The life of Florence Nightingale

When Florence Nightingale entered the Deaconess Hospital at Kaiserswerth, the institution, if we count the first primitive penitentiary, had been in existence sixteen years. It already consisted of a hospital and training home for deaconesses, a seminary for infant-school teachers, a kindergarten, an orphan asylum, and a penitentiary, but was small compared with the extensive settlement of to-day. It was managed on very simple and primitive lines, and the nurses came almost entirely from the peasant class. The fashion of “lady” nurses was practically unknown. Deaconess Reichardt, the first sister enrolled in the institution, was still there at the time of Miss Nightingale’s sojourn.

An interesting bit of autobiography regarding her Kaiserswerth days is given by Miss Nightingale in a letter preserved by the authorities of the British Museum. The letter was sent in reply to their request for a copy of the little history of Kaiserswerth which Miss Nightingale published after her return from the institution, and was hastily written in pencil. It is dated September 24th, 1897, from her house 10, South Street, Park Lane, and runs as follows:—

One can imagine the flutter of excitement amongst the good simple deaconesses as they flitted about in their blue cotton gowns, white aprons, and prim muslin caps when it was known that an English lady of wealth and position had come to study amongst them. That such a woman should voluntarily undertake the duties of a hospital nurse, tending the sick poor with her own delicate hands, was at that time almost unprecedented. But the “Fraulein Nightingale” was quickly at home amongst her fellow-nurses and eager to learn all that the more experienced could teach her. She took both day and night nursing and entered into all branches of work. Garbed in the simple nurse’s dress she moved through the wards of the hospital carrying the charm of her presence from bed to bed, as she was later to do at Scutari. Was there a difficult case to attend or an operation to be performed, the English Fraulein was sure to be on the scene.

At this period Miss Nightingale was in the strength and beauty of her early womanhood. She was tall, slight, and graceful, with abundance of brown hair neatly arranged on either side her high broad forehead, and had penetrating grey-blue eyes and a mouth which though firm indicated a sense of humour. The deaconesses, with whom she could talk in their own language, found her a diverting companion, for she had a sharp incisive wit, a certain homely shrewdness of expression, and a knowledge acquired not only from a superior education, but from a good experience of foreign travel. Above everything else she was distinguished by the power of adapting herself to circumstances, and she settled down to the humble fare and simple routine of life at Kaiserswerth as easily as though she had never known the refined luxuries of her father’s house. It is small wonder that the sweet old faces of the retired deaconesses, living out the last spell of life in the Kaiserswerth Home of Rest, light up with smiles to-day at the mention of the “Fraulein Nightingale.” Some can recall her gracious kindly presence amongst them, and all feel a community of satisfaction that her honoured name is enrolled among the sisterhood.

Sister Agnes Jones, the devoted and famous nurse of Liverpool, was at Kaiserswerth in 1860, and records the impression which Miss Nightingale’s personality had left on the deaconesses. She wrote in a letter to a friend: “Their love for Miss Nightingale is so great; she was only a few months there, but they so long to see her again. I was asking much about her; such a loving and lovely womanly character hers must be, and so religious. Sister S. told me many of the sick remembered much of her teaching, and some died happily, blessing her for having led them to Jesus.”

Although training in hospital work was Miss Nightingale’s primary object in going to Kaiserswerth, she was deeply interested in all Pastor Fliedner’s schemes for helping the poor in his parish, and did a good deal of what in these days would be termed “district visiting,” along with Frau Fliedner. She also took a keen interest in the school and the teachers’ seminary, and formed a warm friendship with Henrietta Frickenhaus, the first schoolmistress at Kaiserswerth, who was still in charge of the seminary, and had at that time trained four hundred candidates.

Pastor Fliedner had given up parish work to travel abroad and found deaconess institutions in various towns at the time when Miss Nightingale first came to Kaiserswerth, but they occasionally met, and during the latter part of her residence he was at home and took, as may be readily imagined, a deep interest in the training of so brilliant and distinguished a pupil. Mr. Sidney Herbert visited Kaiserswerth during Miss Nightingale’s probation, and had therefore an opportunity of seeing the efficient training of the lady who was later to be his honoured coadjutor in hospital and nursing reforms.

A very impressive scene took place when Florence Nightingale left Kaiserswerth. The present head of the institution, Pastor Düsselhoff, tells me that his mother, the eldest daughter of Pastor Fliedner, vividly recalls the scene to-day. After bidding good-bye to the deaconesses, Miss Nightingale bent her head to the pastor and asked for his blessing. With hands resting on her head, and face upturned to heaven, he prayed that her sojourn at Kaiserswerth might bear precious fruit and her great powers be dedicated to the service of humanity. Then, repeating his usual formula—“May God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, three Persons in one God, bless you; may He stablish you in the Truth until death, and give you hereafter the Crown of Life. Amen”—he sent her forth dedicated to the service of the sick and suffering. Little did he think what the magnitude of that service was to be. Teacher and pupil were not destined to meet again, but the good pastor lived to hear the name of Florence Nightingale resound through the world.

After Miss Nightingale’s return home from her second sojourn at Kaiserswerth, she published in 1851 a booklet on the institution, and in the introduction gives some excellent advice to the girls of the time. Her remarks may seem a little out of date to-day, but are interesting as showing the desire for useful work which was beginning to actuate women of the leisured classes and which needed to be directed into fitting channels. There was then the great cry of the untrained. Women were longing for occupation, but few had received definite courses of training.

Miss Nightingale was at this period a pioneer of her sex and a decidedly “advanced” woman, but the desire for freedom of action was tempered by a naturally well-balanced nature. She put forward the plea on women’s behalf that they should be encouraged to seek occupation and properly trained for their work. In Kaiserswerth she deals more particularly with the vocation of a nurse or deaconess, but as a prelude to the little work she refers to the position of women in her own century. There is “an old legend,” she writes, “that the nineteenth century is to be the century of women,” but she thinks that up to the present (1851) it has not been theirs. She magnanimously exempts man from blame. The fault, has not been his, for “in no country has woman been given such freedom to cultivate her powers” as in England. “She [woman] is no longer called pedantic if her powers appear in conversation. The authoress is courted not shunned.” Women, she thinks, have made extraordinary intellectual development, but as human beings cannot move two feet at once, except they jump, so while the intellectual foot of woman has made a step in advance, the practical foot has remained behind. “Woman,” says Miss Nightingale, “stands askew. Her education for action has not kept pace with her education for acquirement. The woman of the eighteenth century was perhaps happier, when practice and theory were on a par, than her more cultivated sister of the nineteenth century. The latter wishes, but does not know how to do many things! The former, what she wished at least that she could do.”

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. So is the air as good an element for fish as the water, if they did but know how to live in it. Show us how to be single and we will agree. 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.

She goes on to speak of the longing of women for work and the ennui which results from the lack of it, and draws the picture of five or six daughters living in well-to-do houses with no other occupation than taking a class in a Sunday-school and of the middle-class girls who become burdensome to fathers and brothers.

She expends some characteristic witticisms on the young ladies who try to drive away ennui by a little parish visiting, and because of their want of knowledge only succeed in demoralising the poor. In evidence of this, Miss Nightingale tells the story that one day on entering a cottage which was usually neat and tidy she found everything upside down.

“La! now! why, miss,” said the cottage woman at her visitor’s look of astonishment, “when the district-visiting ladies comes, if we didn’t put everything topsy-turvy they would not give us anything.”

“To be able to visit well,” says Miss Nightingale, commenting upon the foregoing incident, “is one of the rarest accomplishments. But when attained, what a blessing to both visitors and visited!”

These remarks in regard to the work of women were by way of preliminary to introducing the subject of deaconesses. Miss Nightingale had returned from Kaiserswerth full of enthusiasm for the vocation of trained nurse and visitor to the poor, and was endeavouring to introduce the then highly novel subject to her young countrywomen as a way of getting rid of listlessness and ennui. That she felt the ground to be dangerous is shown by the detailed account of the connection of the office of a deaconess with the early Christian Church, which she deemed it necessary to give in order to allay the Protestant fear that a deaconess was a nun in disguise.

In these days, when women are actively employed in Church work and philanthropy, and when their assistance is welcomed by the clergy in parishes all over the land, it seems strange to find how cautiously Miss Nightingale recommended the office of deaconess. She labours through scholastic arguments and cites the Fathers. St. Chrysostom speaks of forty deaconesses at work in Constantinople in the fourth century. Holy women of the order worked amongst the Waldensian, Bohemian and Moravian Brotherhoods. Luther complained of the lack of deaconesses in his neighbourhood, adding, “Women have especial graces to alleviate woe, and the words of women move the human being more than those of men.” Under Queen Elizabeth, deaconesses were instituted into the Protestant Church during public service. The Pilgrim Fathers when first driven to Amsterdam and Leyden carried their deaconesses with them, and Miss Nightingale cites the improving example of the Amsterdam deaconess who sat in her place at church with a little birchen rod in her hand to correct the children, and relates how she called upon the young maidens for their services, when they were sick, and she was “obeyed like a mother in Israel.”

She considers it clearly proved that before the establishment of the order of sisters of mercy by St. Vincent de Paul in 1633, the office of deaconess had been recognised by all divisions of Christians, and was therefore not borrowed from the Roman Catholic Church. The reason why such sisterhoods had not flourished among Protestants was owing to the lack of preparatory schools and training homes. This want had been supplied at the Kaiserswerth institution, and she proceeds to give a history of its foundation and growth. There she had found her ideal, and for the next few years her life was devoted to philanthropic and religious work. Military nursing had not as yet dawned upon her horizon.