-
The Extension of Workhouse Nursing to Metropolitan London
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
The Extension of Workhouse Nursing to Metropolitan London E ven before trained nurses began staffing the Liverpool Workhouse Infirmary, in May 1865, media attention to a death from the absence of nursing at a London workhouse infirmary gave Nightingale the opportunity to raise the issue of reform there. To her friend, the Rev Mother Mary Clare Moore of Bermondsey, Nightingale recounted: ‘‘I don’t know whether you have heard of a dreadful case of a poor man who died from bedsores contracted in the Holborn Union Infirmary by manifest neglect. But I trust good will come out of evil, and out of the inquiry which is being now made, and that the whole system of workhouse nursing will be altered in consequence.’’1 To her friend Harriet Martineau, Nightingale jokingly remarked that she was never so obliged to anyone for dying.2 The correspondence makes clear that Nightingale had no interest in laying blame for a particular death—lack of care was characteristic of all workhouses—and in fact the doctors were exonerated in the inquiry. Rather she wanted to raise the general issue of the provision of trained nursing—available in no workhouse infirmary. She challenged C.P. Villiers, the president of the Poor Law Board, a Cabinet position, to consider fundamental reform. He responded with alacrity and became a key collaborator, indeed continuing to work with Nightingale behind the scenes, writing from his home address when he was ‘‘turned out,’’ as the expression was for the defeat of a government . In fact the wider political happenings had a devastating effect on Nightingale’s plans/hopes for reform. Lord Palmerston, the Liberal prime minister when Nightingale began this campaign, was an old family friend and supporter she could 1 Letter 1 September 1865, Convent of Mercy, Bermondsey; typed copy British Library Add Mss 45789 ff34-35. 2 Letter 12 February 1865, Add Mss 45788 f281. 326 / count on. He died in 1865 and the government fell soon after, to be replaced by the Conservatives in the next general election; Lord Derby became prime minister, while Benjamin Disraeli led the government in the House of Commons. To Dr Farr Nightingale said that Palmerston ‘‘was the only man who could drag a too liberal bill, especially in the Poor Law, through the Cabinet.’’ Further, if he ‘‘had lived another session we should have got something done at the Poor Law Board, which we shall not now.’’3 The new president of the Poor Law Board, Gathorne Hardy, was not open to as fundamental a change as Villiers. Lord Palmerston’s death, incidentally, prompted a member of his family to write Nightingale with condolences, for they well understood the old prime minister’s fondness for the young reformer (he had supported her in the early post-Crimea period), and what his loss would mean for her work (see Society and Politics 5:515). Yet it is not clear that Villiers had taken the crucial step of getting a bill drafted and through Cabinet. According to Louisa Twining no bill had been formulated.4 The material here reports a key phase in the development of a public health care system, the provision of professional medical and nursing services to the vast mass of the London metropolitan population, with central administration and funding. These were services that until then had been provided only haphazardly as charitable endeavours or in a very rudimentary form in the case of public provision through the Poor Law. These new measures did not remotely go so far as Nightingale had hoped, and she had to accept Gathorne Hardy’s much more limited legislation. Workhouse reform would have to be won institution by institution, not through general legislation establishing a system and funding it. A key reform in the lost 1865 Poor Law Continuance Bill was that the Poor Law Board would have the power to order boards of guardians of particular workhouses to expend money on necessary alterations. Nightingale in her campaign raised the principle of care for a ‘‘brother’’ (or sister) in affliction. She drew on the existing provisions for care of the sick, for example, in the provision of better diet for the sick poor than for other workhouse inmates. She explained that there would be social as well as humanitarian benefits from the provision of 3 Letter 19 October 1865, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 5474/95. 4 Louisa Twining, ‘‘The History of Workhouse Reform,’’ in Woman’s Mission: A Series of Congress Papers on the Philanthropic...