Stella Bingham’s Ministering Angels: A History of Nursing from The Crimea to The Blitz
‘Call to Arms’
Military nursing in the Crimea had done so much to establish female nursing as a respectable career that the reformers by no means abandoned the military field when hostilities came to an end. Thanks largely to the efforts of Miss Nightingale and her friends the health of the troops gradually improved. The Army Medical School was created in 1860. New military Hospitals were built. Patients moved in to the first, the Royal Victoria at Netley, in 1863. Though Netley was completed against strenuous opposition from Miss Nightingale, because it was built to the old corridor pattern, the Herbert Hospital, Woolwich and the Cambridge at Aldershot met her approval as they were constructed in the pavilion style. In 1866, a Royal Warrant authorized the appointment of nursing sisters in any military general Hospital and eight lady nurses under Mrs Shaw Stewart took on day duty at the Herbert Hospital which was completed that year. In 1869 Mrs Jane Deeble went from St. Thomas’s Hospital, London, to Netley with six ward sisters.
Army nursing was still largely in the hands of male orderlies : in theory at least. Mrs Rebecca Strong, one of Mrs Deeble’s ladies at Netley, wrote: ‘There was normally an orderly attached to each ward, but they were often taken away for relief work such as coal carrying, etc. Each sister had from six to eight of these wards under her charge, and speedily found that the nursing must be done by herself … A special orderly could be had in emergencies, but the nursing was nil.’
The army showed its appreciation of female nursing by dispatching Mrs Deeble with fourteen nurses to serve in the Zulu War of 1879, but the service was not given any formal structure until 1881, the year the War Office granted the National Aid Society (the British Red Cross organization) permission to train military probationers.
Stella Bingham (c) June 2015
Extract from Chapter 8, ‘Call to Arms’ – Stella Bingham’s Ministering Angels: A History of Nursing from The Crimea to The Blitz – Bingham charts the history of nursing across 1000 years of history, and the way in which this history intersects with changing cultural perceptions of gender. (A full description can be found here, http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ministering-Angels-Stella-Bingham/dp/0850453178 (accessed 20 June 2015).
http://www.amazon.co.uk/product-reviews/B00UQYXZ02/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1 )
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/book/ministering-angels/id979057333?mt=11 (accessed 20 June 2015)