house which was not hopeless; but there was no sign of dismay in Florence Nightingale. She completed her task, showing unconsciously by it how a woman as well as a man may be born to administration and command.
By a sort of treachery only too common in the visitors of celebrated people, we have all seen the letter of Mr. Sidney Herbert, in 1854, entreating Miss Nightingale to go—accompanied by her friends the Bracebridges, who are familiar with life in the East—to Turkey, to minister among the sick and wounded of our army. How soon she was ready, and how she and her band of nurses went, and were just in time to receive the wounded from Inkermann, no Englishman forgets. No man of any nation concerned will ever forget her subsequent services. She had against her not only a chaos of disorder in which to move, and a hell of misery around her to relieve, but special difficulties in the» jealousy of the medical officers, the rawness of the nurses so hastily collected, and the incompatibilities of the volunteer ladies who started on the enterprise with her or after her. On the state of the hospitals it can, I hope, never be necessary to enlarge again. We all know how, under her superintendence, places became clean and airy, and persons cleanly, clothed, fed, and afforded some chance of recovery from maladies or wounds. While history abides, the image of Florence Nightingale, lamp in hand, going through miles of beds, night by night, noting every patient as she went, and ministering wherever most wanted, will always glow in men’s hearts; and the sayings of the men about her will be traditions for future generations to enjoy.
She did not, like Mrs. Mompesson, sink down and die in the midst of the scene: nor did she, like Mary Pickard, return into ordinary life for the rest of a long career. She was prostrated by the Crimean fever at Balaklava, and carried up to the hospital on the cliffs till she began to mend, when she was taken to sea. She would not come home, because her work at Scutari was not finished. She remained there till the end of the war, by which time she and her military and medical coadjutors had shown what hospitals may be, and how low the rate of mortality of an army may be reduced, even in time of war.
She has never recovered from that fever; and for some years she has been confined by severe and increasing illness. Not the less has she worked, steadily and most efficiently. She cannot fulfil her aim,—of training nurses in an institution of her own, and thus raising up a body of successors. The grateful people of England supplied the means, without her knowledge or desire,—which was the same thing as imposing a new service upon her. She wished to decline it when she found how little likely her health was to improve. Her letter to the trustees of the fund must be fresh in all memories, and the reply of the trustees, who satisfied her that the money was accumulating, and the plan and the public able and willing to wait. If she could not do this particular work, she has done many others. Her written evidence before the Sanitary Commission for the Army is a great work in itself. So are various reforms urged on the military authorities by her and her coadjutors, and now adopted by the War Office. Reforms in the Indian army are about to follow. The lives thus saved no one will attempt to number; and the amount of misery and vice precluded by her scientific humanity is past all estimate.
Her “Notes on Nursing,” prepared and issued in illness and pain, are the crowning evidence of what she is and can do. Hitherto we have, I trust, appreciated and honoured her acts: now we are enabled to perceive and appreciate the quality of her mind. It was as certain before as it can ever be, that she must have acquired no little science, in various departments, to produce the effects she wrought: but we see it all now.
We see also, much more clearly than ever, her moral characteristics. I will not describe them when they can be so much better seen in her “Notes on Nursing.” Any one who reads those Notes without being moved in the depths of his heart, will not understand the writer of them by any amount of description: and those who have been so moved, do not need and will not tolerate it. The intense and exquisite humanity to the sick, underlying the glorious common sense about affairs, and the stem insight into the weaknesses and the perversions of the healthy, troubled as they are by the sight of suffering, and sympathising with themselves instead of the patient, lay open a good deal of the secret of this wonderful woman’s life and power. We begin to see how a woman, anything but robust at any time, may have been able, as well as willing, to undertake whatever was most repulsive and most agonising in the care of wounded soldiers, and crowds of cholera patients. We see how her minute economy and attention to the smallest details are reconcilable with the magnitude of her administration, and the comprehensiveness of her plans for hospital establishments, and for the reduction of the national rate of mortality. As the lives of the sick hang on small things, she is as earnest about the quality of a cup of arrowroot, and the opening and shutting of doors, as about the institution of a service between the commissariat and the regimental, which shall ensure an army against being starved when within reach of food. In the mind of a true nurse, nothing is too great or too small to be attended to with all diligence: and therefore we have seen Florence Nightingale doing, and insisting upon, the right about shirts and towels, spoon-meats and the boiling of rice; and largely aiding in reducing the mortality of the army from nineteen in the thousand to eight, in time of peace.
In the spirit and tone of this book we see, too, how it is that, with all her fame, we have known so little of the woman herself. Where it is of use to tell any piece of her own experience, she tells it; and these scraps of autobiography will be eagerly seized upon by all kinds of readers: but, except for the purpose of direct utility, she never speaks of herself, more or less, or even discloses any of her opinions, views, or feelings. This reserve is a great distinction in these days of self-exposure, and descanting on personal experiences. It is the best possible