Nightingale.

Nightingale. FLORENCE, the daughter of William Edward Nightingale of Embley Park, Hampshire, and Lea Hurst, Derbyshire, was born at Florence, 15th May 1820. She was taught mathematics, the classics, and modern languages under the guidance of her father, and thus highly educated and brilliantly accomplished she early exhibited an intense devotion to the alleviation of suffering, which in 1844 led her to give attention to the condition of hospitals. She visited and inspected civil and military hospitals all over Europe; and in 1851 went into training as a nurse in the institution of Protestant Deaconesses at Kaiserswerth on the Rhine, and studied with the Sisters of St Vincent de Paul in Paris the system of nursing and management carried out in the hospitals of that city. On her return to England she put into thorough working order the Sanatorium for Governesses in Harley Street. Ten years was the term of apprenticeship thus served in preparation for the work of her life. In the spring of 1854 war was declared with Russia; Alma was fought on the 20th of September, and the wounded from the battle were sent down to the hospitals on the Bosphorus, which were soon crowded with sick and wounded, their unhealthy condition becoming apparent in a rate of mortality to which the casualties of the fiercest battle were as nothing. In this crisis Miss Nightingale wrote on 15th October and offered to go out and organise a nursing department at Scutari. Lord Herbert, who had already written a letter 'requesting' her to go, which crossed that containing Miss Nightingale's offer, gladly accepted, and on the 21st of October she departed with thirty-four nurses. She arrived at Constantinople on the 4th of November, the eve of Inkermann—the beginning of the terrible winter campaign—in time to receive the wounded from that second battle into wards already filled with 2300 patients. Her devotion to the sufferers can never be forgotten. She would stand twenty hours at a stretch, in order to see them provided with accommodation and all the requisites of their condition, and a few months after her arrival she had 10,000 sick men under her care. But she saw clearly in the bad sanitary arrangements of the hospitals the causes of their frightful mortality, and her incessant labour was devoted to the removal of these causes, as well as to the mitigation of their effects. In the spring of 1855, while in the Crimea organising the nursing departments of the camp-hospitals, she was prostrated with fever, the result of unintermitting toil and anxiety; yet she refused to leave her post, and on her recovery remained at Scutari till Turkey was evacuated by the British, July 28, 1856. She, to whom many a soldier owed life and health, had expended her own health in the physical and mental strain to which she had subjected herself. In 1857 she furnished the 'commissioners appointed to inquire into the regulations affecting the sanitary condition of the British army' with a paper of written evidence, in which she impresses forcibly and clearly the great lesson of the Crimean war, which she characterises as a sanitary experiment on a colossal scale. At the close of the Crimean war a fund of £50,000 was subscribed for the purpose of enabling her to form an institution for the training of nurses; this is spent in training a superior order of nurses in connection with St Thomas's (the Nightingale Home) and at King's College Hospital. From the Queen she received an autograph letter of thanks, and a cross set with diamonds, as also a bracelet set with brilliants from the Sultan of Turkey. Her experience in the Crimea turned the attention of Miss Nightingale to the general question of army sanitary reform, and first to that of army hospitals. In 1858 she published her valuable Notes on Nursing, and she contributed two papers to the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, on Hospital Construction and Arrangement. The Notes on Hospitals (1859), from their clearness of arrangement and minuteness of detail, are most valuable to the architect, the engineer, and the medical officer. In the year 1863 was issued the Report of the Commission on the Sanitary Condition of the Army in India. These reports were sent in manuscript to Miss Nightingale, and at page 347 of vol. i. are inserted her incisive and admirable observations upon this immense mass of evidence. In 1871 Miss Nightingale published Notes on Lying-in-Institutions; in 1873, Life or Death in India and (in Fraser's Magazine) 'A "Note" of Interrogation,' which attracted a good deal of attention, mainly on account of the way she handles religious beliefs and life. From America and from different European governments her advice has been sought as to army sanitation; she assisted in founding the Red Cross Society. Longfellow's Santa Filomena is in her praise. The article HOSPITALS in this Encyclopædia is from her pen.