Page:Portraits of celebrated women Florence Nightingale.djvu/11

Rh studied the schools, hospitals, and reformatory institutions of London, Edinburgh, and the continent. It appears by her evidence lately given before the English Army Medical Reform Commission, that she has devoted her attention to the organization of hospitals for thirteen years, during which time she has visited all the hospitals of London, Edinburgh, and Dublin; many country infirmaries, and some of the military and naval hospitals in England; all the hospitals in Paris, where she studied with the Sisters of Charity; the institution of the Protestant Deaconesses at Kaiserwerth, on the Rhine, where she was twice in training as a nurse; the hospitals at Berlin, and many others in Germany, and at Lyons, Brussels, Rome, Constantinople, and Alexandria; and the war hospitals of the French and Sardinians. Soon after her return home from the continent, the hospital established in London for sick governesses was about to fail for want of proper management, and Miss Nightingale consented to be placed at its head. Derbyshire and Hampshire were exchanged for the narrow, dreary establishment in Harley-street, to which she devoted the whole of her time and her fortune. While her friends missed her at assemblies, lectures, concerts, exhibitions, and all the entertainments for taste and intellect with which London in its season abounds, she whose powers could have best appreciated them was sitting beside the bed and soothing the last complaints of some poor, dying, homeless, hapless governess. Miss Nightingale found pleasure in tending these poor, destitute women in their infirmities, their sorrows, their deaths, or their recoveries. She was seldom seen out of the walls of the institution; and the few friends whom she admitted found her in the midst of nurses, letters, prescriptions, accounts, and interruptions. Her health sunk under the heavy pressure. Thus it appears she had received a special training for the great work to which she was providentially called.

When the accounts of the sufferings of the soldiery in the Crimea, of the additional rigors that they were enduring