Stephen Paget

“ The institute had been founded on a very humble scale in 1833 for the care of the destitute by Theodor Fliedner, protestant pastor of Kaiserswerth, and had since grown into a training school for women teachers and for nurses of the sick. The institution was run on the lines of poverty, simplicity, and common sense. A very brief experience of the Kaiserswerth Institute convinced Miss Nightingale of the possibilities of making nursing a "calling" for ladies and no mere desultory occupation. ”

“ The butter is most filthy; it is Irish butter in a state of decomposition; and the meat is more like moist leather than food. Potatoes we are waiting for, until they arrive from France.' Sidney Godolphin Osborne went out to visit Scutari soon after Miss Nightingale's arrival, and in a report on the hospital accommodation described the complete absence of 'the commonest provision for the exigencies' of the hour (cf. Osborne's Scutari and its Hospitals, 1855) . Miss Nightingale's difficulties are incapable of exaggeration. ”

“ In 1867, at the request of the poor law board, she wrote a paper of ‘Suggestions for the improvement of the nursing service in hospitals and on the methods of training nurses for the sick poor.’ Miss Nightingale had a hand in establishing in 1868 the East London Nursing Society, in 1874 the Workhouse Nursing Association and the National Society for providing Trained Nurses for the Poor, and in 1890 the Queen’s Jubilee Nursing Institute. ”

“ Miss Nightingale's official title was 'Superintendent of the Female Nurses in the Hospitals in the East'; but she came to be known generally as 'The Lady-in-Chief.'
Her headquarters were in the barrack hospital at Scutari, a huge dismal place, reeking with dirt and infection. Stores, urgently needed, had not got beyond Varna, or were lost at sea. 'There were no vessels for water or utensils of any kind; no soap, towels, or clothes, no hospital clothes; the men lying in their uniforms, stiff with gore and covered with filth to a degree and of a kind no one could write about ”

“ She never went to India. But the sanitary condition of the army and people there became one of the chief interests of her later life. The government submitted to her the report of the royal commission on the sanitary state of the army in India in 1863, and she embodied her comments in a paper entitled ‘How People may live and not die in India,’ in which she urged the initiation of sanitary reform. ”

“ This, which was the aim of her life, was no fruit of her Crimean experience, although that experience enabled her to give effect to her purpose more readily than were otherwise possible. Long before she went to the Crimea she felt deeply the ‘disgraceful antithesis’ between Mrs. ”