Silent in an Evil Time (2 page)

Following her time with the Powell family, Edith went on a holiday to Europe, financed by a small inheritance from a relative. For her, the
highlight of the trip came in the German province of Bavaria, where she visited the Free Hospital. The institution offered care at no charge to patients who couldn't afford medical treatment. Edith was so impressed by the hospital's generosity that she donated part of her inheritance to purchase new medical equipment. Around the Free Hospital, Edith earned a special name from the staff and patients. She was “the English Angel.”

If the experience in Bavaria gave Edith the idea that she might choose nursing as her profession, four more positions as governess still lay ahead. Three were with families not far from Swardeston, but the fourth was different and exceptional. The principal at Laurel Court, the formidable Margaret Gibson, used her contacts to secure a job for Edith that took her out of England – to a city that would be central to her future. Edith went to work for the François family, whose home was in a grand house on the most beautiful avenue in Brussels.

Belgium wasn't far from England in distance – little more than sixty kilometers across the English Channel – but to a young woman like Edith, it was light-years away in history and culture. Her new employer, Paul François, was a leading lawyer in Brussels, and he, his wife, and their four young children lived in a large and gracious house on Avenue Louise. The street was the city's pride, several lanes wide, and lined for its entire length with four rows of chestnut trees. The François mansion blended naturally into these gorgeous surroundings, and as the governess of the house, Edith found herself among Brussels' most sophisticated society. Life back in simple Swardeston was nothing like life on stylish Avenue Louise.

Edith took full part in the François family's activities. She carried out her job as governess, winning the children's affections just as she had at the Powell house, but the François parents also included her at parties and on holidays in glamorous resorts. At first, Edith wasn't entirely
comfortable during the three-hour Sunday lunches and the even longer dinners, with the ongoing gossip and chatter. But she grew to enjoy the occasions, easily holding up her end of conversations.

Edith developed such confidence that she gave Paul François a piece of her mind at one luncheon. When François made a rude remark about England's Queen Victoria, Edith stood up from her chair and told Monsieur François she wasn't going to sit there while someone, even her employer, insulted the monarch of her country. Then she strode out of the room. Edith thought any patriotic English person would have reacted in the same bold way. François had to admit that he admired the governess' spirit.

During the years Edith worked for the François family, she took annual summer holidays at home in Swardeston. For two or three weeks at a time, she sank back into the life that had been familiar to her since childhood – the life of tennis, church, watercolors, and long walks through the countryside. Nineteenth-century English people habitually walked great distances, and Edith was a spectacular example of the female of the species. It was nothing for her to take brisk hikes of several hours on the roads and paths around Swardeston. She had lots of time to read, which she did widely, and Charles Dickens was her favorite novelist. Among poets, she admired William Wordsworth, the writer who looked on poetry as a higher calling.

Both of Edith's sisters, Florence and Lillian, had chosen nursing as their profession, and they were launched on rewarding careers. Jack, the youngest Cavell child, lived in the shadow of his accomplished sisters. He found a job in the offices of the Norwich Union Insurance Society in the nearby city, staying with the company for his entire working life, not rising far up the ranks. Jack was bitter and took out his disappointments in long nights of drinking in bars. He never married, though he had a romance
with a barmaid. The Cavell family considered the relationship unworthy for the son of a vicar, and the Reverend Cavell left it to Edith to break up her brother's romance. Edith handled the difficult job with tact, but Jack never forgave her, not even in later years when Edith became England's great heroine.

In the spring of 1895, when Edith was twenty-nine, the Reverend Cavell became ill, probably with pneumonia. Mrs. Cavell begged Edith to come home and look after her father. Edith wasted no time in returning to the Swardeston vicarage, but she was sad to leave her job with the François family, and sad to move from Brussels, which she thought of as her second home. Her family, however, had first claim on her loyalties.

Edith cared for her father through the summer, providing him with the nursing he so desperately needed. It might have been expected that Mrs. Cavell would have asked Florence or Lillian to look after their father, since they were trained nurses. But she turned to Edith, the daughter she most relied on. Edith performed so capably that the Reverend Cavell returned to his church full-time by early autumn.

The experience with her father came as a final revelation for Edith. Over the years, since her visit to the Free Hospital in Bavaria, she had been thinking about nursing as a career. At last, feeling the satisfaction of bringing the Reverend Cavell back to health, she made up her mind once and for all: She would train to become a full-time nurse.

Sixteen-year-old Florence Nightingale (seated) and her sister, Parthenope, lived the pampered life of the very rich in nineteenth-century England.
(The Toronto Reference Library)

F
ar more than anyone else, Florence Nightingale shaped the profession that Edith was about to enter. Before Nightingale, nursing – as we know it in the modern world – didn't exist. In the mid-nineteenth century, nurses were of two kinds, both incapable of giving proper care. One kind was made up of members of Anglican and Catholic religious orders, and while good-hearted, the women were often more interested in saving the souls of their patients than in treating their illnesses. The second kind came from the lowest classes. They were women who carried out little more than housemaid's chores, who sometimes got drunk on the job. Neither sort of nurse had formal training in looking after sick people, nor were they expected to do much beyond keeping the patients as comfortable as possible while they waited to die. Then along came Florence Nightingale.

Florence was as different from Edith as day is from night. She was born in 1820 to a life of privilege. Her immediate family – father, mother, and older sister, Parthenope – divided their time between two handsome country estates. When the family traveled to London for parties and balls, they stayed in lavish hotel suites. From her childhood to her death in 1910, Florence Nightingale moved in circles that included England's powerful elite.

Florence's father was quick to recognize that his younger daughter had a brilliant mind. He made sure she received a broader education than most boys of the time. Florence, who was Anglican, believed that God appeared to her on February 7, 1837, when she was seventeen, and called her to His service. Florence decided that the service lay in nursing. Driven to care for the ill, she was forever rushing to the bedsides of sick friends and relatives, and she developed an instinct for treating people in medical need. With her intellectual nature, Florence researched every corner of the health profession. She visited hospitals in England and on the continent, learning the techniques of nursing and keeping notes on each hospital's methods.

Florence's parents opposed their daughter's fascination with medicine every step of the way. To them and to everyone else of their class, nursing was no activity for a lady. They expected her to marry someone of her own social standing and raise a family. Like Edith Cavell, Florence Nightingale remained single; unlike Edith, Florence had the money to follow her passion for healing wherever she wanted it to take her.

Florence's chance to put the ideas she formed about nursing into effect arrived when Britain entered the Crimean War in the spring of 1854. The war pitted Britain, France, and Turkey against Russia, all the countries quarreling over small differences. On the battlefields, the fighting took place in a part of the world that few English people could have found on
a map. It was in the Crimea, a remote region of southwest Russia on the Black Sea. Britain sent fifty thousand poorly equipped troops to the distant battleground, led by incompetent generals. From the beginning, the soldiers suffered from disease, wounds, and medical neglect.

In response, Florence Nightingale recruited thirty-eight nurses, and under her leadership, the nursing team sailed to the war zone to save lives. They landed in Turkey, in November 1854, to a cold reception from the British officers and the army doctors. Both groups looked on Florence as a pushy woman, sticking her nose into a place where she wasn't wanted.

Florence ignored the opposition. She took over a hospital in an abandoned Turkish army barracks in Scutari, a suburb of Turkey's major city of Constantinople. The building had no running water, few beds, and was unready in every imaginable way to receive sick and wounded soldiers. Florence soon put things in order. She and her team scrubbed away the building's filth, she spent her own money on beds and equipment, and she inspired her nurses to work with discipline and efficiency.

Over the next many months, thousands of soldiers who needed medical treatment were transported by ship across the Black Sea, from the Crimean battlefields to Scutari. At the hospital, Florence created an institution so different from other military hospitals that it amounted to a revolution in caregiving. She emphasized fresh air, pure water, and washed sheets on every bed. She preached good hygiene and plenty of nourishing food.

Today, we take for granted that hospitals, even at scenes of war, meet a minimum standard of cleanliness. But in the 1850s, such a notion was unheard of. Medical science hadn't yet grasped the concept of germs, which spread disease. But Florence's ideas about hygienic conditions made an enormous difference in the speed of healing among the soldiers and on the rate of their deaths. Even the military doctors, who were so scornful of Florence, had to admit that far fewer men died at Scutari than expected, and those who survived improved more quickly than the doctors thought possible.

Florence Nightingale ran a military hospital for almost two years in the Crimean War of the mid-1850s. Her rounds of the wards each night made her famous as the “Lady with the Lamp,” though the lamp she carried bore no resemblance to the one in this picture from The Illustrated London News of Feb. 24, 1855. Florence's real lamp was described as “a candle inside an accordion-style shade that could be folded flat,” which she held over her head.
(The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)

Florence, working eighteen hours a day, performed more nursing than any of her staff. She didn't turn away from the soldiers with the most festering wounds, or the worst cases of dysentery. At night, she wrote long reports to the government in London, explaining her methods and making her case for money and equipment. Before finally resting her head on the pillow each night, she took one last tour of the hospital wards. She walked the four kilometers of beds, lighting her way with a
small Turkish lamp held over her head. The men idolized Florence as the “Lady with the Lamp.”

At home in England, the Lady with the Lamp turned into a famous figure. The war made the front pages of every newspaper, and Florence Nightingale's nursing became an exciting part of the story. In the spring of 1856, a peace treaty brought an end to the war, which had produced few results apart from killing and maiming thousands of men on both sides.

The following autumn, Florence traveled back to England. She had spent twenty-two months in Turkey, taken three trips from Scutari to the battlefields, and survived an illness that almost cost her life. In England, she was revered and celebrated, though Florence proved to be an elusive subject for her admirers; what she didn't want for herself was celebrity. But it was beyond doubt that Florence's achievements at Scutari had raised the status of nursing as a profession. It was now respectable, as it had never been before, for a decent Englishwoman to become a nurse. Nursing itself was now looked on as something that could save lives, not just comfort those who were dying.

Florence Nightingale was an eccentric person. Just how odd she was became clear in the decades after her return from the war. In that long period, she lived much of her life as a recluse, in a house that her father bought for her in London's posh Mayfair district. From her late thirties to her death at age ninety, Florence rarely left her home. Instead, she devoted every waking hour to reading and writing about hospitals and the people who worked in them. Nobody knew more about the subject than she did. At the request of the British government, she wrote an eight-hundred-page report called “Notes Affecting the Health, Efficiency and Hospital
Administration of the British Army.” The document was her first shot in the long and successful campaign to introduce her ideas about clean water, warm clothing, and trained nurses to both military and civilian hospitals.