Читать книгу The Life of Florence Nightingale (Vol. 1&2) - Edward Tyas Cook - Страница 25

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There are Private Martyrs as well as burnt or drowned ones. Society of course does not know them; and Family cannot, because our position to one another in our families is, and must be, like that of the Moon to the Earth. The Moon revolves round her, moves with her, never leaves her. Yet the Earth never sees but one side of her; the other side remains for ever unknown.—Florence Nightingale (in a Note-book of 1847–49).

A poet of our time has counted “Disappointment's dry and bitter root” among the ingredients of “the right mother-milk to the tough hearts that pioneer their kind.” If it indeed be so, Florence Nightingale was well nurtured. The spiritual experiences and speculations, recorded in the last chapter, worked round to a justification, as we have seen, of her chosen plan of life. Religion thus brought no consolation for the failure of her scheme to escape in December 1845. “My misery and vacuity afterwards,” she wrote in an autobiographical retrospect, “were indescribable.” “All my plans have been wrecked,” she wrote at the time, “and my hopes destroyed, and yet without any visible, any material change.” She faced the new year and its life on the old lines in a mood of depression which, with some happier intervals, was to grow deeper and more intense during the next few years.

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She did not, however, abandon her ideal. We shall see in subsequent chapters that neither foreign travel distracted her from it, nor did opportunities for another kind of life allure her from the chosen path. The way was dark before her; the goal might never be reached, she often thought, in this present sphere; but she felt increasingly that only in a life of nursing or other service to the afflicted could her being find its end and scope. “The longer I live,” she wrote in her diary (June 22, 1846), “the more I feel as if all my being was gradually drawing to one point, and if I could be permitted to return and accomplish that in another being, if I may not in this, I should need no other heaven. I could give up the hope of meeting and living with those I have loved (and nobody knows how I love) and been separated from here, if it would please God to give me, with a nearer consciousness of His Presence, the task of doing this in the real life.”

Meanwhile she pursued her inquiries. Now that the fruits of Florence Nightingale's pioneer work have been gathered, and that nursing is one of the recognized occupations for gentlewomen, it is not altogether easy to realize the difficulties which stood in her way. The objections were moral and social, rooted to large measure in conventional ideas. Gentlewomen, it was felt, would be exposed, if not to danger and temptations, at least to undesirable and unfitting conditions. “It was as if I had wanted to be a kitchen-maid,” she said in later years. Nothing is more tenacious than a social prejudice. But the prejudice was in part founded on very intelligible reasons, and in part was justified by the level of the nursing profession at the time. These are considerations to which full weight must be allowed, both in justice to those who opposed Miss Nightingale's plans, and in order to understand her own courage and persistence. The idea was widely prevalent at the time that for certain cases in hospital practice a modest woman was, from the nature of things, unsuited to act as a nurse. Mr. Nightingale, who desired to do what was right by his daughter, made many inquiries, and consulted many friends. There is a letter to him from a Brighton doctor arguing against the prevalent belief, and maintaining stoutly that “women of a proper age and character are not unfit for such cases. Age, habit, and office give the mind a different turn.” But the whole of this letter shows a degree of broad-mindedness with regard to the education and sphere of women which was in advance of the average opinion at the time. And in any case, whether women were fit or unfit by nature, it was certain that many, perhaps most, of the women actually engaged in nursing were unfit by character, and that a refined gentlewoman, who joined the profession, might thus find herself in unpleasant surroundings. We shall have to consider this matter more fully in a subsequent chapter. Here it will suffice to say that though there were better-managed hospitals and worse-managed, yet there was a strong body of evidence to show that hospital nurses had opportunities, which they freely used, for putting the bottle to their lips “when so disposed,” and that other evils were more or less prevalent also.34 Reports from Paris and its famous schools of medicine and surgery were no better. One who had been through it said that life at the “Maternité” was very coarse. In the clinique obstétricale at the École de Médecin, “the élèves have the reputation of being pretty generally the students' mistresses.” The difficulties in the way of a refined woman, who sought to obtain access to the best training, were very great. Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, a pioneer among woman-doctors in America, told Miss Nightingale of a young girl who had planned, as the only feasible way of studying surgery in Paris, to don male attire. “Pantaloons will be accepted as a token she is in earnest, while a petticoat is always a flag for intrigue. She has a deep voice, and I think will pass muster exceedingly well among a set of young students, but I shall be quite sorry for her to sacrifice a mass of beautiful dark auburn hair! What a strange age we live in! What singular sacrifices and extraordinary actions are required of us in the service of truth! An age of reform is a stirring, exciting one, but it is not the most beautiful.” The more she heard of the worst, the more was Florence Nightingale resolved to make things better; but the more her parents heard, the greater and the more natural was their repugnance. Somebody must do the rough pioneer work of the world; but one can understand how the parents of an attractive daughter, for whom their own life at home seemed to them to open many possibilities of comfortable happiness, came to desire that in this case the somebody should be somebody else.

Miss Nightingale herself was so much impressed by the difficulties and dangers in the way of women nurses, that she was inclined at first to the idea that the admission of gentlewomen into the calling could best be secured, either in special hospitals connected with some religious institution, or in general hospitals under cover of some religious bond. “I think,” wrote Monckton Milnes to his wife, “that Florence always much distrusted the Sisterhood matter,”35 and such was the case. Her inner thought was that no vow was needed other than the nurse's own fitness for the calling and devotion to it. But she was engaged in the crusade of a pioneer, and had to consider what was practically expedient and immediately feasible, as well as what was theoretically reasonable. Dr. Blackwell was of the same opinion. She did not like religious orders in themselves; they only “become beautiful,” she said, “as an expedient, a temporary condition, an antidote to present evils.” Miss Nightingale was therefore intensely interested in the Institution for Deaconesses, with its hospital, school, and penitentiary, which a Protestant minister, Pastor Theodor Fliedner, had established some years before at Kaiserswerth. Her family were great friends with the Bunsens, and the Baron had sent Florence one of Pastor Fliedner's Annual Reports.36 Her interest in it was twofold. It was the kind of institution to which Protestant mothers might not object to send their daughters. It was also in some sort a school of nursing where, whatever wider scope might afterwards be attainable, gentlewomen could serve an apprenticeship to the calling. “Flo,” wrote her sister to a friend in 1848, “is exceedingly full of the Hospital Institutions of Germany, which she thinks so much better than ours. Do you know anything of the great establishment at Kaiserswerth, where the schools, the reform place for the wicked, and a great hospital are all under the guidance of the Deaconesses?” Two years before (June 1846) Florence herself had written to Miss Hilary Bonham Carter, begging her to ask Mrs. Jameson about “the German lady she knew, who, not being a Catholic, could not take upon herself the vows of a Sister of Charity, but who obtained permission from the physician of the hospital of her town to attend the sick there, and perform all the duties which the Sœurs do at Dublin and the Hôtel Dieu, and who had been there fifteen years when Mrs. Jameson knew her. I do not want to know her name, if it is a secret; but only if she has extended it further into anything like a Protestant Sisterhood, if she had any plans of that sort which should embrace women of an educated class, and not, as in England, merely women who would be servants if they were not nurses. How she disposed of the difficulties of surgeons making love to her, and of living with the women of indifferent character who generally make the nurses of hospitals, as it appears she was quite a young woman when she began, and these are the difficulties which vows remove which one sees nothing else can.” Perhaps it was as a result of these inquiries that Florence Nightingale became acquainted, through Baron von Bunsen, with the institution at Kaiserswerth; though, as appears from a letter given below, Madame Mohl had also sent her some information about it. It is certain that by the autumn of 1846 she was in possession of its Reports, and that the place had become the home of her heart. During these years she was also quietly pursuing studies on medical and sanitary subjects.