The name Florence Nightingale
is inextricably linked to
advances in medicine, perhaps
eclipsing the fame of Harvey,
who discovered the circulation of
blood, or even Hippocrates, the legendary
father of medicine in Ancient
Greece. In an age when women were
kept out of virtually all of the professions
(except the oldest one) she
courageously used her upper class connections
to become a nurse. Her vision
scandalized her family who thought
male nakedness was simply not proper
for a lady to witness.
But Florence was both determined
and well connected. She spoke and
wrote Latin, Greek, French, German
and Italian, and was deeply interested
in history. This was a formidable
woman. Sidney Herbert, then British
Secretary of State at War, capitulated
to her repeated requests and sent her to
the Scutari hospital in Turkey during
the Crimean War. She found some
2,000 British soldiers who were laid:
“Like paving stones in four miles of
corridors.” As she and her nurses
cleaned, fed and comforted wounded
and sick soldiers, she grew increasingly
angry, complaining to Sidney
Herbert: “No mops, plates, forks,
spoons, nor even scissors for cutting
the men’s hair which is literally alive”
(from lice). Although the Crimean War
was brutal, ten times more men died
from infection than from military
wounds. Certainly she must have saved
hundreds of wounded soldiers with her
cleansing and care of the troops, who
memorialized her as: ‘The lady with
the lamp.’
But, according to Reputations, a
BBC documentary, reviewed some
time ago in The Guardian Newspaper,
the real killer was the hospital itself as
Scutari was built over a cesspit. Nancy
Banks-Smith of The Guardian, in
reviewing the documentary, wrote that
the medical efforts were really whitewashing
a sepulcher. “When Lord
Palmerston, a neighbour of the
Nightingales, sent a sanitary commission,
they flushed, aired and ventilated
Scutari, and the death toll dropped
from 42% to 2%. Strictly speaking we
should erect a statue to a plumber in
Trafalgar Square”, concluded Ms.
Banks-Smith.
... Ms. Banks-Smith should
have included engineers and
chemists in her witty rejoinder...
history repeatedly shows that these
two professions have constantly
been in the vanguard of public
health initiatives.
Florence Nightingale’s fame coincided
with the inventions of photography,
and sound recording. Indeed,
Thomas Edison recorded her voice,
giving us two rare flashbacks of her
era.
Like Darwin, she took to her bed
for years but kept up a barrage of complaints
and suggestions for public
health initiatives. While born into the
ranks of wealth and privilege she
rejected the offer of a State Funeral
and burial at Westminster Abbey.
Appropriately, it was common soldiers
who carried her coffin to burial.
Actually I think Ms. Banks-Smith
should have included engineers and
chemists in her witty rejoinder on
plumbing, for history repeatedly shows
that these two professions have constantly
been in the vanguard of public
health initiatives. Equally, their anticipation
of designs of water and wastewater
treatment systems and processes
have usually been ignored by historians.
To design a war weapon is to
immortalize your name for eons; witness
the Bren, Browning, Colt,
Kaliznakov, Smith & Wesson, Webley,
etc. But who knows the names of
Ardern, Lockett and Fowler, discoverers
of the activated sludge process in
Lancashire, still a benchmark process
in wastewater treatment, or the French
nobleman/scientist Antoine-Laurent
Lavoisier, who, in 1780, made milestone
discoveries in chemistry, particularly
phosphorous, but was arrested by
The Revolution and pleaded for two
more weeks to conclude his experiments.
The tribunal declared that: “The
state has no need of chemists.” His
request denied, he was guillotined, taking
much of his knowledge with him.
In 1847, years before Joseph Lister
and Louis Pasteur made their giant
strides in medicine, a young
Hungarian doctor, Ignaz Semmelweis
linked the high mortality rates in
maternity wards to a lack of simple
hand washing by doctors in between
treating patients. His superiors scoffed,
as the British medical establishment
was to do some five years later when
Dr. John Snow postulated that a
cholera outbreak in London was waterborne.
The findings of both these medical
pioneers were the subject of scorn
for many years and both died in relative
obscurity.
And who knows of John Walker of
England, who, in 1827, invented the
‘Lucifer’ match, making phosphorous
a commercial commodity and perhaps
an important contributor to the
Industrial Revolution as it provided a
cheap, portable means of combustion.
Can you imagine running a household
or factory, with no way to ignite cooking
or process appliances? Try camping
without matches or lighters if
you’re not convinced.
‘Lucifers’ were very popular among
troops in the awful trenches in World
War I as they permitted troops to smoke
between barrages. A favourite song
among British troops at the front went:
“While you’ve a Lucifer to light your
fag (cigarette), smile boys all the while.”
We should learn the lessons of the
Scutari military hospital. While the
Prime Minister and Provincial
Premiers are fighting for more health
spending, they might be reminded that
‘The Invisible Professions’ of chemistry
and engineering are fundamental
health services which are in the front
line of our public health systems but at
the back door for funding. After Cain
slew Abel, water-borne diseases went
on to kill more humans than all the
recorded wars in history.
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