Читать книгу The Life of Florence Nightingale - Edward Tyas Cook - Страница 70

Miss Nightingale's reluctance to assume the superintendence of additional nurses will be the more readily understood when we pass to the multifarious duties which circumstances led her to discharge.

“Having understood,” she wrote to Lord Stratford de Redcliffe (Nov. 7), “that Your Excellency has the power of drawing upon Government for the uses of the sick and wounded, I beg to state that there is at present a great deficiency of linen among the men in the Hospitals until the Government Stores can arrive and be appropriated to them. A hundred pairs of sheets and 200 shirts might be applied to such a temporary purpose, and would never be de trop. Also a few American stoves, upon which we might prepare delicate food for the worst cases, who require to be fed every two or three hours, which is of course impossible for the Medical Officers and Orderlies to attend to; many deaths are necessarily the consequence.”

This suggestion to the Ambassador, made on the third day after Miss Nightingale's arrival, serves to introduce two main directions in which she applied a woman's insight to the condition of things at Scutari. Efficient nursing requires, she well knew, cleanliness and delicately cooked food. She set herself with characteristic energy to supply these necessities. She found “not a basin, nor a towel, nor a bit of soap, nor a broom,” and instantly requisitioned 300 scrubbing brushes. "The first improvements took place," said Mr. Macdonald, “after Miss Nightingale's arrival—greater cleanliness and greater order. I recollect one of the first things she asked me to supply was 200 hard scrubbers and sacking for washing the floors, for which no means existed at that time.”109 Miss Nightingale had foreseen that washing would be one of the first things necessary. During the voyage out, as the ship was approaching Constantinople, one of the party went up to her and said earnestly, “Oh, Miss Nightingale, when we land, don't let there be any red-tape delays, let us get straight to nursing the poor fellows!” “The strongest will be wanted at the wash-tub,” was the reply. Until Miss Nightingale arrived, the number of shirts washed during a month was six.110 Up to the date of her arrival, the Purveyor-General had contracted for the washing of the hospital bedding, and of the linen of the patients. Simultaneously, however, with the arrival of the wounded from Inkerman, it was found that the contractor had broken down in the latter part of his contract. And even with regard to the former part, the bedding was washed, Miss Nightingale discovered, in cold water. She insisted upon hot; the more since it was found, as the Duke of Newcastle's commissioners reported, that many of the articles sent back from the wash as clean, had to be destroyed as being in fact verminous. Miss Nightingale accordingly took a Turkish house, had boilers supplied in it by the Engineer's Office, employed soldiers' wives to do the washing, and thus gave the sick and wounded the comfort of clean linen. All this was paid for partly out of her private funds and partly by the Times fund.

Yet more important, perhaps, to the comfort and recovery of the sick, were Miss Nightingale's “Extra Diet Kitchens.” When she came to the Barrack Hospital she found that all the cooking was done in thirteen large coppers, situated at one end of the vast building. The patients' beds extended over a space of from three to four miles (including, of course, both wards and corridors); it took three or four hours to serve the ordinary dinners, and there were no facilities whatever for preparing delicacies between times. Within ten days of her arrival, Miss Nightingale had remedied this defect. She opened two “extra diet kitchens” in different parts of the building, and had three supplementary boilers fixed on one of the staircases for the preparation of arrowroot and the like. As explained more fully below (p. 201), nothing was supplied except in accordance with medical directions; and she met the doctors' requisitions out of her private stores only when the government stores failed. “It is obvious,” she explained, “that Miss Nightingale would have shielded herself from heavy responsibility by adhering, and by obtaining the adherence of the medical officers, to the strict precedents of Military Hospital Regulations, according to which the materials for the Extra Diets would have been sent in to her by the purveyor without requisition, in the same manner as is practised in the case of the ordinary diets; but she felt that in doing so she would most frequently be defeating the object she was sent to carry out, for in the majority of cases the purveyor had either no supply, or a supply of a very indifferent quality of the articles required.”111 It is safe to say that many lives were saved by the application by Miss Nightingale of the good housewife's care to the kitchen of the hospitals. The woman's eye was not above distinguishing between bone and gristle and meat in the men's dinner, and she wanted to have the meat issued from the stores boned, so that one patient should not get all bone, another all gristle, and another all meat. But on this point she was beaten. The Inspector-General informed her that it would require a new “Regulation of the Service” to “bone the meat”!! The notes of exclamation are hers.112 In the culinary department an invaluable volunteer arrived in 1855 in the person of Alexis Soyer, once famous as the chef of the Reform Club, and still alive as M. Mirobolant in Thackeray's Pendennis. M. Soyer rearranged and partly superseded Miss Nightingale's kitchens at Scutari. We shall meet with him and his good work again when we accompany her to the Crimea.

Miss Nightingale was not long at Scutari without being touched by the pitiable condition of the women camp-followers, separated often from their regiments, and in a very forlorn state. Miss Nightingale deputed the care of them in large measure to Mrs. Bracebridge, who, with her husband, collected and administered a separate fund for giving assistance to the wives, women, and children of soldiers at Scutari. A Lying-in Hospital was organized; and Miss Nightingale found employment for many of the women, both in washing as aforesaid, and in making up old linen into various hospital requisites. Here, too, helpful volunteers presently arrived. The Rev. Dr. and Lady Alicia Blackwood were moved after the Battle of Inkerman to go out to Scutari and see if they could be of use. Dr. Blackwood asked and obtained an appointment as a military chaplain; and, on their arrival, Lady Alicia went straight to Miss Nightingale and asked what she could do to help:—

“The reply she gave me,” wrote Lady Alicia, “or rather the question she put me in reply, after a few seconds of silence, with a peculiar expression of countenance, made an indelible impression. ‘Do you mean what you say?’ ‘Yes, certainly; why do you ask me?’ ‘Because I have had several such applications before, and when I have suggested work, I found it could not be done, or some excuse was made; it was not exactly the sort of thing intended, it required special suitability, &c.’ ‘Well,’ I replied, ‘I am in earnest; we came out here with no other wish than to help where we could.’ ‘Very well, then, you really can help me if you will. In this Barrack are now located some two hundred poor women in the most abject misery. A great number have been sent down from Varna; they are in rags, and covered with vermin. My heart bleeds for them; but my work is with the soldiers, not with their wives. Now, will you undertake to look after them? If you will take them as your charge, I will send an orderly who will show you their haunts.’ ”113

Lady Alicia went, and with her husband was of great assistance. Miss Nightingale was mindful also of the families of her nurses. Some of them were wives and widows who had left children at home. “Many things turn up,” wrote Lady Verney to a friend, “for us to do for Florence; as in looking after the children of her nurses.” And Mrs. Nightingale wrote similarly (April 1855):—

Flo has been writing incessantly lately about her nurses' families, for whom the best seem getting very anxious, and she scarcely mentions anything else. We have seen and heard much in visiting them which is a great pleasure to us.

Before the Roebuck Committee, Dr. Andrew Smith, the head of the Army Medical Department in London, was asked, “What do you think was the result of Miss Nightingale's mission?” “I daresay,” he answered, apparently with some reluctance, “it was very advantageous”; and then, pulling himself together like a man and seeking to be just, he added: “There is no doubt about it; because females are able to discover many deficiencies that a man would not think of, and they will look at things that a man will have no idea of looking to.” A very true statement; and perhaps as much as could reasonably be expected from an official on the defensive. But I think we shall find in the next chapter that some of the things which Miss Nightingale saw and did were not unworthy of the more comprehensive sweep claimed by Dr. Smith for the male faculty of vision.