surprised at your physical appearance, as I think you must have been with his. God bless you!”

Lord Panmure, I suspect, was one of those men who presume that any strong-minded woman will be physically ill-favoured.

At any rate Miss Nightingale greatly impressed the Minister, even as the Queen had predicted. In general terms, Lord Panmure seemed very favourable to Miss Nightingale's suggestions.

Miss Nightingale was equally indignant, but her political instinct was not at fault. “I am glad,” she wrote in reply to Mrs. Tulloch (Feb. 20), “that they have been such fools!

I am sure the British Lion will sympathise in this insult, and if it does not, then it is a degraded beast.

” She proceeded to rouse the beast. She told Mr. Herbert about the Government's offer, and he concurred in her view. It was decided to raise the whole subject in the House of Commons. On March 12, 1857, Mr.

This recommendation was stoutly opposed by medical officers of the old school.

“Poor Andrew Smith,” wrote Mr. Herbert during a sitting of the Royal Commission, “swallowed some bitter pills to-day, including Pavilions.”

The bitter pill, administered by Miss Nightingale, is now the recognized prescription in the building of Hospitals.

Also he was the most sympathetic. His very manner engaged the most sulky and the most recalcitrant of witnesses. He never made an enemy or a quarrel in the Commission. He used to say,

‘There takes two to be a quarrel, and I won't be one.’

” Then, again, Miss Nightingale was always at Mr. Herbert's call to supply details, missing dates, and references.

Before the process has come to an end, many things may have happened to overlay the subject in question.

Every generation of reformers sees a certain number of subjects on which its heart has been set deeply interred under a pile of Blue-books.

This was the danger with which Mr. Herbert and Miss Nightingale were confronted in August 1857 in the case of their Royal Commission on the sanitary condition of the British Army. Against the risk of an equivocal Report they had, indeed, guarded themselves in advance;

Now I have written myself into a palpitation. Do you think me one of Byron's young ladies? He, it was, I think, who made a small appetite the fashion. Or do you think me an Ascetic?

Asceticism is the trifling of an enthusiast with his power, a puerile coquetting with his selfishness or his vanity, in the absence of any sufficiently great object to employ the first or overcome the last.

Or, since I am speaking to an artist and must illustrate and not define, the “Cristo della Moneta” of Titian at Dresden is an ascetic.

Dr. Sutherland urged her to take at any rate a week's complete rest. But she would not. Her cause was her life, and she could not for the sake of life lose what alone made life worth living.

While they were delaying, the soldiers were dying.

Her work would not wait. She begged him to come down to Malvern and work with her in order that they might have everything ready to put before Mr. Herbert in London by the time he returned from his fishing. Dr. Sutherland wrote pretty excuses.

Dr. Sutherland urged her to take at any rate a week's complete rest. But she would not.

Her cause was her life, and she could not for the sake of life lose what alone made life worth living.

While they were delaying, the soldiers were dying. Her work would not wait. She begged him to come down to Malvern and work with her in order that they might have everything ready to put before Mr.

30 Old Burlington Street, November 26, 1857. Dear Mr. Herbert—(1) I hope you will not regret the manner of my death. I know that you will be kind enough to regret the fact of it.

You have sometimes said that you were sorry you had employed me. I assure you that it has kept me alive.

I am sorry not to stay alive to do the “Nurses.” But I can't help it. “Lord, here I am, send me” has always been religion to me. I must be willing to go now as I was to go to the East.

“Lord, here I am, send me” has always been religion to me. I must be willing to go now as I was to go to the East. You know I always thought it the greatest of your kindnesses sending me there.

Perhaps He wants a “Sanitary Officer” now for my Crimeans in some other world where they are gone.

—(2) I have no fears for the Army now. You have always been our “Cid”—the true chivalrous sort—which is to be the defender of what is weak and ugly and dirty and undefended, rather than of what is beautiful and artistic.

You are so now more than ever for us. “Us” means in my language the troops and me.—(3) I hope you will have no chivalrous ideas about what is “due” to my “memory.”

The only thing that can be “due” to me is what is good for the troops.

I always thought thus while I was alive. And I am not likely to think otherwise now that I am dead. Whatever your own judgment has accepted from me will come with far greater force from yourself.

“Please tell Miss N. that I warned Peel against the expected recommendation of Sir J. Hall, and he will, I think, be prepared to turn a deaf ear to it. I wrote yesterday to him on another subject and threw in some praise of Alexander.”

Such is the gentle art of influencing Ministers.

On June 11 Dr. T. Alexander was appointed to succeed Sir Andrew Smith. Dr.

And my father is very fond of Sir Harry Verney, which is the next best thing. He is old and rich, which is a disadvantage. He is active, has a will of his own and four children ready-made, which is an advantage.

Unmarried life, at least in our class, takes everything and gives nothing back to this poor earth. It runs no risk, it gives no pledge to life.

So, on the whole, I think these reflections tend to approbation.” For herself she “thinks,” wrote her aunt, “that each day may be the last on which she will have power to work.”

But the worst of it is, that there's no depending upon you for any persistence in curing yourself, while you have so many others to cure.

I often wonder how it is that you who care so little for your own life should have such wonderful love for the lives of others.

” She seldom saw her mother and sister. In June 1858 her sister married. “Thank you very much,” wrote Miss Nightingale to Lady McNeill (July 17), “for your congratulations on my sister's marriage, which took place last month.

… knowledge, this strong practical good sense, this result of much toil, thought, experience to be confined to half-averted official ears, to be forced only on the reluctant attention of a few, and most of these too busy and perhaps too opinionated to profit by it?

Is it to be buried in that most undisturbed grave of wise thought and useful information, a blue book?

that most repulsive, unapproached, unapproachable place of sepulture?

Among these was Harriet Martineau, to whom Miss Nightingale wrote (Nov. 30): “The Report is in no sense public property. And I have a great horror of its being made use of after my death by Women's Missionaries and those kinds of people.

I am brutally indifferent to the wrongs or the rights of my sex.

And I should have been equally so to any controversy as to whether women ought or ought not to do what I have done for the Army; though a woman, having the opportunity and not doing it, ought, I think, to be burnt alive.”

Gladstone the greater friend. Much of Mr. Herbert's strength was exhausted in disputes with the Chancellor of the Exchequer over the question of the national defences. Mrs. Herbert sent to Miss Nightingale the current riddle:

“Why is Gladstone like a lobster?” “Because he is so good, but he disagrees with everybody.”

Mr. Herbert could by no means always count upon the Treasury for consent in all his schemes for improving the sanitary and moral condition of the Army. Still he was able, as Secretary of State, to accomplish a great deal;

I did not expect you to accomplish so much in so short a time.

Be assured that the progress from a worse to a better system is in almost every department of human affairs a progress slow and interrupted.

Do not then be discouraged. If you have not done all that you desired—and who ever did?—you have done more than any one else ever did or could have done, and the good you have done will live after you, growing from generation to generation.

She was quite frank about it. “The scheme will probably result in Hawes's resignation,” she wrote; “that is another of its advantages.”

To reorganize the War Office on paper is an occupation which, during fifty following years, was to beguile the leisure of amateurs, and to fill with disappointed hopes the laborious days of many a Minister.

To carry out any such scheme into practice is a task which only a Minister, in full fighting force, could hope to accomplish. It was beyond the power of a dying man.

(Lord Herbert to Miss Nightingale.) June 7 [1861].… As to the organization I am at my wits' end. The real truth is that I do not understand it.

I have not the bump of system in me. I believe more in good men than in good systems.

De Grey understands it much better.… [He then describes certain minor reforms in personnel, including a definite sphere of responsibility for Captain Galton.] This I should like to do before I go.

“What strikes me in this great defeat,” she replied (June 21), “more painfully even than the loss to the Army is the triumph of the bureaucracy over the leaders—the political aristocracy who at least advocate higher principles.

A Sidney Herbert beaten by a Ben Hawes is a greater humiliation really (as a matter of principle) than the disaster of Scutari.

”

“A woman once told me,” Miss Nightingale said to an old friend, “that my character would be more sympathized with by men than by women. In one sense I don't choose to have that said.

Sidney Herbert and I were together exactly like two men—exactly like him and Gladstone.

”[298]

[291] It was Lord Herbert, who, on sitting down after his first speech in the House of Lords, and on being asked by a friend beside him whether he had found it difficult, replied,

“Difficult! It was like addressing sheeted tombstones by torchlight.”

[292] Army Reform under Lord Herbert, pp. 4–5.

Notes on Nursing.

It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very first requirement in a Hospital that it should do the sick no harm.

It is quite necessary, nevertheless, to lay down such a principle, because the actual mortality in hospitals, especially in those of large crowded cities, is very much higher than any calculation founded on the mortality of the same class of diseases among patients treated out …

The book has not been reprinted since 1863, and is now, perhaps, forgotten; but, if so, that is the necessary fate of many a notable book.

The pioneers of one generation are forgotten when their work has passed into the accepted doctrine and practice of another.

In its day Miss Nightingale's Notes on Hospitals revolutionized many ideas, and gave a new direction to hospital construction.

Sir James Paget's words accurately suggest the nature of Miss Nightingale's work in this field. Before she wrote, there was sad need of the application of sanitary science to many of our hospitals. The rate of mortality in them was terribly high.

Hospitals created almost as many diseases as they cured; there was hospital gangrene, hospital pyæmia, hospital erysipelas, hospital fever, and so forth.

It was even questioned whether great hospitals were not, and must not necessarily be, producers of disease. Miss Nightingale showed that there was no such necessity.

Technical details are often relieved by touches of Miss Nightingale's humour. Here are two examples from her letters to Captain Galton—(March 24, 1861): “I understand that Baring[308] won't ventilate the Barracks in summer because the grates are not hot enough in winter.

Why are the men to die of foul air in August because they are too cold at Christmas? I think Baring must be an army doctor.

” (June 20, 1861): “Is the Architect's ideal the profile of a revolver pistol? If you look at the block plan in this point of view, it is very good.

The written instructions sent by “the Providence” to her cousin for the entertainment of the guests show her care for little things and her knowledge of the weaknesses of great men:

“Take care that the cream for breakfast is not turned.” “Put back Dr. X.'s big book where he can see it when drinking his tea.”

Miss Nightingale also induced her friend Mrs. Herbert to invite the statisticians to an evening party. The feast of statistics acted upon her as a tonic.

“She has been more than usually ill for the last four or five weeks,” wrote her cousin Hilary (July 12); “now I cannot help thinking that her strength is rallying a little; she is much interested in the Statistical Congress.”

Congresses, like wars, are sometimes “muddled through” by our country

, and Miss Nightingale was able here and there to smooth ruffled plumes. A distinguished friend of hers, though his name had been printed as one of the secretaries of a Section, had not received so much as an intimation of the place of meeting;

A very official answer! But Sir George added that he did not see how the result of such enumeration could be “peculiarly instructive”—an avowal which he also made in the House of Commons.

The cleverest of men are sometimes dense

; and this remark of Sir George Lewis, added to his subsequent conduct of the War Office, earned for him, in Miss Nightingale's familiar correspondence, the sobriquet of “The Muff.” In communicating the result of her first attempt to Dr.

It is mere child's play to tell us that what every man of the millions who belong to Friendly Societies does every day of his life, as to registering himself sick or well, cannot be done in the Census.

It is mere childishness to tell us that it is not important to know what houses the people live in.

The French Census does it. The Irish Census tells us of the great diminution of mud cabins between '41 and '51. The connection between the health and the dwellings of the population is one of the most important that exists.

Remember, he is face to face with his enemy all the time, internally wrestling with him, having long imaginary conversations with him. You are thinking of something else. Rid him of his adversary quickly is a first rule with the sick.”

“People who think outside their heads, who tell everything that led them towards this conclusion and away from that, ought never to be with the sick.”

“A sick person intensely enjoys hearing of any material good, any positive or practical success of the right.

“I would rather have men about me when I am ill; I think it requires very strong health to put up with women.”[334] “I am quite of his opinion,” she adds, and she gives some little word-pictures of the female nurse (old style).

“Compelled by her dress, every woman now either shuffles or waddles—only a man can cross the floor of a sick room without shaking it.”

She was writing in the days of crinolines, and draws a picture of “respectable elderly women stooping forward,” when invested therein. Another picture is of the nurse who is supposed, “like port-wine,” to improve with age.

Another of Miss Nightingale's characteristics—her taste for epigrammatic and often pungent expression—is conspicuous in Notes on Nursing.

“Feverishness is generally supposed to be a symptom of fever; in nine cases out of ten, it is a symptom of bedding.”

“No man, not even a doctor, ever gives any other definition of what a nurse should be than this—‘devoted and obedient.’ This definition would do just as well for a porter. It might even do for a horse. It would not do for a policeman.”

Another of Miss Nightingale's characteristics—her taste for epigrammatic and often pungent expression—is conspicuous in Notes on Nursing. “Feverishness is generally supposed to be a symptom of fever; in nine cases out of ten, it is a symptom of bedding.”

“No man, not even a doctor, ever gives any other definition of what a nurse should be than this—‘devoted and obedient.’ This definition would do just as well for a porter. It might even do for a horse. It would not do for a policeman.”

“Some ‘obedient’ nurses know no medium between ‘Now no fire,’ ‘Now fire,’ as if they were volunteer riflemen.”

It required a sound mastery of the laws of household hygiene, some knowledge of medicine or surgery, and, above all, an acute and sympathetic faculty of observation.

“Merely looking at the sick is not observing.”

It was obvious that if Miss Nightingale's ideal of nursing was to be realized, the nurse required both training and inspiration.

She was left a widow at 42 with a young family. She had never had any training in hospital life, there was none to be had.

Her force of character was extraordinary. Her word was law. For her thoughts, words and acts were all the same. She moved in one piece.

She talked a great deal, but she never wasted herself in talking; she did what she said. Some people substitute words for acts: she never. She knew what she wanted, and she did it. She was a strict disciplinarian;

Her force of character was extraordinary. Her word was law. For her thoughts, words and acts were all the same. She moved in one piece. She talked a great deal, but she never wasted herself in talking; she did what she said.

Some people substitute words for acts: she never. She knew what she wanted, and she did it.

She was a strict disciplinarian; very kind, often affectionate, rather than loving. She took such an intense interest in everything, even in things matrons do not generally consider their business, that she never tired.

It was not intended that they should enter upon private nursing. This was an important point in Miss Nightingale's scheme. She had it in her mind from the first that her Training School should in its turn be the means of training elsewhere.

She wanted to sow an acorn which might in course of time produce a forest.

Such, then, was the scheme which was started on June 24, 1860. Miss Nightingale, confined to her room, was unable to visit the Hospital; but every detail was thought out by her.

Miss Nightingale's nursing work had the support of some leading doctors, but I suppose we must take Mr. South's word for it that the medical profession as a whole was unsympathetic or hostile towards reforms which in a later generation received general approbation.

The doctors do not stand alone among the professions in a tendency to oppose reforms. The hostility of lawyers to legal reform is almost proverbial; and as for the politicians, one-half of them is professionally engaged in predicting dire results from reforms introduced by the other half.

And so it continues until the paradoxes of one generation become the commonplaces of the next.

The hostility of lawyers to legal reform is almost proverbial; and as for the politicians, one-half of them is professionally engaged in predicting dire results from reforms introduced by the other half.

And so it continues until the paradoxes of one generation become the commonplaces of the next.

But if the course of political and social progress is strewn with the wrecks of predictions of ruin, neither is it free from the disillusionments of reformers. Fears may be liars, but hopes are sometimes dupes.

But if the course of political and social progress is strewn with the wrecks of predictions of ruin, neither is it free from the disillusionments of reformers.

Fears may be liars, but hopes are sometimes dupes.

Miss Nightingale, as the founder of modern nursing, achieved great and beneficent results, but she lived to experience some disappointments. Her standard was so high that she was more conscious of shortcoming than of achievement.

Non omnia possumus. Those who are capable of completion in one field are often impatient of it in another. Ruskin, so careful of finish in his literary craftsmanship, was asked why he so seldom finished his drawings “to the edges.”

“Oh,” he replied, “I can't be bothered to do the tailoring.”

Mr. Jowett urged Miss Nightingale in one of his letters (Nov. 17, 1861) to devote time and trouble to improving the form of her Suggestions:

To this simple faith of youth, experience succeeded. A patient might pray for sleep, but laudanum was more efficacious.

What was the use of praying to be delivered from “plague and pestilence” so long as the common sewers were still allowed to run into the Thames?

If God sent a visitation of cholera, which was the more probable reading of His mind—that He sent it in order that men might pray to Him for relief from it, or in order that they should themselves set about removing the predisposing causes?

Miss Nightingale's conclusion was that if there be a Plan in the universe, the Plan must be other than what the popular religion of the day, logically interpreted, implies.

“God's scheme for us,” she inferred, “was not that He should give us what we asked for, but that mankind should obtain it for mankind.”

This was the germ from which Miss Nightingale's philosophy of religion was developed. She had read much in metaphysics and in theology; she had reasoned long with herself

But her reply was always the same. The greater the difficulty, the more the need for serious study. With the concentrated study of mankind upon the problem, the answer would be found. “Truth is so,” said her friend.

“Truth is not what one troweth,” said she, and there was no phrase oftener on her lips in serious conversation.

She went on to develop this idea of God as Law in relation to human fate, and to those problems of “free will and necessity,” which Milton thought to be inscrutable mysteries, and around which metaphysicians and logicians have for ages disputed.

There is not so much solid food in books nowadays, especially in religious books, that we can afford to do so. I always think of Mad. Mohl's,

“I don't want any book-writer to chew my food for me.” Now nearly all books are chewed food—especially religious books.

… What I dislike in Renan is not that it is fine writing, but that it is all fine writing. His Christ is the hero of a novel; he himself, a successful novel-writer.

First find the Infinite, said a wise man, then name Him as thou wilt.

“It is not hard to know God,” said Joubert, “provided one will not force oneself to define Him.”

And another, of old time, said:—

On the letter from a lady working at Clewer, who “loved and honoured” Miss Nightingale, and looked forward to seeing her some day, the docket is:

“Dear Uncle Sam, Please choke off this woman and tell her that I shall never be well enough to see her, either here or hereafter.”

To the Secretary of a certain Sanitary Association: “I will give 21s. for Mrs. S.'s sake, provided they don't send me any more of their stupid books, and don't let this unbusiness-like woman write any more of these unbusiness-like letters.”

To a reverend gentleman who had “a secret cure”: “These miserable ecclesiastical quacks! Could you give them a lesson? What would they think of me did I possess such a discovery and keep it secret?” To the inventor of a patent bed-quilt:

“This man's letter reminds me of the Pills which, when taken by a gentleman with a wooden leg, made it grow again.”

To the British Army Scripture Readers she will send a subscription, though with some misgiving: “I am like Paul Ferroll, who never would engage in anything, knowing that he was a murderer, and might be found out any day. So I think.”

So I think.” Her uncle had read her religious speculations, and would have caught the allusion to her heterodox opinions. To a pious lady who sent a tract:

“Please answer this fool, but don't give her my address.”

Miss Nightingale disliked tracts. She received great bundles of them for distribution at Scutari. “I said I distributed them,” she once confessed, “whether to the fire or not, I did not say.” Like all female celebrities, Miss Nightingale received many offers of marriage.

To a pious lady who sent a tract: “Please answer this fool, but don't give her my address.” Miss Nightingale disliked tracts. She received great bundles of them for distribution at Scutari.

“I said I distributed them,” she once confessed, “whether to the fire or not, I did not say.”

Like all female celebrities, Miss Nightingale received many offers of marriage. A letter, which she wrote in the papers in support of the Volunteer movement, produced several.

To a petitioner who sent copies of verses to accompany accounts of his evangelical principles and pecuniary embarrassments: “This is the third time the man has written. I think it is time you put a stop to him and his ‘poetry.’”

Miss Nightingale detested gush almost as much as unbusiness-like habits (if indeed the two things need be distinguished).

She kept everything she received;

To a very long-winded appeal from a lady who claimed “the thrilling honour of Miss Nightingale's sympathy”:

“I believe all this, though I don't know the woman from Adam. Send her £2 for me, at the same time giving her a hint to look at Bleak House.”

But Mr. Smith, though not a member of Parliament, was an old parliamentary hand, and I have seen copies of some of the admirable letters in which he carried out, more or less, his niece's instructions.