Women Sleuths Books

Saturday, February 19, 2011

Florence Nightingale: A Biography

This biography was published in 1913.

Florence Nightingale, OM, RRC (1820-1910) was an English
nurse, writer and statistician. She came to prominence during
the Crimean War for her pioneering work in nursing, and was
dubbed "The Lady with the Lamp" after her habit of making
rounds at night to tend injured soldiers. Nightingale laid the
foundation of professional nursing with the establishment, in
1860, of her nursing school at St. Thomas' Hospital in London,
the first secular nursing school in the world. The Nightingale
Pledge taken by new nurses was named in her honour, and
the annual International Nurses Day is celebrated around the
world on her birthday.*
*....summary from wikipedia

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Excerpts from the book:

While Florence Nightingale and her sister were working hard
at history and languages and all useful feminine arts, romping
in the sunny Hampshire gardens, or riding amongst the Derby-
shire hills, the big world outside their quiet paradise was heap-
ing fuel for the fires of war, which at last, when after a quarter
of a century it flared up out of its long-prepared combustibles,
was "to bring to death a million workmen and soldiers, consume
vast wealth, shatter the framework of the European system,
and make it hard henceforth for any nation to be safe except
by sheer strength." And above all its devastation, remembered
as a part of its undying record, the name of one of these
happy children was to be blazoned on the page of history.
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There was no washing, no clean linen. Even for bandages the
shirts had to be stripped from the dead and torn up to stanch
the wounds of the living.

And there were other foul conditions which only the long
labour of sanitary engineering could cure.

The arrival day by day of more and more of the wounded
has been described as an avalanche. We all know Tennyson's
"Charge of the Light Brigage": that charge occurred at Balaclava
the day before Miss Nightingale left England. And the terrible
battle of Inkermann was fought the day after she arrived at
Scutari.

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Before ten days had passed, she had her kitchen ready and
was feeding 800 men every day with well-cooked food, and
this in spite of the unforeseen and overwhelming numbers in
which the new patients had been poured into the hospitals
after Balaclava and Inkermann. She had brought out with
her, in the Fectis, stores of invalid food, and all sorts of little
delicacies surprised the eyes and lips of the hitherto half-
starved men. Their gentle nurses brought them beef tea,
chicken broth, jelly. They were weak and in great pain, and
may be forgiven if their gratitude was, as we are told, often
choked with sobs.
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