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On Return from the Crimean War N ightingale returned from the war exhausted, but utterly dedicated to ensuring that such a calamity would not happen again. She took her first step when she visited Balmoral Castle at the invitation of Queen Victoria. There she took the opportunity to make her case to the war secretary, Lord Panmure, with the support of the queen and Prince Albert. Afterwards, she began to consider what work she might herself undertake. She had the handsome Nightingale Fund to take charge of, although she did not know what to do with it, and saw real obstacles to speedy action on reforming nursing. Some material shows Nightingale not feeling up to handling a responsible position. She wondered whether she should be bold and ask for serious reforms in the army, or take on a nursing post at a ‘‘small, remote and poor hospital,’’ or some such humble station (see p 443 below). As it would turn out, she would have only about a year of normal health before she fell so ill that any such work became impossible for her. In the meantime, Nightingale was invited to visit military hospitals, and she did. She saw naval hospitals as well, and was sounded out by the director general of the Navy Medical Department about taking on a comparable role there (she did not). Early on, the possibility of the army establishing a spa for convalescent soldiers was explored. Nightingale was a firm believer in getting the sick out of hospitals into healthier surroundings , but nothing came of that initiative. Locations on the Continent (Aix-la-Chapelle), and in England (Bath Spa) were considered. She and Sutherland, at Panmure’s request, did a report on Netley Hospital. With the benefit of hindsight, these first years after her return from the war can be seen as Nightingale’s training for her life of public health reform. This is when she learned how to do research. Her allies from the wars became ongoing collaborators (especially Sutherland , McNeill and Rawlinson) and new experts, such as William Farr, were drawn into her orbit. / 439 Through the Monckton Milneses, Nightingale met Alexander William Kinglake (1809-91) while he was preparing his enormously popular multi-volume history of the Crimean War. She provided him with material, but found his views ‘‘misguided’’ (see p 507 below). Nightingale promised Mrs Milnes that she would send Kinglake extracts from Blue Books, and asked her to forward them.1 She later compared Kinglake’s work unfavourably with the ‘‘notes’’ of Sir George Brown (1790-1865), which had been sent her—this, presumably, is the material Brown later used for his own memoirs. As she worked towards the establishment of the royal commission and wrote her own ‘‘précis,’’ she still had much mundane correspondence to write. Former nurses (and impostors) wanted letters of recommendation . Widows and relatives needed help finding missing husbands and sons. Wounded soldiers and officers came to her for follow-up care. She evidently arranged referrals, as a letter she wrote to William Bowman, mainly about establishing the Nightingale Fund, also thanked him for his ‘‘kind attention to ‘my’ captain’s thigh.’’2 There was vexing correspondence over accounts. A letter from Parthenope Nightingale to Dr Bowman recounted: Did I tell you that we have received some of her ‘‘spoils of war,’’ a little sailor boy with one leg in her hospital, a little Russian who came into hospital for a scald, and being an orphan she adopted into the extra-diet kitchen, where he was for nine months. One of the lady nurses undertook his religious education, and asked where he would go if he were a good boy when he died? He answered ‘‘to Miss Nightingale.’’ He is a very nice little affectionate fellow. They slept a night in London before we saw them and, ‘‘Peter cried all night’’ (says William the one leg), ‘‘because he thought we were going to stop there and not coming to Miss N.’s home, but I knew we should go.’’ Lastly is a Crimean puppy given her by the soldiers, found in a hole in the rocks at Balaclava. I never saw any creatures happier than these and careering about (one leg and all) in the intervals of school where they are made much of, and glory is more to their taste than to their mistress’s.3 1 Letter, Women (8:773). 2 Letter 21 August [1856], Bowman Private Collection. 3 Letter 8 August [1856...

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