Silent in an Evil Time Read Online Free

nursing forever. Nurses in England would no longer be excessively religious or hopelessly alcoholic. Instead, they would be women who received training in the lessons of effective patient care. They would be taught to understand the instructions of doctors and surgeons. They would be dedicated professionals.
    This was the kind of nurse who graduated from the school established at St. Thomas' Hospital in London in the late 1850s. The school, which was named the Nightingale Training Hospital for Nurses, adopted Florence's lessons, and the nurses who graduated from it, and from all the other hospital teaching institutions just like it, became the nursing profession's models. Through her ideas and influence, Florence Nightingale became the founder of modern nursing.

    Edith Cavell never met Florence Nightingale, and it's unlikely that they ever corresponded, though Nightingale was a prodigious letter-writer. When Edith set off on a career in nursing in 1896, Florence was seventy-six years old and past the period of her greatest activity. Still, Edith was as aware as any other young Englishwoman of Florence's influential work. She would soon study
Notes on Nursing
as part of her training. She would come to understand the Nightingale principles because they were the basis of the profession that Edith had come to choose for her own.

    OPPOSITE:
After her return from the Crimean War, Florence wrote countless reports and books about health care and the training of nurses. Her influence changed the profession of nursing forever.
(The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)

From her childhood to her adult years, Edith loved to sketch and to paint in water-color She drew this unidentified London scene in 1902, when she was night superintendent at London's St. Pancras Infirmary.
(The Royal London Hospital Archives)
Chapter Four
NURSE EDITH
    O n September 3, 1896, at the age of thirty, Edith entered the London Hospital (known simply as the London) to begin four years of training. The London occupied many buildings on acres of land on Whitechapel Road, a wide and chaotic street that ran through the slums of the city's East End. Traditionally, the East End was the first home for poor immigrants to England, and in Edith's time, the area took in the country's largest population of Jewish refugees from eastern Europe. Edith could have done her training at a hospital in a more prosperous neighborhood. But she chose to work and live at the London, where she knew she would be nursing the poorest patients.
    The London opened its doors in 1740. One of its early surgeons, Sir William Blizard, gave the hospital its motto: THE PATIENT COMES FIRST . As the words suggest, the London grew famous for the unselfishness of its surgeons, including Sir William, who must have had astonishingly hardy health since he didn't retire until he passed his ninetieth birthday But Sir William's durability made him an exception among early surgeons; as a group, they tended to die young. In the days of primitive instruments and of diagnoses that were far from scientific, surgeons put in weary days of performing operations with a high rate of failure. Though surgical techniques greatly improved in the late nineteenth century, surgeons' lives were, more often than not, short and hard. The pattern seemed to have been set by John Harrison, the London's very first surgeon, who took up his practice at age twenty-two and died just thirteen years later. The official cause of death was overwork.
    The demands on the nurses at the London were just as unforgiving. When Edith started out as a probationary nurse, one of the staff of six hundred nurses, her day opened with the ringing of a bell at 6:00 in the morning, and it didn't end until 9:20 at night, when she went off duty and ate her supper. She was never idle during all those hours. She learned the skills of nursing by working alongside senior nurses, who were in charge of wards of patients, fifty-six beds to each ward. Edith