MILES KINGTON INTERVIEWS
6.Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale is played by Eleanor Bron
Miles Kington played himself
| Kington | Florence Nightingale - Miss Florence Nightingale, I think I should say... |
| Nightingale | Yes, I never married... |
| Kington | You are remembered today as perhaps the most famous medical practitioner of the nineteenth century, more... more famous than Pasteur... |
| Nightingale | Well, M. Pasteur was a Frenchman, and I don't suppose I was ever as famous in France as he was... |
| Kington | I was trying to think of a famous medical figure in England at the time, and failed... The extraordinary thing is that you became famous as a medical person without being a doctor of any kind. You were not medically qualified. You discovered nothing. You never found a cure for anything... |
| Nightingale | A cure for bureaucracy, perhaps? |
| Kington | A cure for bureaucracy! Ah, well if you really had discovered a cure for bureaucracy, you would be even more famous than you are now... |
| Nightingale | Then how am I remembered? |
| Kington | As the Lady with the Lamp. As the woman who brought comfort to our boys in the Crimea. The woman who appeared like an angel in the theatre of war... |
| Nightingale | Oh, yes, all that. Well, it is all true as far as it goes, I suppose. I did have a lamp. I did minister to the sick and wounded. I nursed our boys in the Crimea, yes, but the way you remember it is all very unreal and sentimental. I am not sentimental. I am as tough as old boots. And I saw a lot of old boots out in the Crimea,mostly bought second-hand to shove on to the feet of our poor soldiers. The way they dressed our soldiers was a scandal. The equipment was dreadful, the conditions were dreadful, the medical resources were dreadful. I am sorry. I am going on at you as if you were the War Office. But you see, when I got out to the Crimea, I found that more than half the casualties - more than half the deaths! - were caused not by enemy action but by disease and illness. In other words, were self-inflicted. We were sending men out there to be defeated by our own lack of care, not by the enemy. |
| Kington | Of course, it might be said that you were curing these men only to have them sent out to be shot at again. Healing them just in time for death in the battlefield... |
| Nightingale | You might say that. We didn't say that in Victorian times.We fought for our Queen and country without question. |
| Kington | So you never asked what we were doing in the Crimea,fighting, in the first place? |
| Nightingale | Never. The only question I asked was, what can I do to relieve suffering? Now, I could have chosen a thousand different kinds of suffering to relieve. We had a whole range of choices in Victorian days, I can tell you - there was cruelty to animals, there were poor tortured pit ponies, there were little boys being forced up chimneys,there was child labour in factories, there was child prostitution... |
| Kington | But you chose to tackle the plain, ordinary medical suffering of plain ordinary people? |
| Nightingale | That is how it started out. I came from a well-to-do family. I saw the misery of the working people. I was seized with pity for their lot. I knew people involved in medical work. I got involved in medical work, much against my family's wishes... |
| Kington | Were they against it because it was thought wrong for woman to have an independent career? |
| Nightingale | I don't think you ever begin to comprehend my situation. You are looking at it in entirely twentieth century terms. Have a career, indeed! Nursing was not a career! When I first came to medicine, nursing was for the lowest of the low. That was the entire trouble. People referred to nurses as they now refer to ... barmaids or...girls from escort agencies. Nurses were badly paid, ignorant women who were hired for low wages to mop up in hospitals and probably caused more disease then they ever cured. You can have no idea what nurses were like in the old days. They were slatterns. They were often drunk. Sometimes they were immoral ... Ugh! What I had to do, though I didn't realise it at the time, was revolutionise the whole concept of nursing. I had to turn it from being a necessary evil into a noble profession. |
| Kington | Which the Crimea enabled you to do? |
| Nightingale | Well, looked at from a historical distance, which I think I now can, the Crimean War was just what I needed. The attention of the country was focused on the fighting. Journalism was just beginning to report wars in illuminating detail. The public found out just how bad things were as well as how good they were. So in the context of a well reported war I was able to get people at large to realise just how inefficiently, appallingly inefficiently, military hospitals were run. If I had to become the Lady with the Lamp to achieve this cure for bureaucracy, well, it was worth it. But if that were all I had done, I would not be remembered now. |
| Kington | Like Mrs Seacole? |
| Nightingale | I am sorry? |
| Kington | Mary Seacole was a nurse from Jamaica who went out to the Crimean War at about the same time as you and did many good works. She wrote a book about it. It is forgotten. So is she. |
| Nightingale | Mrs Seacole ... yes... the name does... But look, I too would be forgotten if all I had done was be an angel of mercy. But you will find that people are often remembered for their romantic image, not for the real work they did. William Tell is remembered for shooting an apple off his son's head. St Francis of Assisi isremembered for talking to the animals. Neither of those is exactly a memorable achievement. What they actually did of significance was to make Switzerland independent and to... Do you know? I am not entirely sure what St Francis did do! |
| Kington | He made poverty respectable and glamorous, perhaps? |
| Nightingale | You are being cynical and smart in the modern manner. There is nothing glamorous about poverty. |
| Kington | I'm sorry, I … |
| Nightingale | I acquired fame in the Crimean War, yes - it seems startling now to realise how famous I could become in England when I was still labouring in the faraway Crimea, though I suppose it was quite common to achieve instant fame in our day while a thousand miles away. One thinks of Dr Livingstone, and the death of Gordon... But the fame was only to come in useful when I came back to England and used that fame, and the money collected in my name, to help set up a proper scheme for training nurses. Now, nobody becomes famous for setting up a training scheme for nurses. There are no statues in London of people who started training schemes, only of Ladies with Lamps. You have to be a Lady with a Lamp before you can be an organiser, or famous. That is human nature. It also helps to be a member of a nation which is hypochondriac by nature. |
| Kington | I am not sure that I... |
| Nightingale | Actually, that is not fair. The English are not hypochondriacs in the way that the French nation is. Have you ever visited a French country fair? There will always be at least one stall with a model of the human body, from which the bits can be removed to show all the things that can go wrong, and the French stand there looking at the representation of their liver and their kidneys and their stomachs, imagining all the ills that might befall them, and buying barrels loads of patent medicines to ward off these diseases. And from time the average well-to-do Frenchman betakes himself to a watering place to flush his system out and sluice mineral water through his liver until he feels well enough to start poisoning his body with alcohol and rich foods again... |
| Kington | Are the English not the same? |
| Nightingale | Oh, no. The English pay no attention to their health until they get ill, and then they clamour for treatment. Your modern National Health Service is nothing to do with health at all, only illness. The British today seem to think that it is up to the government to make them well again every time they get ill, conveniently forgetting that they got ill in the first place through not looking after themselves. It is only in a country like Britain, where people never even think of medical treatment till they fall ill, that a nurse could become a famous historical figure. |
| Kington | Is that really... ? |
| Nightingale | Name one famous French nurse. |
| Kington | Yes, well... |
| Nightingale | Preventive medicine and health education are always looked upon by our compatriots as something rather namby-pamby. In Victorian days there was some excuse; poverty, ignorance, unemployment, and so on.Today the population have only themselves to blame. |
| Kington | I think that that is a little hard on the great majority ... |
| Nightingale | But at least the British are interested in their health, even if only when it is too late. It is almost impossible to get them to be interested in food, or it was in my day. When I arrived in the Crimea I found that the arrangements for food for the average British soldier were as bad as the arrangements for medical treatment. I am not superhuman. I could not try to fix everything, And luckily there was someone who was applying himself with heroic efforts to the improvement of catering. |
| Kington | And he was...? |
| Nightingale | Mr Alexis Soyer. A Frenchman. Well, he would have to be. Can you imagine an Englishman devoting himself to improving the lot of the average person's table? I asked you if you could think of a famous French nurse. I will not embarrass you by asking if you can think of a famous English chef from 100 years ago. |
| Kington | No, I don't think I... |
| Nightingale | So there is no need to try. But M. Soyer spent almost as long as I did out in the Crimea, fighting for proper food, proper cooking, proper diet for the poor soldiers. He succeeded, too. But - and this is the vital point - although he wrote books and was much read and talked of, he is now absolutely forgotten. He did as much as I did for the Crimean soldiers. If I was the lady of the lamp, he was the. . . the. . . |
| Kington | The man with the pan? |
| Nightingale | Perhaps. Yet he is forgotten, poor Alexis. And all because the British care so little about food, and so much about their health. If we had both been French, he would now be a household name and I would be forgotten, hard though it seems to imagine! I remember he said to me one day: ‘You know, Mademoiselle Florence, if the British only listened to me and ate properly, they would not have nearly so much need of you!' |
| Kington | It is still true. The British still have one of the worst diets in the world. |
| Nightingale | And the best nursing? |
| Kington | Yes, I think so. |
| Nightingale | So it was not all in vain, all those long years of worrying,and writing letters, and organising, and ... you know that I invented district nurses? |
| Kington | Did you? |
| Nightingale | Oh, yes. The Queen sent for me, you know. |
| Kington | Queen Victoria? |
| Nightingale | Of course. There was no other Queen, as far as I am aware. She wrote to me, and suggested that much of the money accumulated in her Jubilee Fund should be used by me for some project of my choosing. |
| Kington | She left the choice up to you? |
| Nightingale | Indeed. It was not the first time. Many years earlier, after the Crimean War, she had invited me to stay at Balmoral and she and Prince Albert had consulted me about the future of the medical services. |
| Kington | A great honour... |
| Nightingale | I do not want to sound proud, but after a while I became quite used to being consulted. It was not unusual for foreign armies such as those of the United Sates of America to ask for my advice. Well, I already knew from my experience in the Crimea that soldiers have very little idea how to organise these things.... |
| Kington | One sometimes gets the idea that they did not know how to organise the fighting very well either. |
| Nightingale | I have no idea. I left the fighting to them. I always assumed charitably that they knew how to do something properly... So when, near the end of her life, the Queen wrote to me ... |
| Kington | Yes, I am so sorry, I had forgotten, we were talking about the Queen and you… So you went to the Queen ... |
| Nightingale | Certainly not. I was far too frail to go so far. And she was too frail to come to me. We corresponded by letter. She graciously indicated that were I to have a purpose in mind, she would make available funds to enable me to bring it about. I unveiled to her my plans to create a class of nurse who would go to see the poor in their homes if they were too ill or feeble or poor to get to hospital. She graciously acceded. So was born the idea of the district nurse. |
| Kington | So it was your inspiration. I had no idea... |
| Nightingale | This is the price I pay for being the Lady of the Lamp. Nobody imagines I did anything afterwards. And yet I outlived Queen Victoria by nine years... |
| Kington | Did your concept of the district nurse owe anything to your own state of health? |
| Nightingale | I don't understand.... |
| Kington | I believed that in your last years you were confined to your bed. You must have needed constant attention... Such as that provided by a visiting nurse... |
| Nightingale | Ah! I see what you are hinting at... Well, yes, I did take to my bed in later life, I do admit. It was as if I had done so much ministering to others that I thought it might be nice for a while to ... if the truth be known, my illness and my bed-ridden state were in some ways an easy fiction.... You will find in life that it is easier... to get things done if you issue orders from a distance than if you buzz around getting on people's nerves. Once I had established the nursing school at St Thomas's, I had no need to run round the world establishing other such schools. I merely needed to find someone good and tell them to do what I had done at St Thomas's. I dare say I got more done sitting in my bed and sending out notes than I would have done roaming the globe doing good works. I had already done my good works. I let my name go to work for me after that. |
| Kington | In a sense that is what Queen Victoria did. She sat at the heart of the Empire, making known her orders.... |
| Nightingale | Yes, I like that parallel. Queen Victoria and I... Very alike ... |
| Kington | If you were to have your life over again, would have chosen the same path? |
| Nightingale | In what way? |
| Kington | Would you perhaps have chosen to be a doctor so that you could put medicine into practice more directly? Had more power? |
| Nightingale | I cannot conceive of any doctor who ever had as much power as I had. A woman does not acquire power by being made the commanding officer. |
| Kington | But she may do it by marrying the commanding officer ? |
| Nightingale | Perhaps. I have known many households where the husband thought he gave the orders, but the servants heard only the voice of the mistress of the house. It may be that the doctors speak loudly, while the nurses speak softly, and everyone hears the nurses first. However, I was not unhappy to be a woman. In those days men did not know how to deal with a woman who knew exactly what she wanted. There are so many women today, I believe, who know just what they want that men are getting better at dealing with them. |
| Kington | They get more practice, you mean? |
| Nightingale | Precisely. And now, I think, I am getting tired. I shall retire for a little while. |
| Kington | That is the sort of thing that people say before they say,'On doctor's orders'. |
| Nightingale | That may be so. I don't remember ever taking orders from a doctor. Unless I agreed with what he said. You may go now. |
| Kington | Thank you, it has been a most enlightening and enjoyable... |
| Nightingale | And close the door. Fresh air, yes. Draughts, no.... Goodbye... |
The Miles Kington Interviews
BBC Radio 4 tx 15.08.1994