Page:Notes on Nursing What It Is, and What It Is Not.djvu/27

Rh means, without her knowledge or desire, which was the same thing as imposing a new service upon her. She wished to decline it when she found how little likely her health was to improve. Her letter to the trustees of the fund must be fresh in all memories, and the reply of the trustees, who satisfied her that the money was accumulating, and the plan and the public able and willing to wait. If she could not do this particular work, she has done many others. Her written evidence before the Sanitary Commission for the Army is a great work in itself. So are various reforms urged on the military authorities by her and her coadjutors, and now adopted by the war office. Reforms in the Indian army are about to follow. The lives thus saved no one will attempt to number; and the amount of misery and vice precluded by her scientific humanity is past all estimate.

Her "Notes on Nursing," prepared and issued in illness and pain, are the crowning evidence of what she is, and can do. Hitherto we have, I trust, appreciated and honored her acts; now we are enabled to perceive and appreciate her mind. It was as certain before as it can ever be that she must have acquired no little science, in various departments, to produce the effects she wrought; but we see it all now.

We see also, much more clearly than ever, her moral characteristics. I will not describe them when they can be so much better seen in her "Notes on Nursing." Any one who reads those Notes without being moved in the depths of his heart will not understand the writer of them by any amount of description; and those who have been so moved do not need and will not tolerate it. The intense and exquisite humanity to the sick, underlying the glorious common sense about affairs, and the stern insight into the weaknesses and the perversions of the healthy, troubled as they are by the sight of suffering, and sympathizing with themselves instead of the patient, lay open a good deal of the secret of this wonderful woman's life and power. We begin to see how a woman, any thing but robust at any time, may have been able, as well as willing, to undertake whatever was most repulsive and most agonizing in the care of wounded soldiers and crowds of cholera patients. We see how her minute economy and attention to the smallest details are reconcilable with the magnitude of her administration, and the comprehensiveness of her plans for hospital establishments, and for the reduction of the national rate of mortality. As the lives of the sick hang on small things, she is as earnest about the quality of a cup of arrowroot, and the opening and shutting of doors, as about the institution of a service between the commissariat and the regimental, which shall insure an army against being starved when within reach of food. In the mind of a true nurse nothing is too great or too small to be attended to with all diligence; and therefore we have seen Florence Nightingale doing and insisting upon the right about shirts and towels, spoon-meats, and the boiling of rice, and largely aiding in reducing the mortality of the army from nineteen in the thousand to eight, in times of peace.

In the spirit and tone of this book we see, too, how it is that, with all her fame, we have known so little of the woman herself. Where it is of use to tell any piece of her own experience, she tells it; and these scraps of autobiography will be eagerly seized upon by all kinds of readers; but, except for the purpose of direct utility, she never speaks of herself, more or less, or even discloses any of her opinions, views, or feelings. This reserve is a great distinction in these days of self-exposure, and descanting on personal experiences. It is the best possible rebuke to the egotism, or the sentimentality, which has led