Page:Notes on Nursing What It Is, and What It Is Not.djvu/25



will be, through all time to come, the representative nurse par excellence. In her case it is a special calling, in virtue of natural capacity, moral and intellectual at once. She did not set out from any chosen starting point. She did not propose to earn her own salvation by a life of good works. She was not incited by visions of a religious life in a favored monastic community. She did not aspire to take in hand a department of human misery, in order to extinguish it, and then look about to see what particular misery it should be. She does not appear to have had any plans relating to herself at all. Nor was she overtaken by the plague in a village; nor did she overtake a fever in a village in the course of her travels, like her representative sisters of an earlier time; nor did she do the work of the occasion, and reenter ordinary life as if nothing had happened. Her case is special and singular in every way.

Her childhood and youth where very much like those of little girls who have wealthy parents, and carefully chosen governesses, and good masters, and much travel — in short, all facilities for intellectual cultivation by study and extended intercourse with society, at home and abroad.

The peculiarity in the case of herself and her nearest relatives seems to be their having been reared in an atmosphere of sincerity and freedom, — of reality, in fact, — which is more difficult to obtain than might be thought. There was a certain force and sincerity of character in the elder members on both sides of the house which could not but affect the formation of the children's characters; and in this case there was a governess also whose lofty rectitude and immaculate truthfulness commanded the reverence of all who knew her.

In childhood a domestic incident disclosed to the honest-minded little girl what her liking was, and she followed the lead of her natural taste. She took care of all cuts and bruises, and nursed all illness within her reach; and there is always a good deal of these things within the reach of country gentry who are wealthy and benevolent. For the usual term of young-lady life, Florence Nightingale did as other young ladies. She saw Italy, and looked at its monuments; she once went to Egypt and Greece with the Bracebridges; she visited in society, and went to court. But her heart was not in the apparent objects of her life — not in travel for amusement, nor in art. In literature, books which disclosed life and its miseries, and character with its sufferings, burnt themselves in upon her mind, and created much of her future effort. She was never resorted to for sentiment. Sentimentalists never had a chance with her. Besides that her character was too strong, and its quality too real, for any sympathy with shallowness and egotism, she had two characteristics which might well daunt the sentimentalists — her reserve, and her capacity for ridicule. Ill would they have fared who had come to her for responsive sympathies about sentiment, or even real woes in which no practical help was proposed; and there is perhaps nothing uttered by her, from her evidence before the Sanitary Commission for the Army to her recently published "Notes on Nursing," which does not disclose powers of irony which self-regardant persons may well dread.

Such force and earnestness must find or make a career. She evidently believes, as all persons of genius do, that she found it, while Rh