-
Introduction to Volume 6
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Introduction to Volume 6 N ightingale’s work as a public health pioneer and reformer was prompted and nourished by her faith. She early interpreted her adolescent ‘‘call to service’’ as a call to nursing, but later understood it more broadly to be a ‘‘saviour,’’ meaning saver of lives, or healer. For this, administrative reform more than direct service was often required, a lesson she learned from her mentor, statistician L.A.J. Quetelet (related in Society and Politics). Quetelet’s research gave evidence that different methods of medical treatment did not affect death rates, while Nightingale herself learned from sad experience in the Crimean War that a bad site or bad hospital, that is, bad architecture or bad engineering, could cost large numbers of lives. The young Nightingale was allowed to visit workhouses and hospitals when she was not allowed to nurse in them. She was deeply troubled by what she saw, but recognized that nothing she could do would materially help. When, years later, trained nursing was about to be introduced into the Liverpool Workhouse Infirmary, she wrote her friend Mary Clare Moore (1817-74), mother superior of the Convent of Mercy, Bermondsey: I have always felt workhouse patients were the most neglected of the human race, far more so than in hospitals. And I am so glad to make even this beginning. . . . I hope London workhouses will follow , and Manchester. I remember years and years ago, when I used to visit at Marylebone Workhouse, feeling how hopeless those depths of misery were to comfort, and that visiting did nothing but break the visitor’s heart. (Theology 3:285) Apart from Nightingale’s own experience of a ‘‘call,’’ she recognized the historic role of Christianity in providing care to the sick of all kinds. She considered the ancient Romans superior to later peoples in some respects, notably courage, but told nurses: Of mercy to the sick and weak in mind and body, miserable and suffering , the idiots and insane, the old Romans knew nothing. That was / 1 apparently brought in by Christ; mercy, care and kindness to the idiot, the leper, is the truest Christianity. The Christian is a nurse; the hospital, the asylum, is a true present of Christianity. The hospital is a true, a unique, fruit of Christianity: hospitals and asylums. Nightingale then quoted from Mary’s prayer at her visit with the mother of John the Baptist: ‘‘My soul doth magnify the Lord and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.’’1 She frequently cited ‘‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord,’’ Mary’s prayer at the annunciation , with regard to her own call.2 In her introduction to the medieval mystics, Nightingale referred to the ‘‘new and strange’’ doctrine, ‘‘viz., that he who cleans out a drain is serving God more than he who prays to Him ‘against plague, pestilence and famine.’ ’’ Indeed, ‘‘cleaning out a drain is doing God’s will while it is against God’s will to pray that the typhus, caused by the foul drain, should be removed without the drain being removed’’ (see Mysticism and Eastern Religions). Nightingale referred to the work of Agnes Jones in introducing nursing into the Liverpool Workhouse Infirmary as ‘‘doing a saviour’s work’’ and she noted that the period in which Jones had to do it, less than three years, was the same as Christ had had for his public ministry (see p 284 below). Nightingale’s experience at Kaiserswerth encouraged her to relate sickness to the person’s larger life. ‘‘That sickness is one of the means sent by God to soften the heart, is generally acknowledged,’’ she wrote in her first publication, The Institution of Kaiserswerth on the Rhine, for the Practical Training of Deaconesses (in European Travels). At Kaiserswerth also she sat up with dying patients, and asked Pastor Fliedner3 for advice on how to talk to the dying about the state of their souls. The nursing volumes will show much correspondence with nurses about their opportunities to assist patients with their religious concerns. Notably Nightingale always emphasized the nurse’s responsibility to care for the body and showed great disdain for those who sought to convert the dying to their own denomination or church. The reform of workhouse nursing is arguably the work closest to Nightingale’s heart. Certainly it was the work she most wanted to do as 1 Luke 1:46-47, open letter to nurses 25 May 1900, Archives of Ontario, and Add Mss 47728 ff225...