Florence Nightingale

The story goes back to the middle of the nineteenth century. England was at war with Russia, and an English army was fighting in the Crimea. Disturbing reports, chiefly from the pen of William Russell the Times reporter, began to come to England of the terrible conditions in the hospitals where our wounded men were being treated. The chief hospital, the one at Scutari in Turkey, was an old barracks. It was built over a vast drain up which the wind blew evil-smelling air. The floors were broken and the building was swarming with rats and mice. But even this horrible place was overcrowded. There were hardly any beds, and men were lying on the floor, in the passages, anywhere. There were no clean shirts for the men, and they lay in their blood-soaked rags. They were dying in thousands, not of their wounds so much as of sickness. The only nurses were old soldiers long past fighting age, who knew nothing of nursing and were quite unable to do the work. That was the terrible position when Sydney Herbert, the Minister for War, wrote to Florence Nightingale asking if she would go out to the Crimea with a band of nurses. his letter crossed hers in the post offering her services. Within a week she was ready, and with thirty-eight nurses she sailed for Scutari. The Nightingales moved in the highest social class. Cabinet Ministers were frequent visitors to their house. They were very wealthy; they had two large country houses and town house in London. They travelled a good deal, and Florence (she was so called because she was born in the city of Florence in 1820) was highly educated in music, art, literature, Latin and Greek. She spoke Italian, French and German with easy, was attractive, and was expected to marry one of the numerous admirers who came to the Nightingales' home. But ever since she was a child she had nursed the villagers and the sick dogs and cats and horses round her home and had had a passion to be a nurse. Her parents were horrified and did all they could to prevent it, but Florence was not to be turned aside. Whenever she was abroad she visited hospitals, she read, secretly, books on nursing, reports of medical societies, histories of hospitals. She spent some weeks as a sister in a hospital in Paris and three month in a nursing school at Kaiserwerth in Germany, and kept up a constant struggle with her parents. Finally her singleness of aim and her resolution won the day. Her mother - with tears in her eyes - agreed to Florence becoming superintendent of an Establishment for Gentlewomen during illness in Harley Street, the fashionable street of London's most famous doctors. She had been there a year when the Crimean War broke out. It was from there that she wrote to Sidney Herbert, whom she knew personally, offering her services. When she arrived at Scutari ache found conditions even worse than the reports had stated. The War Office had told her nothing was lacking at Scutari. She found that everything was lacking, furniture, clothes, towels, soap, knives, plates. There were no bandages and no linen to make bandages, few medicines and scarcely any proper food. Luckily she had brought with her large quantities of food, soups, wines, jellies and medical supplies. Everywhere she met with inefficiency and confusion, and everywhere difficulties were put in her way by the officials in charge. As the officials working according to Army regulations could not, or wouldn’t, supply the necessary stores, she did so out of her own money. She bought boot, socks, blankets, shirts by the thousand. She spared no one, least of all herself. She often worked for twenty-four hours on day, dressing wounds, helping surgeons in their operations, easing the pain of the sick, comforting the dying. Every night, carrying a little oil-lamp to light her way, she walked by beds, four miles of them. To the soldiers she was “Lady with the Lamp” and they worshipped her. But that is only one side of the picture. She was also the hard, practical woman. Florence Nightingale and her nurses got down on their knees and scrubbed floors and walls. She organized the cooking of the men's food and the washing of their clothes. Instead of badly-cooked, badly-served food she gave the men well-cooked, well-served meals. She wrote letters to the Government in England, stinging letters to waken them out of their self-satisfied dreams. In 1855 she was made Inspector of all hospitals in the Crimea. It meant long, uncomfortable journeys in snow and rain and cold. She took fever but continued her work from her bed. She refused to go home until the last soldier went. It was not until after peace was declared in 1856 that she returned home - an invalid for life. But Florence Nightingale lived fifty-four years longer. Thought she couldn't leave her house, often not even her bed, she worked as fiercely as she had done at Scutari and brought about more changes in English life than perhaps any other private person of her time. At home she met with the same opposition from officials as she had met in the Crimea but she had great support, too. Queen Victoria was a great admirer of her. She changed the whole system of hospital organization of the army. Florence Nightingale began the reform of the health service in India. She wrote books on nursing. She started the Nightingale Training School for nurses at St. Thomas's Hospital, now one of the finest in the world. She changed the whole idea of hospital planning and is the founder of modern nursing. Foreign governments consulted her on the health services for their countries and their representatives crowded to the ceremony in 1907 when Florence Nightingale was given the Order of Merit, the highest civil honor the Government can give and the first ever given to a woman. Three years later, a very old, tired woman of ninety, she died quietly in her sleep.