Page:Portraits of celebrated women Florence Nightingale.djvu/16

116 where the clothing supplied by Miss Nightingale might be cleansed and dried. Her supervision had an eye for all needs; her experience had a knowledge for all that should be done; and her energy enabled her to have carried into effect that which she saw and knew ought to be effected.

In ten days after their arrival Miss Nightingale and her assistants fitted up a sort of impromptu kitchen, and from this hastily-constructed resource, eight hundred men were daily supplied with their respective needed quantities of well-cooked food, besides beef-tea in abundance. They who are acquainted with the plan of cookery pursued in barracks, where all a company's meat and vegetables are boiled in one copper, the portions belonging to messes being kept in separate nets, will know how that food is likely to suit the sickly appetite of a fevered patient, and how invaluable a system which provided the needful light diet, prepared with due quickness, as well as nicety, would be in hospital treatment. This was effected by Miss Nightingale's kitchen, even in its early operation, and it subsequently attained a degree of excellence productive of extensive benefit, scarcely to be estimated by those unacquainted with the importance of such details. Her extraordinary intelligence and capacity for organization showed itself in subordinate, as well as principal points of arrangement. In what might be called "housekeeping duties," she showed womanly accomplishment, no less than nice judgment. When the nurses were not needed at the bedsides of the sick and wounded, they were employed by her in making up needful articles of bedding and surgical requisites—such as stump-pillows for amputation cases. Not only was the laundry in excellent working order, but by the strong representation of Miss Nightingale, the dysentery wards were cleansed out, and general purification was made a diligently-regarded particular. During the first two months after her arrival, when there was no one else to act. Miss Nightingale was the real purveyor of those vast establishments—the hospitals at Scutari—providing what could not be