Page:A short history of nursing - Lavinia L Dock (1920).djvu/138

122 122 A Short History of Nursing Crimea, and some 200 women nurses in all passed under her control. Miss Nightingale's dominant intellect and char- acter, with her exact and complete knowledge of practical detail, enabled her to do a truly stupen- dous piece of work in the Crimea, and she had to do it in the face of every obstacle that official jealousy, red tape, and bureaucratic inefficiency could present. Though she systematized a nursing service for the first time for the EngHsh army, and gave the first demonstration any country had seen of a trained gentlewoman who was not a religious Sister at the head of an army nursing staff, having orderlies as well as nurses under her command, yet this was not the biggest part of what she did. From the nursing standpoint all this does not seem extremely difficult, and the number of nurses directed by her was small indeed compared with the numbers enrolled in England during the recent world war. The extraordinary achievement of Miss Nightingale in the Crimea was that she prac- tically overthrew the whole method of managing the British army which had obtained up to that time and was regarded as sacrosanct by the bureau- crats. She turned the searchlight of her intelli- gence and knowledge upon it and exposed all its faults. Following up her discoveries, she wrote