95%Nurse

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When visitors arrive at the Florence Nightingale Museum they quickly identify themselves as a part of Florence Nightingale’s legacy. This is how we can state with such confidence that our visitors are 95% nurse. An impressive figure that does exclude schools, pre-booked groups and national promotions.

One of the most contentious issues facing the Museum is the need for an admission charge.  Not surprisingly nurses and many other visitors are disappointed that the exhibition is not funded nationally as recognition of the nursing profession. It is an understandable misunderstanding we have to accept as a side effect of being a focal point. Nurses are highly skilled individuals with a pronounced sense of historical and communal pride; protecting that sense of individual and collective worth is after all a key objective for the Museum.

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We exist outside the vocabulary expected of a medical museum and instead of grisly instruments we offer grisly statistics illustrating the mortality rates of ordinary people denied basic health care. Florence Nightingale began the process that ultimately established the popular culture symbols of the nursing profession.  The Museum relates Nightingale’s life and work through relatively humble objects that perfectly illustrate how much was achieved with little more than soap and a fierce intellect. The therapeutic nature of the exhibition will be boosted by the return of ten Victor Tardieu paintings, depicting a First World War field hospital. True to form, they are a remarkably upbeat series of pictures.

For the last few years the Front of House team have been recording statistical information profiling visitors to the Museum.  It is an ongoing activity which could prove very interesting in the coming months as a refreshed website and exhibition revamp are completed. The process of recording this very useful information has become second nature to the team and has, over time, become a soothing daily activity.

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The next major project for the Museum will be unveiled on 12^th May, the anniversary of Florence Nightingale’s birthday. “Take me to Neverland” will explore the history of J M Barrie’s Peter Pan, featuring items from the collection of Great Ormond Street Hospital. The forthcoming exhibition has already created a notable buzz amongst our visitors, especially families. A range of events planned for 2016 builds on last year’s eclectic Twistmas festival. They begin with February’s half-term maths theme, evening talks and more planned weekend activities boosting access to a collection which is 100% relevant to everybody.

 

75th anniversary of the bombing of St Thomas’ Hospital

Today a service is being held in the hospital garden to commemorate the 75^th anniversary of the bombing of St Thomas’ during the Second World War.

Between September 1940 and May 1941, the hospital was bombed six times, miraculously there was only a total of ten fatalities, but the hospital’s infrastructure and services were badly affected at a time when they were under immense pressure from both military causalities and civilian victims of the Blitz.

From 7th September 1940 – 21st May 1941, Britain was ravaged by the Blitz, a period of sustained strategic bombing by the German Luftwaffe. London, major ports such as Portsmouth and Liverpool and industrial centres like Sheffield were all targeted, London itself was bombed for 57 consecutive nights. It is estimated the Blitz killed more than 40,000 civilians, over half of those in the capital.

St Thomas’ Hospital, in a key strategic position across the river from the Houses of Parliament, was an early target. The first direct hit occurred at 2.30am on 9th September 1940 when a large bomb fell on Block 1, which included Gassiot House, where the Florence Nightingale Museum is located today. Gassiot House served as the Hospital’s nurses’ home, six members of hospital staff were killed including two nurses.

On 13th September 1940, St Thomas’ was again hit by a large bomb, this time falling on ‘Jericho’ the night nurses’ dormitory and a temporary building known as ‘E Hut’. On this occasion there were only minor injuries and no fatalities.

The most destructive attack occurred two days later on 15th September, when a very heavy bomb made a direct hit on the main hospital corridor, causing the collapse of medical outpatients, wrecking the kitchen, canteen, Dispensary and Administrative blocks, and putting all essential services at St Thomas’ out of action. Four members of staff died, three were critically injured, and 38 other patients and staff also suffered injuries.

On the 27th September 1940, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother) visited the hospital to view the damage and meet the staff.

St Thomas’ was hit a further three times in October 1940, and in April and May 1941, with no further fatalities and only minor injuries occurring.

During the period of the Blitz much of the hospital’s night time activity was moved to the basement where it was considered to be marginally safer. Due to a city wide blackout, which required that all exterior lighting be turned off, and black out blinds or panels to be installed so that enemy aircraft would not be aided by lights on the ground, much of the medical staff’s work was carried out in near darkness.

These white rabbits were painted on the basement walls to aid doctors, nurses and patients with navigating the warren of basement corridors at night, and can still be seen today.

America’s first trained nurse

The Florence Nightingale Museum Director was honoured recently by an invitation to Massachusetts General Hospital in the beautiful city of Boston. The main reason for the invitation was to give the keynote lecture at the unveiling of a newly commissioned portrait of Linda Richards, America’s first trained nurse. Warren and Lucia Prosperi (http://prosperistudio.com), the husband and wife team who created this beautiful piece, work closely from original photographs and written accounts of their subject. The portrait is now displayed in the Paul S Russell Museum, part of Massachusetts General Hospital (http://www.massgeneral.org/museum)

Linda Richards was the first of four students to graduate from a nursing training programme at the New England Hospital for Women in 1873. Make no mistake – this very early nurse training was tough. Richards wrote: “We rose at 5.30 a.m. and left the wards at 9 p.m. to go to our beds, which were in little rooms between the wards. Each nurse took care of her ward of six patients both day and night. Many a time I got up nine times in the night; often I did not get to sleep before the next call came. We had no evenings out, and no hours for study or recreation. Every second week we were off duty one afternoon from two to five o’clock.

In 1874, The Boston Training School for Nurses started at Massachusetts General Hospital and Linda Richards was approached to become superintendent, initially she refused but was eventually persuaded. Like Florence Nightingale, Linda Richards was clearly a brilliant advocate, as she persuaded the senior hospital staff to lecture to her student nurses, providing them not only with important knowledge, but also increasing the students status within the hospital. Several doctors supplemented their lectures by allowing the student nurses to accompany the morning rounds of the wards. Although this work was important for the nurses – and the hospital – yet more importantly, it created a model of what a modern nursing school should look like.

Linda Richards arranged to visit England to enable her to observe the Nightingale system in action. Nightingale and Richards had corresponded for some time and one morning soon after her arrival in England, Richards was thrilled to be able to meet the great lady. With typical modesty, Richards wrote “It had never occurred to me that she would honor me by asking me to call upon her, so great was my surprise when I received an invitation to visit her at her home.” Richards memoirs relates an encounter that clearly had a huge emotional impact on her, being taken into the presence of a “small lady clad in black silk” who was lying on a coach (by this stage, Nightingale had been living as an invalid for some years.) Richards describes “The sweet face, with the deep blue eyes, and the beautifully shaped head” and says that meeting Nightingale was the fulfilment of her life’s ambition.

An excellent judge of character, Nightingale herself was equally impressed by Richards and offered to help her as much as she could. She wrote to Angelique Pringle, an old student of hers, who was at that time heading up the Edinburgh infirmary in Scotland, and arranged for Richards to go on a placement there as well. Nightingale wrote; “A Miss Richards, a Boston lady, training matron to the Massachusetts General Hospital, has in a very spirited manner come to us for training to herself….I have seen her, and have seldom seen anyone who struck me as so admirable. I think we have as much to learn from her as she from us.”

Richards’ remains rest in the beautiful cemetery in southern Boston: (http://www.foresthillscemetery.com).

The Nightingale Team are Floored…

Tonight is the private view of the exhibition. Everything is ready, party dresses are hanging up in the office for the team to change into after work, wine is cooling in the fridge, RSVPs are still arriving… How nice it will be to acknowledge all our hard work, we thought, and to thank our supporters at tonight’s grand event.

But as always with life in a small museum, it is a good idea to expect the unexpected and we have just been dealing with a minor disaster on the flooring front. For the last few months, mysterious bubbles have been appearing in our lovely floor. In one area, this has erupted into a crater and we have had to rope the area off.  Today, the workmen appeared and decided that today was the day that we should tackle this issue. Decision time – should we send them away and face the fact that an area must remain roped off for the time being? Or should we let them hack away sections of the floor, releasing rubble and dust as they went?

We decided to bite the bullet and try and deal with it today – after an alarming couple of hours, the problem has been solved, at least temporarily, as the crater has been removed, a plyboard layer cut to size, and trip-proof carpet placed over the top.

 Right – can we go back to polishing the wine glasses now, please?

Object of the Month – March

As our new exhibition The Hospital in the Oatfield commemorating the role nurses played during the First World War opens tomorrow, it seems fitting that March’s object of the month is from the period.

Civilian, military and VAD nurses alike felt a sense of shared identity through wearing a uniform which marked them out as contributing to the war effort, whether at the Front or at home.

These uniform stripes, kindly loaned to us by Barts Health NHS Trust Archives, belonged to Catherine Elston. Nurse Elston was a truly remarkable woman; she trained at the London Hospital in the deprived East end of the city, where she held the position of Sister. Elston subsequently worked at Poplar Hospital, before taking up a position in Bordeaux, France, and eventually becoming the    Director of the training school there.

When war broke out in August 1914, Elston joined the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Nursing Service as a reserve. She went on to serve on one of the many ambulance trains used to ferry wounded serviceman from the Front. In our exhibition The Hospital in the Oatfield you can see examples of letters and postcards Elston sent to her loved ones describing life on No1 Ambulance Train. Among the medals Elston was awarded to mark her work, was the Queen Elisabeth Medal, which recognised those who had given exceptional service to Belgium in relieving the suffering of its citizens during the First World War.

Exhibition Countdown!

We are now 48 hours away from opening the First World War nursing exhibition, and the fun is getting fast and furious! Our carefully worked out schedule for installing the exhibition has been rewritten several times, as one cancellation can create an alarming knock-on effect. But it’s been an exciting week – the agonising over the colour scheme was worthwhile as the exhibition room is now painted a lovely pale blue, with interpretation panels of a rich corn colour. The belongings of the First World War nurses are beautifully arranged in the display cases, and the archival material is up on the walls. The last thing to go up is the ten oil paintings that will form the centrepiece of the exhibition – and then we are good to go! As I write, members of the team are obsessively wiping non-existent marks of the glass of the display cases, and straightening out objects by a fraction imperceptible to the human eye.

Our top pieces of advice for installing an exhibition in a small museum are as follows:

• 1.       Always factor in more time than you think will need. Buffer zones are your friend!

• 2.       If lenders allow it, collect loaned items early so you have them on site.

• 3.       Prioritise marketing above creating the display – journalists will lose interest in a millisecond and you may never get that chance of coverage again.

• 4.       Face the fact that all other areas of your work will be seriously neglected, and just hope to catch up later on!

Keeping it in the Family

In preparing for our exhibition about First World War nursing, one of the nicest things we have found is the interest and support of the families of these brave women. The exhibition will tell the story of one field hospital in northern France, run by the Duchess of Sutherland, and we have tried to trace as many of the relatives and descendents of the people who were there as possible. I admit that we didn’t expect to find many – or even any! – family members who remembered the staff at the hospital in the oatfield. In the summer of 1915, the Duchess herself was middle-aged, as was the artist Victor Tardieu who painted the hospital camp in a set of beautiful oil paintings that form the heart of our exhibition.

How wrong we were! First of all, the dealer who sold us the paintings, the erudite and extremely kind Philip Athill of Abbott & Holder in Museum Street http://www.abbottandholder-thelist.co.uk/ put us in touch with the grandchildren of the surgeon who had worked at the camp. His grandchildren (one of whom is a doctor herself) remembered their grandfather clearly and fondly. Best of all, they have loaned us two albums that contain numerous photographs of the hospital camp taken by their grandfather, a keen amateur photographer. These have added a wonderful dimension to the exhibition, as many of the photographs capture everyday life of the nurses and their lives at the camp.

We are also thrilled at the enthusiasm of the family of the Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland. Her granddaughter, the Countess of Sutherland, kindly shared her memories of her grandmother, with whom she was very close. It was a real thrill to meet someone who knew well Millicent Duchess of Sutherland, and who was able to confirm that she was indeed an extremely strong-willed and determined person!

Object of the Month – January

This object from the Florence Nightingale Museum’s stores – is Nightingale’s  foot warmer,  which would have come in very handy in the days before central heating!

Upon her return from the Crimea, Nightingale suffered from brucellosis, commonly known as ‘Crimean fever’.

Brucellosis is a highly contagious disease caused by ingestion of unsterilized milk or meat from infected animals. Symptoms include muscular pain and sweating; and if untreated brucellosis can lead to chronic conditions such as spondylodiscitis of the lumbar spine (inflammation of one or more vertebrae and the intervertebral disc space), and sacroiliitis (inflammation of the sacroiliac joint).

Nightingale certainly suffered from ill health for the much of her life, following her time in the Crimea.  It seems plausible that she could have suffered from one or both of these chronic conditions, as a complication of her brucellosis.

Nightingale would have used her foot warmer during carriage journeys. Travelling by carriage may seem romantic and appealing to us in the twenty-first century, but in reality they would be draughty and often rather uncomfortable for long journeys. This foot warmer would bring Nightingale some much needed relief when travelling.

The foot warmer is made of tin, with two wooden footrests on the top. It has a hinged lid, and a well where the charcoal or hot stone would be placed to provide the heat.

The foot warmer was found with Nightingale’s things at her home in South Street, London following her death in 1910; therefore it is likely it was in use towards the end of her life.