The life of Florence Nightingale

The New Year of 1855 brought no mitigation in Florence Nightingale’s arduous task. Though there was no longer the influx of wounded from the battlefields, disease was making fearful ravages amongst the soldiers now engaged in the prolonged siege of Sebastopol. Miss Nightingale thus described the hardships endured by the men in a letter to a friend. “Fancy,” she writes, “working five nights out of seven in the trenches! Fancy being thirty-six hours in them at a stretch, as they were all December, lying down, or half lying down, after forty-eight hours, with no food but raw salt pork sprinkled with sugar, rum, and biscuit; nothing hot, because the exhausted soldier could not collect his own fuel, as he was expected to do, to cook his own rations; and fancy through all this the army preserving their courage and patience as they have done. There is something sublime in the spectacle.”

The result of this life of exposure in the trenches during the rigours of the Crimean winter was terrible suffering amongst the soldiers from frost-bite and dysentery, and there was a great increase in cholera and fever, which kept the hospitals more crowded than ever.

At the beginning of the year a further staff of fifty trained nurses under Miss Stanley, the sister of the late Dean, arrived at Scutari and were distributed amongst the various hospitals in the East. Miss Nightingale had now five thousand sick and wounded under her supervision, and eleven hundred more were on their way from the Crimea. Under her immediate personal care in the Barrack Hospital were more than two thousand wounded, all severe cases. She had also now established her régime in the General Hospital at Scutari, and some of the new nurses were installed there under Miss Emily Anderson, while others went to Kullali Hospital on the other side of the Bosphorus and worked under Miss Stanley until she returned to England.

Sisters of mercy from some of the Irish convents were among the new nurses, and one of the number, Sister Mary Aloysius, is still at the time of writing living in her convent home at Gort, Co. Galway. Her “Memories” of the Crimea afford a graphic picture of the state of the General Hospital at Scutari and of the arduous toil of the nurses.

The aged sister has a keen sense of humour, and in describing the departure of Miss Stanley’s company from London Bridge for Scutari, evidently derived some satisfaction that her nun’s garb was less extraordinary than the dresses provided by the Government for its nurses. “The ladies and the paid nurses,” she relates, “wore the same uniform—grey tweed wrappers, worsted jackets, white caps and short woollen cloaks, and a frightful scarf of brown holland embroidered in red with the words ‘Scutari Hospital.’ The garments were contract work and all made the same sizes. In consequence the tall ladies appeared to be attired in short dresses and the short ladies in long.” It was a similar evidence of official blundering to that which sent a cargo of boots for the soldiers in the Crimea all shaped for the left foot. “That ladies could be found to walk in such a costume was certainly a triumph of grace over nature,” adds Sister Aloysius. The fact is interesting as showing the advance made in modern times in a nurse’s official dress as exemplified in the charming though useful costumes worn by military nurses in the South African war.

However, all honour to the noble pioneers who sank personal considerations and effaced self in a desire to discharge their errand of mercy.

A powerful sidelight is thrown on the work of the Lady-in-Chief by the experiences of her subordinates. Sister Mary Aloysius writes: “Where shall I begin, or how can I ever describe my first day in the hospital at Scutari? Vessels were arriving and orderlies carrying the poor fellows, who with their wounds and frost-bites had been tossing about on the Black Sea for two or three days and sometimes more. Where were they to go? Not an available bed. They were laid on the floor one after another, till the beds were emptied of those dying of cholera and every other disease. Many died immediately after being brought in—their moans would pierce the heart—and the look of agony on those poor dying faces will never leave my heart. They may well be called ‘the martyrs of the Crimea.’

“The cholera was of the very worst type, and the attacked men lasted only four or five hours. Oh, those dreadful cramps! You might as well try to bend a piece of iron as to move the joints. The medical staff did their best, and daily, hourly, risked their own lives with little or no success. At last every one seemed to be getting paralysed and the orderlies indifferent as to life or death.... The usual remedies ordered by the doctors were stuping and poultices of mustard. They were very anxious to try chloroform, but did not trust any one with it except the sisters.”

If the Lady-in-Chief and her nurses had been at first rather coldly welcomed in the surgery wards, their presence when the epidemic of cholera set in was indeed counted a blessing. These trained and devoted women could be entrusted with applying the desperate remedies needed for the disease, which the medical staff would have felt it useless to leave in the hands of orderlies. The stuping, for example, required the most careful attention to have any chance of success. The method of the sisters was to have a large tub of boiling water, blankets torn in squares, and a piece of canvas with a running at each end to hold a stick. The blankets were put into the boiling water, lifted out with tongs and put into the canvas. An orderly at each end wrung the flannel out so dry that not a drop of moisture remained. Then chloroform was sprinkled on the hot blanket, which was then applied to the patient’s stomach. Rubbing with mustard and even with turpentine followed, until the iron grip which had seized the body was released or the end had come.

The nurses fought with the dread disease in the most heroic manner, but the proportion saved among the stricken was small indeed. The saddest thing was that it was generally the strong and healthy soldier who was attacked.

“One day,” says Sister Aloysius, “a fine young fellow, the picture of health and strength, was carried in on a stretcher to my ward. I said to the orderlies, ‘I hope we shall be able to bring him through.’ I set to work with the usual remedies; but the doctor shook his head, and said, ‘I am afraid it’s all no use, sister.’ When the orderlies, poor fellows, were tired, I set to work myself, and kept it on till nearly the end—but you might as well rub iron; no heat, no movement from his joints. He lived about the usual time—four or five hours.”

Week after week the fearful scourge continued, until the avenues to the wards were never free from the two streams of stretchers, one bringing in the stricken, the other carrying out the dead. The spread of the infection was thought to be largely due to the graves not being deep enough, and the air surrounding the hospitals had become putrid.

Scarcely less dreadful than the cholera patients were the men suffering from frost-bite, who arrived in hundreds from the trenches before Sebastopol. Nothing enables one to realise their terrible condition like the narrative of one on the spot. Referring to her experience amongst the frost-bitten patients, Sister Aloysius says: “The men who came from the ‘Front,’ as they called it, had only thin linen suits—no other clothing to keep out the severe Crimean frost. When they were carried in on the stretchers, which conveyed so many to their last resting-place, their clothes had to be cut off. In most cases the flesh and clothes were frozen together; and, as for the feet, the boots had to be cut off bit by bit—the flesh coming off with them; many pieces of the flesh I have seen remain in the boot. Poultices were applied with some oil brushed over them. In the morning, when these were removed—can I ever forget it?—the sinews and bones were seen to be laid bare. We had surgical instruments; but in almost every case the doctors or staff-surgeons were at hand, and removed the diseased flesh as tenderly as they could. As for the toes, you could not recognise them as such.”

One could multiply these ghastly descriptions if further evidence was needed to show the terrible sufferings endured by officers and men alike in the trenches before Sebastopol. Mention the famous siege to any of the old Crimean veterans as they sit beneath the trees in the grounds of Chelsea Hospital, and they will tell you stories of hardships endured which makes one regard their still living bodies with amazement. And they are not mere soldiers’ tales: the old heroes could scarcely invent greater horrors than history has recorded. The weary weeks were passed for the most part by the men sitting or lying in holes dug in the frozen ground deep enough to shelter their heads from the flying bullets and bursting bombs. If a poor fellow decided to stretch his numbed and cramped legs, he was more than likely to have his head blown off. Lord Wolseley bears to-day the marks of his experiences as a venturesome young subaltern in the trenches at Sebastopol, when, riddled with bullets and a part of his face blown away, he was laid on one side by the surgeons as a “dead un.” Fortunately he managed to prove that he was yet alive. The Life of Captain Hedley Vicars reveals also the privations of the time. He himself lay in the open air on a bed of stones and leaves, having given up his tent to men who were sick.

The cold was so intense that in a sudden skirmish the men were often unable to draw their triggers. A frost-bitten soldier lying ill at Balaclava, when he tried to turn in the night, found that his feet were frozen to those of another soldier lying opposite.

Hundreds of these poor men, worn out by every imaginable kind of suffering, were constantly arriving at the already crowded hospitals at Scutari. As many as sixty men were known to die in a single night, and for two months the death rate stood at 60 per cent.

Florence Nightingale seemed to be everywhere, and particularly did her deep religious feelings prompt her to speak with the dying and point their thoughts to heaven. She was a ministering angel alike for soul and body. In her ear was often murmured the last message home, and to her was entrusted the bit of money, the watch, or the cherished keepsake to be sent to wife or sweetheart. How faithfully these dying commissions were carried out, in spite of overwhelming duties to the living, is known to families all over the land who have loved ones sleeping beneath the cypress-trees on the shores of the Bosphorus.

At night, after the surgeons had gone their rounds, the figure of the Lady-in-Chief was seen in her simple black dress, white apron, and small closely fitting white cap gliding through the wards and corridors carrying a tiny lamp in her hand. By its light she saw where pain was greatest, where the Angel of Death was about to descend, and she would pause to smooth a pillow, or give the word of consolation.

Florence Nightingale’s sublime courage was strikingly shown in these nocturnal rounds. Then, when silence for the most part reigned, and the sufferers were courting slumber, the ear was most likely to be startled by some heart-breaking sound. The delirious call of the poor emaciated fellow who still fancied himself in the trenches before Sebastopol, or on the blood-stained ridges of Inkerman fighting for dear life, the smothered sob at thought of home, the hacking cough, the groan of agony, the gasp of death—these were the sounds which fell on the stillness as “the lady with the lamp” moved from bed to bed. One such experience would be a memory for a life-time, but night after night, week after week, and month after month, our heroine fulfilled this sad and tender ministry to the suffering. Longfellow paid his beautiful tribute to the lady with the lamp in verses which impel quotation, familiar as they are:—

To the poet’s vision, Florence Nightingale was the modern Santa Filomena, the beautiful saint pictured by Sabatelli descending from heaven with attendant angels to minister to the sick and maimed.