Читать книгу The Life of Florence Nightingale - Edward Tyas Cook - Страница 65

Miss Nightingale, meanwhile, was at sea on her way to Constantinople, revolving many things in her mind. She had been called to a mission upon which issues very near to her heart depended. If it succeeded, then, as Mr. Herbert had written to her, not only would an enormous amount of good be done now to the sick and wounded, but “a prejudice would have been broken through, and a precedent established, which would multiply the good to all time.” And so, as we all know, it was destined to be. But at the time the fate of the experiment was doubtful. It was Mr. Herbert's conviction that no one except Florence Nightingale could make it succeed, but it was by no means certain that even she could do so. She took in her hands the reputation of the Minister who trusted her, and her own; and not her reputation only, but the hopes, the aspirations, the ambitions which had ruled her life.

She determined to succeed, and she counted the difficulties which would confront her. Writing two years later and giving account of her stewardship, she paid her tribute of thanks to those “among the officials, medical as well as military, to whose benevolence, ability, and unselfish devotion to duty she was indebted for facilities, without which, in a position such as hers, new to the service, and exposed to much criticism and difficulty, she would have been utterly unable to perform the work entrusted to her.”79 She saw from the start that she would be exposed, in the very nature of the case, to some medical jealousy and much military prejudice.

The idea of employing female nurses at Scutari had been mooted before the army left for the East, but was abandoned, as the Duke of Newcastle explained, because “it was not liked by the military authorities.”80 Of the military prejudice against the intrusion of women, even for the gentle office of nursing, into the rough work of war, some entertaining illustrations are happily on record. Lieutenant-Colonel Sterling, afterwards Sir Anthony Sterling, K.C.B., was on active service during the Crimean campaign, first as brigade-major, and afterwards as assistant adjutant-general to the Highland division. He was an elder brother of Carlyle's John Sterling, and himself possessed of some literary skill. “A solid, substantial man,” Carlyle calls him; he was also a man who loved to stand by the ancient ways. He wrote a series of lively letters during the campaign, and in his will directed that they should be published. Nowhere, so clearly as in Sterling's Highland Brigade in the Crimea, have I found contemporary evidence of the prejudices against which the experiment of Mr. Herbert and Miss Nightingale had to contend. During Miss Nightingale's visit to Balaclava in 1855, some dispute arose among the nurses. “Miss—— has added herself,” wrote Colonel Sterling, “to the hospital of the 42nd; and will not acknowledge the voice of the Nightingale, who has written an official letter to Lord Raglan on the subject. I suppose he will order a court-martial composed of nurses, who will administer queer justice.” Our Colonel is something of a wag. He cannot help laughing at “the Nightingale,” because, as he explains, he has such “a keen sense of the ridiculous.” He is so pleased with his quip about the female court-martial that he returns to it in another letter. He is tickled, too, by a saying of the mess-room, that “Miss Nightingale has shaved her head to keep out vermin.” One can almost hear the honest Colonel's guffaw as he wonders whether “she will wear a wig or a helmet?” Women, he supposes, imagine that “war can be made without wounds”; they will be teaching us how to fight next; and as for their ideas of nursing, why some of the ladies actually took to “scrubbing floors”! It amused him, but angered him no less. He has to admit that he believes “the Nightingale” has been of some use; but he bitterly resents her “capture” of orderlies for mere purposes of nursing, and when he is asked, “When will she go home?” answers with Christopher Sly, “Would it were done.” “However,” he writes, “—— (presumably Sidney Herbert) is gone; and I hope there is not to be found another Minister who will allow these absurdities.” Miss Nightingale read Sir Anthony's book when it came out in 1895, and made some severe marginalia upon it; remarking upon his “absolute ignorance of sanitary things,” noting the “misprints as a fair index to the whole,” and finally dismissing the book as “one long string of Seniority complaints.” But I protest that she need not have been so angry. And, indeed, perhaps she was not so angry as she seemed, for her caustic pen was not always a true index of her mind. For my part I take my hat off to Sir Anthony Absolute. His honest, old-fashioned outbursts let in a flood of light upon one side of the difficulties which were to confront Miss Nightingale upon landing at Scutari.

She pondered much also upon the possibilities of friction with the medical officers; and here, too, our Colonel has some light to give us. “The Chief Medical Officer out here,” he wrote, “ought to have been intrusted with Nightingale powers.” The Service in all its branches stuck together, it will be seen, and no blame to it for that! But if a fighting colonel smarted under what he deemed a slight upon an army medical officer, how much more might the Medical Service itself be expected to resent any encroachment upon its appointed province! How keenly it did resent such encroachment may be gathered from the Life and Letters of Sir John Hall, M.D., by Mr. Mitra, whose book supplies us with the same kind of illustration in regard to the army doctors that we may gather from Colonel Sterling's in regard to the soldiers. Sir John, like Sir Anthony, thought the whole thing “very droll.” He was stationed in the Crimea, and we shall hear something of the strained relations between him and Miss Nightingale, when we follow her thither. But at Scutari also, there were some few medical officers who retained even to the last a ridiculous jealousy of any “meddling” by Miss Nightingale and her staff.81 She foresaw this danger, and made up her mind to avert it by every means in her power.

And there was a third danger which she foresaw also. Not only had she to overcome military prejudice and to avert medical jealousy, but she had also to prevent religious disputation. This last task was beyond her powers, as it has ever proved beyond those of men, women, and angels; for by this cause even the angels fell. No work, however beneficent, has ever yet been found beyond the capacity of the odium theologicum to mar and embitter. Miss Nightingale's mission did not escape the common lot, as we shall hear; but she was keenly sensible of the danger.

Miss Nightingale pondered over all these things as the ship sped on its way to the Golden Horn; and the more she pondered, the more she was driven to decide upon a course of action, very different from what many people supposed that she would adopt, but entirely consonant with the bent of her own mind. She saw quite clearly that, if she was to avoid the rocks ahead of her, what was needed was not so much genial, impulsive kindness, reckless of rules and defiant of constituted authority, but rather strict method, stern discipline, and rigid subordination. The criticisms to which she exposed herself in the superintendence of her nurses were based, not upon laxity, but upon her alleged severity.82 As for her own conduct, she supposed that her work, when she landed, would be that of the matron of a hospital. If, as it turned out, she became rather (as she put it) mistress of a barrack, it was because she found herself in the midst of conditions which the constituted authorities at home had not foreseen, and before which those on the spot stood powerless. Miss Nightingale was happily possessed of an original mind and a resolute will. She saw evils which cried out for remedies; and new occasions taught new duties.