A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines Part 23

She was born in 1822 in the city of Florence in Italy, and was named after the place where she first drew breath. Her father was William Nightingale, an English gentleman, and her elder sister, Parthenope, also took her name from the place where she was born, for Parthenope is the ancient term for Naples.

The Nightingale family did not remain long in Italy, and soon after the birth of his youngest child William Nightingale, with his wife and two little daughters, returned to England where the two girls spent their childhood in a rambling old house in Derbys.h.i.+re with many traditions and stories attached to it. Here Florence conceived a love for nursing and used to tend sick animals in the neighborhood and when she grew older, to sit up with and cheer the sick among the cottagers. There were not many people, even among those who were far older than herself, who could minister to the sick with her kindness and skill, and her fame soon was general through the neighborhood. Poor men used to come hat in hand to the old house requesting that Miss Florence spend a few hours with a sick wife or a young mother, and the Nightingales were kind enough and sensible enough to allow their daughter to do the work for which she had so evident an inclination.

There were no trained nurses in those days, and the general business of nursing as a profession was considered almost disreputable. Sick people were expected to be cared for by their relatives; hospitals were inefficient and badly run, and the comforts of the modern sickroom were unknown. As Florence grew older she thought a great deal about these things, and finally decided that she would do something which at that time was regarded almost as strange as if she had declared her intention of visiting the North Pole--she said she was going to become a professional trained nurse, and went abroad to study nursing on the Continent which was far ahead of England in such matters.

In a European hospital that was more in accord with the standards we know to-day and where comfort, skill and cleanliness went hand in hand, Florence Nightingale nursed the sick and acquired a mastery of the profession as it was then understood. It was so unusual for a woman of refinement to enter such a calling that she had become known in many places simply because she had decided to become a nurse; and after she returned to England she was at once offered the position of Superintendent at a Home for Sick Governesses in London.

This home, like many another benevolent inst.i.tution in those times, was badly administered. As it constantly showed a deficit, its friends had become discouraged in supporting it, and the subscriptions on which it lived had been falling off. The ladies who were compelled to remain there did not receive the care that they should have had, and were unhappy and dispirited. This was the state of affairs when Florence Nightingale became the Superintendent of the Home.

In a very short time the Home was completely changed. Miss Nightingale had personally visited the former subscribers, and secured once more their help and patronage. She had changed the system on which the Home had been run to such an extent that it served as a model for inst.i.tutions of its kind, and where the unfortunate women that lived there had been on the verge of actual physical suffering, they were now well cared for and contented.

Then war broke out between England, France and Turkey on the one side and Russia on the other,--a war that was brought about among other reasons by the desire of the Russian Czar to seize and hold the port of Constantinople. Great Britain and France supported the Turks and active fighting commenced. The theater of war soon s.h.i.+fted to the Crimean Peninsula where the British and French laid siege to the town of Sebastopol which was Russia's most important fortress and chief base of supplies. Before the walls of Sebastopol there took place severe fighting, which continued until bitter winter rendered further campaigning impossible.

While the war was going on thousands of sick and wounded British soldiers were pouring into the base hospitals at Scutari, where no provision for their care had been made. With the constant flood of wounded men, and men who were dying of dysentery and cholera, with no medical supplies and little food, with no nurses and only a few doctors, the condition of the British wounded soon became terrible beyond description. As there were no field dressing stations they had to be carried for days with their wounds undressed before they reached the hospital, and when they arrived it was often some time before the hara.s.sed doctors could care for them. They were brought in with their uniforms covered with filth and blood, and were laid in long rows on the floors of the hospital where few cots were to be found. Vermin crawled over the floors, over the walls and over the bodies of the helpless men. Rats gnawed the fingers of the wounded who were too weak to drive them away. There were no conveniences of any kind and many men died of exhaustion because no food adequate for the sick could be prepared. All the food, we are told, consisted of beef and vegetables boiled together in one huge caldron, into which new supplies were thrown indiscriminately as fast as they were delivered. The bread was moldy and the beef too tough even for well men to eat.

Owing to the efforts of a war correspondent of the London _Times_, the people at home were soon informed of the state of affairs in the Crimea, and gifts and supplies poured in profusely. But owing to the inefficiency and red tape of the War Department, the supplies were not delivered, but lay rotting in warehouses and in the holds of vessels while men died for the want of them. On one occasion, we are told, a consignment of shoes for the soldiers turned out to be in women's sizes. Improper inspections resulted in high profits, for the army contractors made uniforms out of shoddy and leather accouterments from paper, filled the cores of hay bales with kale stocks and cheated the Government right and left without forbearance or conscience.

Then the newspapers began calling for English women to go to the Crimea and care for the sick, and Florence Nightingale heard the call. She wrote a letter to Sydney Herbert who was Minister of War, volunteering to organize a body of nurses and go out to the Crimea to care for the wounded.

Right then a curious thing happened. The War Department had already decided that Miss Nightingale was the one person who could take charge of the reorganization of the hospitals in the Crimea, and had written a letter requesting her services. Offer and request crossed each other in the mails. On the following day her appointment was officially announced, and she was overwhelmed with proffers of a.s.sistance from all sides.

A large number of patriotic women volunteered to aid her, but only a very few possessed the necessary qualifications for such a task. Of all that offered to go Miss Nightingale was only able to accept thirty that she considered would be capable of performing the severe tasks that lay ahead, for she knew only too well the grim welcome she would receive at the Crimea.

Without farewells, quietly and at night, seen off only by a few intimate relatives, the little group of nurses started on their mission--the first one where women were to care for the soldiers who had fallen in war.

They crossed the English Channel and arrived at Boulogne in France on the following morning, where they were given a rousing greeting by the voluble French fish-wives, who had heard of their mission and who crowded around them to get a sight of the angels of mercy. From there they made their way to the seat of the war, and Miss Nightingale looked for the first time on the hospital where she was so soon to acquire immortal fame.

It may well be thought that her heart sank when she saw the enormity of the task that lay before her, for she had been sent to bring order from chaos, plenty from want, comfort from torture and cleanliness from wholesale filth. She had to contend not only with these awful conditions, but with the dislike and distrust of the medical officers with whom she was to work, who resented the fact that a woman had been sent out to reorganize what they considered a part of their department, and who doubted, because she was a woman, that she would be capable of doing so efficiently.

And when she arrived there was no time to spend in preliminary planning, for active fighting had been going on at the front and the wounded from recent battles were pouring in, adding to the confusion that already existed. They were laid groaning in hallways and on the bare ground until such time as the doctors could look after them.

Then Florence Nightingale, hardly taking breath, plunged into the task that awaited her and sent her nurses to the quarters where they were most needed. With their own hands these brave Englishwomen scrubbed the reeking floors and supervised the work of the orderlies. They visited the quartermasters and obtained the supplies that had been tied up through faulty administration and through army red tape, and in a short time they had established a diet kitchen where several hundred sick and wounded men could have the food they required, food that would save their lives.

The death rate, we are told, before this woman nurse and her little company arrived at the hospital was sixty percent of all the cases that were treated there--and after she had effected the changes that she saw were necessary, the death rate was only one percent--a fact in itself that speaks more loudly than any words for her efficiency and her bravery.

At times this indomitable woman was on her feet for twenty hours out of the twenty-four, supervising, directing, taking the last message of some dying soldier for his family, feeding another who was too weak to feed himself. The doctors who had been her opponents soon looked up to her and became her devoted friends, and the men who had been through such terrible sufferings thought she was indeed an angel from heaven, and, as she pa.s.sed down the long wards would furtively kiss her shadow as it fell across their blankets. Many a time she took charge of cases that had been given up by the doctors, who turned their attention always to those whom they believed had a fighting chance for life, and she nursed them back to life with a patience and a tenderness that the doctors could not spare.

From the s.h.i.+ps and warehouses there commenced to appear the comforts that sick men demanded--sheets and nightgowns, socks and pillows; in the place of the nauseous beef stew, the wounded began to get broths and jellies. Should they die they were sure of a woman's hand and a kindly ministration at the last, for Florence Nightingale had resolved that no man should die unattended in her hospital. And the wonders she performed were heard of back in England, where her name became national.

She had gone to Scutari in 1854. In May, 1855, she visited other hospitals that were nearer the seat of war and went into the trenches themselves before Sebastopol. One of her biographers tells us that when she entered the trenches she was warned by a sentinel to go no further, because the enemy had the place under close watch and would certainly open fire when they beheld a group of people at that particular point.

"My good young man," replied Miss Nightingale, "more dead and wounded have pa.s.sed through my hands than I hope you will ever see on the battlefield during the whole of your military career; believe me, I have no fear of death."

Then she fell ill with Crimean fever, and through the army the news was received with more consternation than a severe defeat. Men broke down and cried like children when they heard that Miss Nightingale lay at the point of death, and the Commander in Chief, Lord Raglan, rode through sleet and mud for hours to visit her personally. She did not die, however, but recovered to take up again her duties as chief nurse and organizer.

When the war was ended Miss Nightingale remained at the Crimea until the last soldiers were sent home, and then, and not till then, she followed them. After most of the men had left and only a few remained she still worked faithfully to serve them, establis.h.i.+ng "reading huts"

and places of recreation such as the Red Cross and the Y.M.C.A.

established in France and Belgium in the course of the World War some sixty years later.

As a matter of fact the work performed by Miss Nightingale was indirectly responsible for the birth of the Red Cross which was organized in Switzerland some four years after she had finished her work at the Crimea, and certainly no name in the Red Cross, in spite of the host of n.o.ble men and women who have served there, has ever equaled the glory of her own.

She returned to England quietly as she had left, although a British Government placed a battles.h.i.+p at her service--and she lived in England engaged in useful and philanthropic work for a great many years. With a fund of about $250,000 she founded the Nightingale Home for the proper training of nurses, a fund that she could have doubled or trebled had she so desired, or if the needs of the home had required it. In the following years she was frequently consulted on hospital organization in the armies not only of Great Britain but of Continental nations as well. She died in 1910, one of the great figures among the heroines of history.

CHAPTER XXVI

FATHER DAMIEN

Many are the stories of brave doctors and ministers who have sacrificed themselves in times of pestilence and plague, caring for the sick, allowing experiments to be performed on their own bodies, and giving their lives without fear in the hope of saving invalids and sufferers; but no story is more thrilling than that of the Belgian priest named Father Damien.

Father Damien's real name was Joseph de Veuster, and he was born in the year 1840, in the little village of Tremeloo in Belgium, not far from the city of Louvain that became famous in the World War when the Germans sacked it, burned its university and murdered its inhabitants.

A strong religious impulse ruled the de Veuster family, and out of three children two were destined for a religious life. As a matter of fact all three finally entered the service of the Church--a girl named Pauline who entered a convent and two brothers, Auguste and Joseph, who became respectively Father Pamphile and Father Damien.

Originally the parents of these three children had decided that Auguste was to become a priest and Joseph was to enter business and be a merchant, but it could easily be seen the priesthood was also the life for Joseph, who had a serious and contemplative nature even when very young, and spent much of his time in prayer and meditation. On one occasion, when only four years old, Joseph had been found on his knees before the altar of the church when it was supposed that he had wandered away from home and been lost in the woods or the fields about the town, and when still a young boy he was fond of taking long walks by himself in the fields and of herding sheep until he became known as "the little shepherd."

When Joseph was eighteen his sister Pauline left home to enter the convent, and even before that time his brother had gone to Paris to study at the home of the Picpus Fathers. Joseph himself, in accordance with his parents' design that he was to become a business man, went to a town in France called Braine le Comte to learn the rudiments of a commercial career and to study the French language. But while he had gone there willingly, he felt the desire for a religious life more and more strongly, until he finally told his parents that he desired to be a priest. It was not difficult for him to obtain their consent and Joseph went to Paris to study at the same school that his brother had attended.

In Paris Joseph served as a novice and when this term was ended he went to Louvain where his brother was already a priest in holy orders, having adopted the name of Father Pamphile. Joseph himself planned to take the name of Father Damien.

For some time Joseph lived with his brother in Louvain where he continued his studies, but he was not yet ordained as a priest when an event took place that changed the whole course of his life and was destined in the end to make his name famous throughout the civilized world.

The Picpus Fathers, like many other Catholic brothers, were great missionaries, carrying on this service in what were then called the Sandwich Islands, now better known as the Hawaiian Islands, under the Government of the United States. At that time, however, the islands formed an independent state under a native king and there was a great deal to be done by the missionaries that went there.

Father Pamphile received orders to go to the Sandwich Islands and engage in missionary work. He was delighted, for this work appealed to him and he felt that he could serve his Church better in that far country than by remaining in Louvain where he had his parish. After his pa.s.sage had been engaged, however, Father Pamphile was smitten with an attack of typhus fever, and found himself unable to answer the call to foreign service when the time came.

Now Joseph was even more ardent than his brother, and he burned to answer this call himself, although he was not yet a priest. He asked Father Pamphile, however, if it would be his pleasure for him to take his place and engage in the missionary work that had been intended for the elder brother; and Father Pamphile was only too glad to have Joseph perform the task that his illness had rendered him unable to perform himself. So Joseph wrote to his superiors, volunteering to go to the Sandwich Islands in place of Father Pamphile, and soon a letter was received consenting to the new arrangement. Wild with delight he told his brother of what had taken place and at once commenced making his preparations for the voyage.

The islands to which Father Damien was bound are of the greatest tropical beauty, and the natives have become known all over the world for their strange customs, their unusual music and their skill in swimming the deep blue waters that surround the land where they live.

At that time, however, they were suffering from the ravages of the most terrible disease, perhaps, in the entire world,--certainly the one most feared from the times of the Bible down to the present day. This was the disease of leprosy.

Leprosy was not a native disease in the Hawaiian Islands originally, but had been carried there by merchants or voyagers from the Far East where was its home, but it spread so rapidly among the natives that before long it seemed as if the Hawaiian Islands themselves had been the cradle of this terrible scourge. This was due, we are told, to the hospitable habits of the islanders, who lived closely together, and to their kindness in persisting in keeping with them those members of their families who had already fallen its victims. At about the time that Father Damien reached the islands, however, the Government had taken the matter in hand, and all the lepers that could be found were torn from their families and carried to a lonely island named Molokai.

Here they were outcasts, deserted by their friends and relatives, living in wretchedness and desolation and, in that time, provided only with the barest necessities of life.

After a voyage of five months, in which his s.h.i.+p contended with many gales and much rough weather, Father Damien arrived in the Sandwich Islands and was at once made a full priest and given a parish in a wild part of the country--a parish so large that it took him days to go from one end of it to the other. He worked hard and soon became well known among the natives under his care, and to his fellow churchmen as a man of great earnestness and much physical strength.

One day Father Damien happened to be at a meeting of churchmen which was being addressed by the Bishop who said that he deeply regretted that he could spare no priest to send to the Island of Molokai to the unfortunate lepers, who seemed to be cast off there forsaken of G.o.d and man alike and whose condition was wretched beyond belief. But Father Damien at once arose and pointed out to the Bishop that a priest _could_ be spared for such service, for one of the newcomers to the islands could take charge of his own parish, while he himself, he said, would go to Molokai and spend his life in caring for the lepers, whose condition made his heart bleed whenever he thought of them.

It can be imagined that a gasp of astonishment and admiration went through the a.s.semblage that heard this courageous offer, for the man who volunteered for such service was going to living death--to a place of horror and human suffering where life appeared in its most hideous form, and where disease wrote its imprint on the human body with such a terrible flourish that the very sight of Father Damien's future companions was enough to strike fear to the heart's core. But Father Damien thought little of all this; he knew that he could do much good among the lepers, and he made the offer in simple sincerity without a thought of himself or of the dangers that he would encounter.

It is needless to say that it was accepted. On the spot Bishop Maigret a.s.signed to Father Damien the island of Molokai for a parish, and the brave priest left on the next boat, not even having time to take with him a change of linen or the simplest necessities of life.

It may be thought that Father Damien's heart sank when he reached the island. A high and gloomy cliff of rock towered above the settlement of the lepers, and he found them living in the rudest of huts, dying from vice as well as from disease. Water was difficult to obtain and there were none of the conveniences and few of the necessities of life.

Moreover, in that settlement, which was one that had lost all hope, the only law that was known was the law of despair, and those that lived there tried to forget their unhappy lot in wild orgies and revels, drinking a fiery spirit they distilled themselves called "Ki" which was made from the root of a plant that grew in profusion on the island, fighting and gambling as they chose, and dying like dogs with none to care for them, and with little hope for even a decent burial.