Sir Edward Tyas Cook

“ The greatness of Miss Nightingale's character, and the secret of her life's work, consist in the union of qualities not often found in the same man or woman. She was not a sentimentalist; yet she was possessed by an infinite compassion. Pity for the sick and sorrowful,—a passionate desire to serve them,—devotion to her “children,” the common soldiers—sympathy with the voiceless peasants of India: these were ruling motives of her life. She scorned those who were “only enthusiasts”; but there was no height of devotion to which a considered enthusiasm would not lead her. ”

“ Of Lord Lawrence and Sir Bartle Frere, Miss Nightingale wrote to Madame Mohl (March 26, 1869) : “You can ask Sir Bartle Frere about Sir John Lawrence if you like. But they are so unlike, yet each so roundly perfect in his own way, that they can never understand each other—never touch at any point, not thro' eternity. I love and admire them both with all my mind and with all my heart, but have long since given up the slightest attempt to make either understand the other. But each is too much of a man, too noble, too chivalrous, to denigrate the other.” ”

“ Nurses cannot avoid exercising a moral influence. They exercise it by their characters, and no point can ever be reached at which a woman can say, “Now my character is perfect.” “Nurses are not chaplains”; “it is what a nurse is in herself, and what comes out of herself, out of what she is (almost without knowing it herself) that exercises a moral or religious influence over her patients. No set form of words is of any use. And patients are so quick to see whether a Nurse is consistent always in herself—whether she is what she says to them. ”

“ The inspiration of the ideal was gone. That inspiration never forsook Miss Nightingale in her pursuit of the art of life.
In life, as in other arts, what is spontaneous, and perhaps even what is unregenerate, have often more of charm than what is acquired or learnt by discipline. And in the case of Miss Nightingale, her elemental vigour of mind and force of will, will perhaps to some readers seem more admirable than the philosophy which she applied to her conduct or the acquired graces with which she sought to chasten her character. ”

“ Mr. Jowett had, it is clear, a very high opinion of Miss Nightingale's genius, the most sincere admiration for her self-devotion, and a deep affection for her. But he thought that she was in some ways not using her life to the best advantage, and that her state of physical and mental suffering was in some measure the result of a too impetuous temper. In letter after letter, full of a beautiful and delicate sympathy, he whispered into her ears counsels of calm, of trust, of moderation. ”

“ And, if any one would know what are the lowest depths of human vice and misery, would see the festering mass of decay of living human bodies and human souls, and then would try what one loving soul, filled with the spirit of her God, can do to let in the light of God into this hideous well (worse than the well of Cawnpore) , to bind up the wounds, to heal the broken-hearted, to bring release to the captives—let her study the ways, and follow in the steps of this one young, frail woman, who has died to show us the way—blessed in her death as in her life. ”

“ But for the most part the despondency and the self-abasement which coloured her meditations, and which sometimes appear in her letters, were the expression of the mystical way of her soul. They are the utterance of a soul which was striving after perfection, and found the path difficult and thorny. Miss Nightingale was masterful and eager; she had often been able to impress her will upon men and upon events; she found it difficult to bear disappointments and vexations with that entire resignation which the mystics taught her. ”

“ And now you work on in silence, and nobody knows how many lives are saved by your nurses in hospitals (you have introduced a new era in nursing) ; how many thousand soldiers who would have fallen victims to bad air, bad water, bad drainage and ventilation, are now alive owing to your forethought and diligence; how many natives of India (they might be counted probably by hundreds of thousands) in this generation and in generations to come have been preserved from famine and oppression and the load of debt by the energy of a sick lady who can scarcely rise from her bed. ”

“ Bracebridge went home: on many, many times since—when Sidney Herbert, the War Minister with whom I had worked five years in the War Office died: when Sir John Lawrence, the Indian Viceroy, left India: and many other times when the future fell across my life like a great black wall, not (as in other lives) making a change, but completely cutting off the future from the past: and again when my Father's death brought upon me a load of cares which would have been too great had I had nothing else to do and had I been in health. ”

“ A statesman, past middle age, absorbed in politics for a quarter of a century, out of sympathy with me, remodels his whole life and policy—learns a science the driest, the most technical, the most difficult, that of administration, as far as it concerns the lives of men,—not, as I learnt it, in the field from stirring experience, but by writing dry regulations in a London room by my sofa with me. ”

“ To pit the medical school against the nurse-training school is to pit the hour-hand against the minute-hand. The worst nursing in Europe is that of Sisterhoods, where no civil administration or medical school is admitted. The worst hospitals in Europe are those where no nurse-training schools are admitted, where the doctor is, in fact, the matron.—You ask me whether it is possible to follow out successfully the profession of Nursing except from ‘higher motives.’ What are the ‘higher motives’? ”

“ I am neither for nor against ‘Paid Nurses.’ My principle has always been: that we should give the best training we could to any woman of any class, of any sect, paid or unpaid, who had the requisite qualifications, moral, intellectual, and physical, for the vocation of a Nurse. Unquestionably, the educated will be more likely to rise to the post of Superintendents, not because they are ladies, but because they are educated.—The relation of a nursing staff to the medical officers is that of the building staff to an architect. ”

“ The artist on canvas exhibits the blended tints at one time. That is why the portrait by a great painter sometimes tells us more of a character at a glance than is gathered from volumes of written biography. But no artist painted a portrait of Miss Nightingale in her prime, and I must do as best I may with my blotching prose in an endeavour to collect into some general impression what has been told in these volumes. ”

“ Miss Nightingale's interest in details of sanitary reform was gradually merged into larger questions. Recurrent Indian famines gave a new turn to her thoughts. “I have been doing sanitary work for India for 18 years,” she explained in a letter to Lord Houghton (Nov. 27, 1877) ; “but for the last four have been continually struck by this dreadful fact: What is the good of trying to keep people in health if you can't keep them in life? These ryots are being done to death by floods, by drought, by Zemindars, and usurers. You must live in order to be well.” ”

“ Self-sufficiency, then, is the failing which the Chief of the Nurses constantly chastises. She does so by holding up before her pupils the ideal of nursing as a progressive art. “For us who nurse,” she says, “our nursing is a thing in which, unless in it we are making progress every year, every month, every week,—take my word for it, we are going back. The more experience we gain, the more progress we can make. The progress you make in your year's training with us is as nothing to what you must make every year after your year's training is over. ”

“ My dear old Comrades—I think of you on Balaclava Day and many days besides. In peace as in war, I wish you the best wish: Quit ye like men! God, from whom the soldiers take their orders, has as much work for us to do for Him in peace as in war—thank His Love and Wisdom!—and to the last years of our lives which ought to be the best years of our lives. ”

“ Having found her appointed corner in the vineyard, Miss Nightingale devoted her life to it; in equal measure, with careful adjustment of means to ends, and with intense devotion. “To make an art of Life!” she wrote to Madame Mohl (May 20, 1868) . “That is the finest art of all the Fine Arts. And few there be that find it. It was the ‘one thing wanting’ to dear——. She had the finest moral nature I ever knew. Yet she never did any good to herself or to any one else. Because she never could make Life an Art. ”

“ The minds of many turned to Sir John Lawrence, but, with one exception, no Indian civilian since Warren Hastings had permanently held the office of Viceroy. Miss Nightingale had unbounded admiration for him. The soldier's heart in her loved his heroic deeds. “What would Homer have been,” she once said, “if he had had such heroes as the Lawrences to sing?” [28] Personal intercourse had filled her with closer admiration for what Lord Stanley called “a certain heroic simplicity” in the man, for his unaffected piety, his rugged honesty, his deep sympathy with human suffering. ”

“ She found on questioning the Nurses that their technical education did not reach the high standard which she desired to maintain. She feared that the moral standard similarly fell short of her ideal; nursing was coming to be regarded too much as a business profession, and too little as a sacred calling. Miss Nightingale determined to throw herself into a sustained effort for the better realization of her ideal. ”

“ She was intensely conscious of a special destiny, and the tenacity with which in the face of many obstacles she clung to her sense of a vocation enabled her to fulfil it. The sphere of women's work and opportunities has been so much widened in the present day, that readers of a generation later than Florence Nightingale's may require, perhaps, to make some effort of sympathetic imagination in order to realize how much of a pioneer she was. ”

“ No words of Florence Nightingale's that have been quoted in the course of this Memoir are more intensely autobiographical, none express more truly the spirit in which she lived and moved and had her being, than those which I have put together on a preceding page from her Notes on the Mystics. Her creed may seem cold to some minds, but she invested it with a spiritual fervour which none of the Mystics has surpassed. This woman, so practical, so business-like, and in her outward dealings with men and affairs so worldly-wise, was a dreamer, a devotee, a religious enthusiast. ”

“ Miss Nightingale was behind the scenes both at Calcutta or Simla and in London: in India by confidential communications from Lord Ripon himself, in London through friends in the India Office. She knew how uncertain was the support he received in his own Council, and how strong was the opposition in the Council in Downing Street. He was a good man fighting against adversity, and she was eager to do what she could to help him. His reforms were also hers. She had spent years of labour in mastering the intricacies of land tenure in India. ”

“ In India your work represents, not only diminished Mortality as with us, but increase of energy, increase of power of the populations. I always feel, as if God had said: mankind is to create mankind. In this sense you are the greatest creator of mankind in modern history....
Would there be any impropriety in your Sanitary Commissions sending copies of their printed Minutes to the Barrack and Hospital Improvement Commission here, through the India Office—merely for information? As far as your Bengal Commission goes: these men don't want urging: they have not now to be taught. ”

“ What is also true, but less generally known, is that there have been heavier sacrifices than those demanded in war and rendered glorious by British valour. The greater part of the British lives that were shed in India were lost, not in battle, but by disease. Burke said of British rule in India in his time: “England has built no bridges, made no high roads, cut no navigations. Were we driven out of India this day, nothing would remain to tell that it had been possessed, during the inglorious period of our dominion, by anything better than the ourang-outang or the tiger.” ”

“ And in Jesus Christ, His best son, our Master, who was born to show us the way through suffering to be also His sons and His daughters, His handmen and His handmaidens, who lived in the same spirit with the Father, that we may also live in that Holy Spirit whose meat was to do His Father's will and to finish His work, who suffered and died saying, ‘That the world may love the Father.’ And I believe in the Father Almighty's love and friendship, in the service of man being the service of God, the growing into a likeness with Him by love, the being one with Him in will at last, which is Heaven. ”