Sarah A. Southall Tooley

“ Time has scarcely printed a line on her brow, or a wrinkle on her cheeks, or clouded the clearness of her penetrating eyes, which is the more remarkable when it is remembered that she has been a suffering and over-worked invalid ever since her return from the Crimea. The dainty lace cap falling over the silver hair in long lapels gives a charming frame to Miss Nightingale’s face which is singularly beautiful in old age. ”

“ We must refrain from quoting more of this singularly fine tribute of the Chief to one of her ablest generals in the army of nursing reform, with the exception of the beautiful closing words: “Let us add living flowers to her grave, ‘lilies with full hands,’ not fleeting primroses, not dying flowers. Let us bring the work of our hands and our heads and our hearts to finish her work which God has so blessed. ”

“ Miss Nightingale fought steadily and patiently against criticism and prejudice, and now and again from her sick-room came stirring appeals to the young womanhood of England that they would regard the nursing of the sick as the noblest work to which they could devote themselves. “We hear so much of idle hands and unsatisfied hearts,” she wrote, “and nowhere more than in England. All England is ringing with the cry for ‘Woman’s Work’ and ‘Woman’s Mission.’ Why are there so few to do the work?... The remunerative employment is there, and in plenty. The want is the women fit to take it.” ”

“ In the roof of the ceiling is an innocent-looking little trap-door which, when opened, reveals a secret chamber of some size. This delightful old kitchen, with its mysterious memories, was a place of great fascination to Florence Nightingale and her sister in their childhood, and many stories did they weave about the scenes which transpired long ago in the old mansion, so near their own home. ”

“ It was indeed a hard cross to bear for a woman comparatively young and with a mind full of humanitarian projects, and as the first years of waiting passed Florence Nightingale drank deep of the cup of life’s disappointments. ”

“ District nursing, so solitary, so without the cheer and the stimulus of a big corps of fellow-workers in the bustle of a public hospital, but also without many of its cares and strains, requires what it has with you, the constant supervision and inspiration of a genius of nursing and a common home. ”

“ Miss Nightingale’s father displayed a fine discrimination when he selected the position for his new house. One might search even the romantic Peak country in vain for a more ideal site than Lea Hurst. It stands on a broad plateau looking across to the sharp, bold promontory of limestone rock known as Crich Stand. Soft green hills and wooded heights stud the landscape, while deep down in the green valley the silvery Derwent—or “Darent,” as the natives call it—makes music as it dashes over its rocky bed. ”

“ When you see the natural and almost universal craving in English sick for their ‘tea,’ you cannot but feel that Nature knows what she is about. I should be very glad if any of the abusers of tea would point out what to give to an English patient after a sleepless night, instead of tea. It is the almost universal testimony of English men and women who have undergone great fatigue, such as riding long journeys without stopping, or sitting up for several nights in succession, that they could do it best upon an occasional cup of tea—and nothing else. ”

“ She selected three specially trained and educated women, who were not only to give addresses in village schoolrooms on such matters as disinfection, personal cleanliness, ventilation, drainage, whitewashing, but were to visit the homes of the poor and give friendly instruction and advice to the women.
She knew, and respected the feeling, that an Englishman regards his home, however humble, as a castle into which no one may enter uninvited. Miss Nightingale had no sympathy with the class of “visiting ladies” who lift the latch of a poor person’s cottage and walk in without knocking. ”

“ The wounded arrived by the shipload until every ward, both in the General and in the Barrack Hospital, was crowded to excess, and the men lay in double rows down the long corridors, forming several miles of suffering humanity. During these terrible days Florence Nightingale was known to stand for twenty hours at a time, on the arrivals of fresh detachments of sick, apportioning quarters, directing her nurses and attending at the most painful operations where her presence might soothe and support. She would spend hours over men dying of cholera or fever. ”

“ For every man who had perished in those bitter trenches before Sebastopol, died in the ill-fed camps of hunger or disease, or groaned his life away in the crowded and pestilential hospitals, Sidney Herbert saved at least the life of one British soldier by his labours. ”

“ The late Dean Stanley, who was not a man to misuse the English language, described Miss Nightingale’s faculty as “commanding genius.”
We read in the thrilling accounts of the period how the Lady-in-Chief went her rounds at night, passing along the endless corridors and through the hospital wards carrying a little lamp, the gleam of which lighted her progress of mercy and love. Dying men turned on their pillows to bless her shadow as it passed. ”

“ The United States, which has to-day such an efficient organisation for the succour of the sick and wounded soldiers, owes the inception of the movement to Florence Nightingale. When the American Civil War broke out in 1860, her name had become a talisman not only to her fellow-countrymen, but to English-speaking people all over the world, and to her example the women of the United States looked when their land became devastated by war. ”

“ Miss Nightingale was a pioneer of the pioneers. She herself had not then any clear course before her for the future, but she realised the important point that she could not hope to accomplish anything without training. The faculty was necessary and the desire to be helpful to the sick and suffering, but a trained knowledge was the important thing. In a letter which Miss Nightingale wrote in after years to young women on the subject of “Work and Duty” she remarked: “I would say to all young ladies who are called to any particular vocation, qualify yourselves for it as a man does for his work. ”

“ It appears that when Miss Nightingale was a young woman, the fashion for extolling the single girl as against her sister who had entered the bonds of matrimony was coming into vogue, but on this point our heroine was racily sincere. “It has become of late the fashion,” she says, “to cry up ‘old maids,’ to inveigh against regarding marriage as the vocation of all women, to declare that a single life is as happy as a married one, if people would but think so. ”

“ Florence Nightingale’s ride to camp proved an adventurous one. The road was bad and not nearly wide enough for all the traffic. Crowds of many nationalities, together with a ceaseless stream of mules, horses, oxen, artillery waggons, cannon, infantry, and cavalry struggled over the uneven muddy road, drivers and officers shouting, horses kicking, sometimes a waggon overturned, and everybody in a state of turmoil. ”

“ Other women engaged in nursing the sick soldiers possibly thought that they had made equal personal sacrifices with Miss Nightingale—some indeed gave their life in the cause. Others again, returning to a life of seclusion after toiling through the arduous nursing of the campaign, might perhaps have felt some injustice that one name alone rang through the land, while others who also had borne the heat and burden of the day remained unhonoured and unsung. ”

“ Not until all the hospitals were closed, and the last remnant of the British army was under sailing orders for home, did Florence Nightingale quit the scene of her labours. Just before leaving the Crimea, she was amazed to find that some fifty or sixty women, who had followed their husbands to the Crimea without leave, but had been allowed to remain because they were useful, were actually left behind before Sebastopol when their husbands’ regiments had sailed. ”

“ It needs no words to picture the gratitude of the women to the dear Lady-in-Chief who sought them out in their abject misery, gave them decent clothing and food from her own stores in the Nurses’s Tower, and saw that the little lives ushered into the world amid the horrors and privations of war had at least tender care. At the end of January, owing to a broken drain in the basement, fever broke out, and Miss Nightingale now persuaded the Commandant to remove the women to healthier quarters. ”

“ If life could be saved, Florence Nightingale was determined to save it, and throughout the night, assisted by one of the nurses, she sat beside the men, feeding them with a spoon until their senses awakened and their strength began to return. ”

“ A softness comes into their voice, and a smile of pleasure lights up their wrinkled faces, as they tell you how “beautifully Miss Florence used to talk.” In years long after, when she returned for holiday visits to Lea Hurst, nothing gave Miss Nightingale greater pleasure than for the young girls of the district, some of them daughters of her former scholars, to come on summer Sunday afternoons and sing on the lawn at Lea Hurst as she sat in her room above. ”

“ We have no detailed record of what words were spoken at this meeting, but we know that the memory of the heavenly personality of Elizabeth Fry was an ever-present inspiration with Florence Nightingale in the years which followed.
It was a meeting of kindred spirits, but of distinct individualities. We do not find Miss Nightingale making any attempt to take up the mantle fast falling from the experienced philanthropist: she had her own line of pioneer work forming in her capable brain, but was eager to glean something from the wide experience through which her revered friend had passed. ”

“ Another and more intimate description of Miss113 Nightingale at this period reveals to us the true and tender womanhood which learning had left untouched. “Miss Nightingale is one of those whom God forms for great ends. You cannot hear her say a few sentences—no, not even look at her, without feeling that she is an extraordinary being. Simple, intellectual, sweet, full of love and benevolence, she is a fascinating and perfect woman. She is tall and pale. Her face is exceedingly lovely; but better than all is the soul’s glory that shines through every feature so exultingly. ”

“ Macdonald and his superfluous cash away to her office in the Nurses’ Tower, where he could see for himself the daily demands on her private stores made by the sick and wounded soldiers, and how impossible it was, despite the generous gifts already received from the charitable at home, to meet all requirements.
The Lady-in-Chief could tell of men arriving by hundreds without a shred of decent clothing on their backs, of the lack of hospital furniture, of beds, pillows, sheets, and sanitary appliances, even of175 drugs, to say nothing of materials for invalid food. ”

“ Certainly no person ever did that well which he did not work at as hard as if he did it solely for money. If by amateur in art or in nursing are meant those who take it up for play, it is not art at all, it is not nursing at all. You never yet made an artist by paying him well; but an artist ought to be well paid.”
A most important outcome of the introduction of a system of trained nurses for the sick poor was the establishment of the Queen’s Jubilee Nurses. ”

“ It was estimated that twelve thousand men could be exercised in the central court. Galleries and corridors, rising story above story, surrounded three sides of the building, and, taken continuously, were four miles in extent. The building and position were alike good, but the interior of the hospital, as Miss Nightingale soon discovered, was a scene of filth, pestilence, misery, and disorder impossible to describe. On either side the endless corridors the wounded men lay closely packed together without the commonest decencies or necessaries of life. ”

“ But hitherto we have not found that young Englishwomen have been convinced. And we must confess that, in the present state of things, their horror of being ‘old maids’ seems justified ... a life without love, and an activity without an aim, is horrible in idea and wearisome in reality.”
Miss Nightingale does not touch on the point that the disparity between the numbers of the sexes makes singleness not a choice but a necessity to many women, and that in the interests of those who must remain unwed, training for a definite calling in life should be given to girls as well as to boys. ”