Annie Matheson

“ Truth is a two-edged sword, and for purposes of rebuke or reform Miss Nightingale used it at times with keenness and daring. In that sense this glowing, loving-hearted woman knew how on occasions to be stern. Her salt never [232] lost its savour. She was swift, efficient, capable to the last degree, and she was also high-spirited and sometimes sharp-tongued. Perhaps we love her all the more for being so human. A person outwardly all perfection, if not altogether divine, is apt to give the idea that there are faults hidden up somewhere. It was not so with Miss Nightingale. ”

“ There were others, and she was always among the first to do them honour. But she stood easily first, and first, too, in the modesty of all true greatness. All her life had been a training for the work which was now given to her hand.
Among the many women who longed to nurse and tend our soldiers, many were fast bound by duties to those dependent on them, many were tied hand and foot by the pettifogging prejudices of the school in which they had been brought up. Many, whose ardour would have burned up all prejudice and all secondary claim, were yet ignorant, weak, incapable. ”

“ The picture of Miss Nightingale that dwells in the popular mind no doubt owes its outline to the memories of the men she nursed with such tenderness and skill. And it is a true picture. Like all good workmen, she loved her work, and nursing was her chosen work so long as her strength remained. None can read her writing, and especially her Nursing Notes and her pamphlet on nursing among the sick poor, without feeling how much she cared for every minutest detail, and how sensitively she felt with, and for, her patients. ”

“ The master-mind that so swiftly transformed the filthy horrors of Scutari into a well-ordered hospital, and could dare to walk through minor difficulties and objections as though they did not exist, was educated in a severe and early school; and the striking modesty and gentleness of Florence Nightingale’s girlhood was the deeper for having grappled with enough real knowledge to know its own ignorances and limitations, and treat the personality of others with a deference which was a part of her charm. ”

“ Florence, having somehow escaped measles and whooping-cough, was not allowed to run into infection in the cottages, but that did not prevent the sending of beef-teas and jellies and other helpful and neighbourly gifts, which could be tied to her pony’s saddle-bow and left by her at the door. She learned to know the cottagers with a frank and very human intimacy, and their homely wit touched her own, their shrewdness and sympathy met their like in her, and as she grew older, all this added to her power and her charm. ”

“ When we think of the long, careful training that had been given to her fine gifts of eye and hand in the art that she loved—for she rightly regarded nursing as an art—an art in which every movement must be a skilled and disciplined movement—we may divine something of what it cost to bear, without one murmur of complaint, what she might so easily have been tempted to regard as a lifelong waste of faculty. ”

“ There we have the humility of true greatness. All her work was amazing in its fruitfulness, but those who knew her best feel sometimes that the part of her work which was greatest of all and will endure longest is just the part of which most people know least. I mean her great labour of love for India, which I cannot doubt has already saved the lives of millions, and will in the future save the health and working power of millions more. ”

“ Florence Nightingale would have enriched our calendar of uncanonized saints even if her disciplined high-hearted goodness had exercised an unseen spell by simply being, and had, by some limitation of body or of circumstance, been cut off from much active doing: for so loving and obedient a human will, looking ever to the Highest, as a handmaiden watches the eyes of her mistress, is always and everywhere a humane influence and a divine offering. ”

“ Felicia Skene was among those whom she consulted and whose advice she found of good service. It has already been noted in these pages that Miss Skene had, without knowing it, been preparing one of the threads to be interwoven in that living tapestry in which Miss Nightingale’s labours were to endure in such glowing colours. Like Miss Nightingale she had real intimacy with those outside her own order, and by her practical human sympathy understood life, not only in one rank, but in all ranks. ”

“ She is a ‘ministering angel,’ without any exaggeration, in these hospitals, and, as her slender form glides quietly along each corridor, every poor fellow’s face softens with gratitude at the sight of her. When all the medical officers have retired for the night, and silence and darkness have settled down upon those miles of prostrate sick, she may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds. The popular instinct was not mistaken, which, when she had set out from England on her mission of mercy, hailed her as a heroine ”

“ The semi-starvation of many hospital patients before Miss Nightingale’s arrival, noted on an earlier page, was chiefly the result of mismanagement—mismanagement on the part of those who meant well—often, indeed, meant the very best within their power, but among whom there was, until her coming, no central directing power, with brain and heart alike capable and energizing and alive to all the vital needs of deathly illness—alert with large foreseeing outlook, yet shrewd and swift in detail. ”

“ She herself has written in Nursing Notes:—
“The everyday management of a large ward, let alone of a hospital, the knowing what are the [154] laws of life and death for men, and what the laws of health for wards (and wards are healthy or unhealthy mainly according to the knowledge or ignorance of the nurse) —are not these matters of sufficient importance and difficulty to require learning by experience and careful inquiry, just as much as any other art? They do not come by inspiration to the lady disappointed in love, nor to the poor workhouse drudge hard up for a livelihood. ”

“ They enjoyed nearly a hundred years ago (Florence was born in 1820) as liberal a course of study as any High School girl of to-day, and no doubt it is true that the orderliness of mind and character, at which his methods aimed, proved of countless value to Florence in those later days, when her marvellous power in providing for minutest details without unnecessary fuss or friction banished the filth and chaos of the first Crimean hospitals, and transformed them into abodes of healing and of order. ”

“ We must create a public opinion which will drive the Government, instead of the Government having to drive us—an enlightened public opinion, wise in principles, wise in details. We hail the County Council as being or becoming one of the strongest engines in our favour, at once fathering and obeying the great impulse for national health against national and local disease. For we have learned that we have national health in our own hands—local sanitation, national health. ”

“ Had the sight of all that agony and of the senseless [197] confusion that received it, led the Lady-in-Chief and her nurses to waste their power in rushing hither and thither in disorganized fear of defeat, their very sympathy and emotion dimming their foresight and clouding their brain, the whole story might have been different. But Miss Nightingale was of those who, by a steadfast obedience hour by hour to the voice within, have attained through the long years to a fine mastery of every nerve and muscle of that frail house wherein they dwell. ”

“ Indeed, it may be truly said that in every quarter of the globe men and women united to pour forth their gratitude to Miss Nightingale, and to enable her to complete the work so bravely begun, by transforming the old and evil methods of nursing under British rule to that ideal art in which fortitude, tenderness, and skill receive their crowning grace. ”

“ There were sons, husbands, brothers, fathers, for whom there would be no more home-coming on earth; and some who would come back broken and maimed: but all had served their country, and heroism lasts beyond time and death.
All through the empire arose an outcry of thanksgiving to the woman who still remained at her post among the sick and the dying—the woman who had saved England’s honour in the [275] day of disgrace and neglect, and had saved also countless lives among her brave sons. ”

“ To me that personality seems to win the heart of the coldest and dullest [309] by its ardent enthusiasm and humility, and those unpublished letters, which I was privileged to read, brought home to me how Miss Nightingale—then an invalid of sixty-two—literally lived in the life of those pioneer nurses whom she had inspired and sent forth.
It is easy to see in them how much she feared for her nurses any innocent little trip of the tongue, with regard to the rest of the staff, which might set rolling the dangerous ball of hospital gossip. ”

“ The growth of her dominion was rapid, was natural, and not unlike the development of what men call ‘responsible government.’ One of others accepting a task ostensibly subordinate and humble, she yet could not, if she would, divest herself of the authority that belonged to her as a gentlewoman—as a gentlewoman abounding in all the natural gifts, and all the peculiar knowledge required for hospital management. ”

“ Surely woman should bring the best she has, whatever that is, to the work of God’s world, without attending to either of these cries. For what are they, both of them, the one just as much as the other, but listening to the ‘what people will say,’ to opinion, to the ‘voices from without’? And as a wise man has said, no one has ever done anything great or useful by listening to the voices from without. ”

“ Yet all over the world at all times, while the enemy is sowing tares in the field, the good seed is ripening also in the ground for the harvest; and through these same years far-off threads were being woven, ready to make part of the warp and woof of a life, as yet busied with the duties and joys of childhood, but one day to thrill the hearts of Europe and be remembered while time shall last. ”

“ Yet, while he talked, my heart ached for her, thinking of the womanly joys of home and motherhood which were not for her, and all the pure and tender romance which woman bears in her inmost soul, even when, as in this noble instance, it is transmuted by the will of God and the woman’s own obedient will into service of other homes and other lives. ”

“ She grew up to be a beautiful and charming woman, for whom men would gladly have laid down their lives; yet her beauty and her charm alone could not have secured for our wounded soldiers in the Crimea, tortured by dirt and neglect, the swift change to cleanness and comfort and good nursing which her masterly and unbending methods aided her commanding personal influence to win. ”

“ The Angel of Mercy still lingers to the last on the [295] scene of her labours; but her mission is all but accomplished. Those long arcades of Scutari, in which dying men sat up to catch the sound of her footstep or the flutter of her dress, and fell back on the pillow content to have seen her shadow as it passed, are now comparatively deserted. She may probably be thinking how to escape, as best she may, on her return, the demonstrations of a nation’s appreciation of the deeds and motives of Florence Nightingale. ”

“ We must ever be grateful for the shining example she has given to nurses, who in her find united that broad-minded comprehension of the ultimate aim of all their work, with a patient and untiring devotion to its practical detail, which alone combine to make the perfect nurse. ”

“ Yes, iron is hard and makes a pillar of strength in time of need. But he who forges out of it weapons and tools that are at once delicate [362] and resistless, knows that it will humbly shoe the feet of horses, and cut the household bread, and will make for others besides Lombardy a kingly crown. And when iron is truly on fire, nothing commoner or softer nor anything more yielding—not even gold itself—can glow with a more steadfast and fervent heat to warm the hands and hearts of men. ”