Page:Portraits of celebrated women Florence Nightingale.djvu/12

112 from want of effectual hospital treatment, and from defective management in supplying stores and necessary relief, she kindled at once with an enthusiastic desire to remedy the evil. The extent of that evil may be gathered from the first that there was, in the first seven months of the Crimean campaign, a mortality among the troops of sixty per cent. per annum from disease alone—a rate which exceeds that of the great plague of London, and a higher ratio than the mortality in cholera to the attacks. One of the chief points in which the deficiency of proper comfort and relief for the sick and wounded sufferers was felt, was the want of good nursing. To send out a band of skillful nurses was soon found to be one of the most essential of all supplies. But unless these were really skilled, more harm than good would certainly accrue; zeal, without experience, could effect little; and a bevy of incompetent or ill-organized nurses would prove an incumbrance, instead of an assistance. Now it was that a field was opened for the wider exercise of Miss Nightingale's genius and philanthropy; and now it was that her admirable abilities were secured for this great object in view. At the request of the Right Hon. Sydney Herbert, Miss Nightingale at once accepted the proposal that she should undertake to form and control the entire nursing establishment for the British sick and wounded soldiers and sailors in the Crimea. Indeed, it is asserted, that by a strange coincidence—one of those coincidences arising out of urgent necessity felt and met at once—she had, herself, written to Mr. Herbert on the very same day, volunteering her services where they were so much needed. The task was one which involved sacrifices and responsibilities of formidable magnitude—the risk of her own life, the pang of separation from her family and friends, the certainty of encountering hardships, dangers, toils, and the constantly-recurring scene of human suffering amidst all the worst horrors of war, together with an amount of obstacle and difficulty in the carrying out of her noble work wholly incalculable. Few but would have