Page:Notes on Nursing What It Is, and What It Is Not.djvu/18

Rh filthy rags, in which they where brought down from the Crimea. A washing contract had, it is true, existed; but it was totally inoperative, and the beds and habiliments of the men had been in a condition loathsome and foul beyond description. A house, well supplied with water, close to the Barrack Hospital, was engaged at the charge of the fund, and here the clothing supplied by Miss Nightingale was washed and dried. In ten days after her arrival an impromptu kitchen was fitted up, from which eight hundred men were daily supplied with well-cooked food and other necessary culinary comforts in abundance — beef-tea, chicken-broth, rice-pudding, jelly, chickens, and numerous delicacies. Heretofore the cookery, performed by soldiers, without any superintendence, and of course without any system, had been most detestable, when the sickly, fastidious appetite of a fevered or consumptive patient is considered. Meat and vegetables had been boiled in one large copper, the separate portions enclosed in nets, and served up either done to rags or half raw; and the delivery had been as devoid of system as the cookery. Sometimes it would be six or seven o'clock in the evening before, in individual cases, things ordered could be supplied, and then the means of cooking would be at an end. In subordinate as well as in leading points of arrangement, the same feminine, directing hand was now to be traced.

With rare thoughtfulness, the nurses were employed in making up needful articles of bedding or surgical requisites, stump pillows for amputation cases, and other things of a like nature.

One "rule of the service" was in existence which alone exemplifies the system bearing so heavily upon the helpless invalids, and which it required all the tact and firmness of Miss Nightingale to stand against; it demanded that all articles needed even for present use should be procured from home through the commissariat; and there was likewise a regulation appointing that a "board" must judge stores already landed, before they could be given out. On one occasion, the "board" not having completed its arrangements, and the men languishing for the stores sent from England, Miss Nightingale insisted that they should be at once dispensed. Red Tape, shocked at the audacity of such a singular proposition, interposed; woe betide the man amenable to martial law who should dare to touch even the cordage of one box! The noble-spirited woman, conscious that determination must effect what entreaty had failed to do, had the store-house broken open, on her own responsibility, and its contents distributed through their proper channels. But, on all other occasions, she paid the most scrupulous deference to the existing laws. Her name and angelic ministerings where the theme of frequent grateful praise among the men in the trenches; and it was remarked that she made the Barrack Hospital so comfortable, that the convalescents began to display a decided reluctance to leave it.

Not only in the scene of her arduous labors, but at home, was the self-dedicated Samaritan assailed by jealousies and suspicions. The circumstance of her having accepted the services of some Sisters of Charity from the nunnery at Norwood, and from St. Stephen's Hospital, Dublin, drew down upon her, in December, so invidious an attack from a clergyman of the Established Church, that the Hon Mrs. Sidney Herbert was obliged to step forward and defend her absent friend, and show "how cruel and unjust" were the aspersions thrown upon her. "It is melancholy to think," she wrote to the wife of the Rev. gentleman, "that in England no one can undertake any thing without the Rh