King of the Queen Bees: How Florence Nightingale joined
Intrepid duo staged revolution in hospitals
the summer of 1892 the net was closing in on Sherlock Holmes.
The world’s most celebrated fictional detective had made his debut five years earlier. Public interest had grown – not least in the real-life model that had inspired Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation.
Doyle let the cat out of the bag in an interview with Harry How, a journalist on the Strand magazine.
You could say it was a ding-dong moment: Doyle had based Holmes on acclaimed surgeon Joseph Bell, his former teacher at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. His observational skills, lightning diagnosis and scientific deduction readily transferred to Holmes.
He wrote to Bell warning him: “I am afraid that my little sketches have had the effect of setting a newspaper man on your trail with as great persistence as even Holmes showed to his criminals.”
Bell coped well with the press interest and remained on good terms with his former student, offering Doyle snippets as potential plot lines.
But what of the real Bell? Less well known is his enormous contribution to the development of modern nursing.
Bell paints a grim picture of nurses at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary in the 1850s: “Poor old useless drudges, half charwomen, half field workers, rarely keeping their places for any length of time, absolutely ignorant, almost invariably drunken, sometimes deaf.”
Surgery wasn’t much better. Robert Liston killed three during just one operation; the patient and one of his assistants whose fingers were accidentally amputated (both contracted hospital gangrene) and a spectator who dropped dead from fright when Liston’s knife cut through his coat tails.
Bell reckoned the introduction of trained nurses in theatres and wards at least doubled numbers of patients surviving treatment in hospital.
A revolution in surgery in the 1860s through anaesthetics and antiseptics coincided with a revolution in nursing spearheaded by Florence Nightingale.
She and Bell got on well. Nightingale sent up St Thomas’s nurses for head roles at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. Bell was the first surgeon to offer lectures to nurses and he invited them on his Sunday ward rounds. Within a generation the infirmary had been transformed with sufficient qualified nurses and well-run theatres. In 1880 Nightingale offered thanks for “all he (Bell) has done so wisely and so well for the causes of trained nursing”.
The next challenge was nursing the sick poor in their own homes. Queen Victoria’s jubilee in 1887 provided the opportunity to set up an institute for training district nurses. The impetus came from William Rathbone in Liverpool and from Nightingale.
In Scotland the banner was taken up by three remarkable women committed to social reform.