Gordon Richard - The Private Life of Florence Nightingale

The Private Life of Florence Nightingale

First published in 1978

Richard Gordon; House of Stratus 1978-2012

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The right of Richard Gordon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

This edition published in 2012 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

Typeset by House of Stratus.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the authors imagination.

Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

www.houseofstratus.com

Richard Gordon , real name Dr. Gordon Stanley Ostlere, was born in England on 15 September 1921. He is best-known for his hilarious Doctor books. Himself a qualified doctor, he worked as an anaesthetist at the famous St. Bartholomews Hospital (where he was also a medical student) and later as a ships surgeon, before leaving medical practice in 1952 to take up writing full time. Many of his books are based on his own true experiences in the medical profession and are all told with the wry wit and candid humour that have become his hallmark.

In all, there are eighteen titles in the Doctor Series, with further comic writings in another seven volumes, including Great Medical Disasters and Great Medical Mysteries , plus more serious works concerning the lives of medical practitioners.

He has also published several technical books under his own name, mainly concerned with anaesthetics for both students and patients. Additionally, he has written on gardening, fishing and cricket and was also a regular contributor to Punch magazine. His Private Lives series, taking in Dr. Crippen, Jack the Ripper and Florence Nightingale , has been widely acclaimed.

The enormous success of Doctor in the House , first published in the 1950s, startled its author. It was written whilst he was a surgeon aboard a cargo ship, prior to a spell as an academic anaesthetist at Oxford. His only previous literary experience had been confined to work as an assistant editor of the British Medical Journal . There was, perhaps, a foretaste of things to come whilst working on the Journal as the then editor, finding Gordon somewhat jokey, put him in charge of the obituaries!

The film of Doctor in the House uniquely recovered its production costs whilst still showing at the cinema in Londons West End where it had been premiered. This endeared him to the powerful Rank Organisation who made eight films altogether of his works, which were followed by a then record-breaking TV series, and further stage productions.

Richard Gordons books have been translated into twenty languages.

He married a doctor and they had four children, two of whom became house surgeons. He now lives in London.

Authors Note

1915 was like 1854 a year of killing. After Mons, the Marne and Ypres, Asquiths Government judged it unfitting to unveil Florence Nightingales statue with ceremony. On the Wednesday of February 24, workmen folded the canvas and dismantled the scaffolding, one brushed the snow from the plinth, and they left her alone in Waterloo Place, in the middle of Londons gentlemens clubland.

On the corner of Pall Mall opposite, through the windows of the Athenaeum Club, her father once wrote with his quill pen he abhorred the new, gimcrack Birmingham steel nibs his exasperated surrender of 500 a year and her independence. Behind her stand figures of guardsmen, cast from the metal of Russian cannon captured at Sebastopol. To her left, she is matched by the statue of Sidney Herbert, Secretary at War for the Crimean campaign. Sidney Herbert was the only man she loved. Though in the flash of Miss Nightingales mind, even love took an appearance as original as her theories on military sanitation.

She was emotional, she was vain, she was complex, she was incomparable. She was a passionate cultivator of new ideas on the compost-heap of long rotted ones. She had a genius for rubbing noses into facts right in front of them. She had infinite capability and little tenderness. Her antiseptic ghost today haunts every sickbed in the world, to which she was Britains most valuable and useful gift.

She shares a cell in our folk-memory with Nelson and Wellington, she is the girl on the 10 note. She has been trampled by the fastidious footsteps of lady biographers and stamped by the cloven hoof of Lytton Strachey. She is much misunderstood. Everyone knows what she offered humanity. Few know what she offered humans. Even the Aladdins lamp of her statue and popular imagination is not the sort which lit her fame in the wards of Scutari.

What was she like to work alongside, argue against, chat to, laugh with? Which way swung the lodestone of her sex? The long letters of a long lifetime print her personality. She had fragments of Elizabeth Fry and Elizabeth I, historys Joan and Shaws, Jane Austen and Gertrude Stein, Lady Hester Stanhope and Amy Johnson, and nothing at all of Emmeline Pankhurst or Mary Poppins.

I have tried to introduce her by a novel in which most of the events happened, many of the characters lived and much of the dialogue is their own. The opinions of Tristram Darling are mine.

Towards noon on the last day of June 1854 as thundery as any other that sultry summer a young man bounded with enviable confidence up the front steps of the Reform Club in Pall Mall. His aggressive flourish swung open the pair of brassbound oak front doors, his four strides were enough for the eight inner ones which led from the porters booth with its massive brass cigar-lighter. He came to an abrupt, disconcerted halt in the clubs great saloon, breathless, with sweat dampening his upper lip, which distressed him. He had feared being late as much as disproving the axiom that a gentleman is never in a hurry.

The young man was me yet he was not me. Human personality is not etched in the cradle and shredded in the grave. It is more like a family portrait gallery. The sprig who went to the Crimean War claims only kinship with my portrait today in the library of my country house, rich, robed, ennobled, in this first year of the reign of King George V. I have sown the seed of charity and as assiduously reaped the honours. In 1854, I was chubby and chestnut-haired, the unmatured good looks which drew glances under the parasols at Lords or Henley, and I had only two sovereigns in the world. I had embarked upon, in Samuel Daniels line,