Improvement in the Hospitals. 179
While the distress of the troops before Sebastopol was thus being daily alleviated, effective influence for good had begun to pervade our hospitals on the Bosphorus. Even before the great stress was laid on them which ensued from the battles and the coming of winter, they were already teeming with confusion and misery. The Army had not contained enough surgeons other than regimental to meet the unexampled needs of the time ; the service had been recruited from the civilians of the profession ; and by universal testimony both classes grappled with their formidable duties in the best spirit. Had there been a system of organisation suited to the exigency, had the sanitary conditions been good, the attendants numerous, the supplies ample, then the efforts of the surgeons, dealing as they did with the cases as they presented themselves, would have found a fair field. But none of these conditions existed, and all they could do was to struggle on, not so much like swimmers making some way, as like those contending in vain with a torrent.
In those days there were two chiefs at the War Office. The Duke of Newcastle was Secretary for War, and Mr Sidney Herbert bore the mysterious title of Secretary at War. The medical department of the War Office lay in Mr Herbert's province, and his inquiries into the methods of dealing with sickness on an extensive scale had led him to expect the best results from the co-operation of women, in controlling and administering large hospitals. Therefore, when it became apparent that the establishments on the Bosphorus were daily growing less able to
180 Miss Nightingale arrives.
contend with their difficulties, he invited the aid of ladies already possessed of large experience, and who, thus encouraged, formed themselves into staffs, and accompanied by paid nurses, and bearing strong recommendations to the medical as well as to other authorities on the spot, proceeded to Constantinople. " It was seen," says Kinglake, " that the humble soldiers were likely to be the men most in want of care, and the ladies were instructed to abstain from attending upon any of the officers." Thus began to enter into the history of the contest an element which strongly moved the imagination of the commuuity, both from the extraordinary alleviation of suffering and establishment of order which it effected, and from the contrast which its gentle and beneficent character offered to the gloomy tenor of the war.
It was on the 4th of November that Miss Nightingale and her immediate companions arrived at Constantinople. She was accompanied by 'Protestant sisters and Catholic nuns, eighteen in all, with twenty trained nurses, and to all were assigned quarters in one of the towers that form the angles of the great barrack at Scutari, which the Turkish Government had given over to us for a hospital. Another band, numbering in all forty-six, under Miss Stanley, bestowed themselves at first in a neighbouring hospital for sailors, and afterwards at the military hospital at Kulali, on the Bosphorus.
The ladies and their attendants at first took an altogether subordinate part in the care of the sick,
The Influence She acquires. 181