Florence Nightingale

Florence Nightingale: A Biography is a book by Annie Matheson. The preface says the little biography is based mainly upon the work of others. Miss Nightingale is quoted as writing that each family in the Orphan Asylum lives with its deaconess exactly as her children.

The quoted description says that when a new child is admitted, a little feast celebrates its arrival, at which the pastor himself presides. The text says that, worn out by her ceaseless labours at Scutari, she had probably been specially open to infection in the sick officer's hut, and that on board the London it became clear she had contracted Crimean fever in a very bad form. The text names her faithful nurse, Mrs. Roberts, who kept off the sun-glare by walking beside her with an umbrella, and her page-boy Thomas. The text speaks of what Miss Nightingale's influence was destined later to achieve: changing a despised and brutalized occupation throughout a whole empire into a noble and distinguished art.