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Medical Care of Employees, Former Employees and Tenants
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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Medical Care of Employees, Former Employees and Tenants I n Nightingale’s lifetime there was no state system for the provision of health care services nor well-organized provision through people’s place of employment. Medical and nursing care for ordinary working people was haphazard at best. Good employers paid for the care of their employees and their families; charitable organizations and individuals paid for others; teaching hospitals took patients on a charitable basis; religious orders and churches, sometimes through parish nurses, provided various kinds of care. Nightingale as a good employer looked after her own domestic employees (and their families ). She also was often called on to organize care for a great variety of people. She took on the care of former employees of the family, tenants at Lea Hurst cottages especially (where she made lengthy visits to look after her mother in the late 1870s). Other villagers she had known from childhood got onto her informal caseload. She was often approached for assistance from soldiers from the Crimean War. Nightingale had the doctor at Lea-Holloway visit and send her a quarterly bill. Initially this was C. Blencowe Noble Dunn (1836-92), mrcs, and after his death Dr George Godfrey Macdonald. She hired a private nurse where necessary, paid for stays at hospital, spas (for water cures) and drugs, extra food (meat, milk, cocoatina) and stimulants as directed by the doctor. For the elderly and convalescent she sometimes paid for cleaning assistance. She met periodically with the doctor and those making arrangements. When in London she commissioned employees and others to act for her. Nightingale acquired a caseload also at Claydon House from her protracted stays there in the 1880s and 1890s (some of which has been related in Life and Family). The letters show considerable concern to identify environmental causes of illness. Several have interesting material on psychiatric problems. The material begins with a pre-Crimea note when Nightingale was still seeking to act on her call to service by informally providing help to the sick poor. / 623 Source: Extract from journal, in I.B. O’Malley, Florence Nightingale 119-20 16 July [1846] Rubbed Mrs Spence for the second time. . . . My imagination is so filled with the misery of the world that the only thing worth trouble seems to me to be helping or sympathizing there—the only thing where labour brings any return. When I am driving about a town all the faces I see seem to me either anxious or depressed or diseased, and my soul flings itself forth to meet them to ‘‘pledge them in the cup of grief.’’ My mind is absorbed with the idea of the sufferings of man; it besets me behind and before. A very one-sided view, but I can hardly see anything else, and all the poets sing of the glories of this world seems to me untrue. All the people I see are eaten up with care or poverty or disease. When I go into a cottage I long to stop there all day, to wash the children , relieve the mother, stay by the sick one. And behold there are a hundred other families unhappy within half a mile, and the feeling of all my life is summed up in those four last verses of [Longfellow’s] ‘‘The Goblet of Life’’: The prayer of Ajax was for light; Through all that dark and desperate fight, The blackness of that noonday night, He asked but for return of sight, To see his foeman’s face. Let our unceasing, earnest prayer Be, too, for light—for strength to bear Our portion of the weight of care That crushes into dumb despair One half the human race. O suffering, sad humanity! O ye afflicted ones, who lie Steeped to the lips in misery, Longing, and yet afraid to die, Patient, though sorely tried! I pledge you in this cup of grief, Where floats the fennel’s bitter leaf! The Battle of our Life is brief, The alarm—the struggle—the relief, Then sleep we side by side. 624 / Florence Nightingale on Public Health Care [52.90.181.205] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 06:17 GMT) Editor: When Nightingale was in Paris in 1847 en route to Rome she passed on advice on her cases, that ‘‘old Elijah Humby’s wife’’ be persuaded to have a visit from the doctor, and expressed anxiety regarding ‘‘whether Mary Flint had the medicines I ordered for her at Clay’s just before...