Базовый курс английского языка - Эккерсли К.Э.
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MR. PRIESTLEY: Yes, I suppose so, but there have been others. Elizabeth Fry, for example, who did a great deal of prison reform; Grace Darling who, with only her father to help, took out the lifeboat and rowed across a mile of wild, stormy sea to rescue shipwrecked sailors. Above all, perhaps, there is Florence Nightingale.
FRIEDA Could you tell us something about her, please?
MR. PRIESTLEY: Certainly if you wish. The story goes back to the middle of the nineteenth century. England was at war with Russia, and an English army was fighting in the Crimea. Disturbing reports, chiefly from the pen of William Russell, The Times reporter, began to come to England of the terrible conditions in the hospitals where our wounded men were being treated. The chief hospital in Turkey was an old barracks. The floors were broken and the building was swarming with rats and mice. But even this horrible place was overcrowded. There were hardly any beds, and men were lying on the floor, in the passages, anywhere. There were no clean shirts for the men, and they lay in their blood-soaked rags. They were dying in thousands, not of their wounds so much as of sickness. The only
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nurses were old soldiers long past fighting age, who knew nothing of nursing and were quite unable to do the work.
That was the terrible position when Sidney Herbert, the Minister for War, wrote to Florence Nightingale asking if she would go out to the Crimea with a band of nurses. His letter crossed hers in the post offering her services. Within a week she was ready, and with thirty-eight nurses she sailed for Scutari.
FRIEDA: But why did Sidney Herbert choose Florence Nightingale? Was she already working as a nurse or had she already organized any work like this?
MR. PRIESTLEY: No women had already organized work like this, and the home of Florence Nightingale was almost the last place that you would have expected a nurse to come from. In her day, nursing was done only by women of the lowest moral class, dirty, drunken creatures. In fact, when women were charged in the police-courts they were often given the choice of going to prison or to hospital service.
The Nightingales moved in the highest social class. Cabinet Ministers were frequent visitors to their house. They were very wealthy; they had two large country houses and a town house in London. They travelled a good deal, and Florence (she was so called because she was bom in the city of Florence in 1820) was highly educated in music, art, literature, Latin and Greek. She spoke Italian, French and German with ease, was attractive, and was expected to marry one of the numerous admirers who came to the Nightingales' home. But ever since she was a child she had nursed the villagers and the sick dogs and cats and horses round her home and had had a passion to be a nurse. Her parents were horrified and did all they could to prevent it, but Florence was not to be turned aside. Whenever she was abroad she visited hospitals, she read, secretly, books on nursing, reports of medical societies, histories of hospitals.- She spent some weeks as a sister in a hospital in Paris and three months in a nursing school at Kaiserwerth in Germany, and kept up a constant struggle with her parents. Finally her singleness of aim and her resolution won the day. Her mother-with tears in her eyes-agreed to Florence becoming superintendent of an "Establishment for Gentlewomen during illness" in Harley Street, the fashionable street of London's
most famous doctors. She had been there a year when the Crimean War broke out. It was from there that she wrote to Sidney Herbert, whom she knew personally, offering her services.
When she arrived at Scutari she found conditions even worse than the reports had stated. The War Office had told her "nothing was lacking at Scutari". She found that everything was lacking, furniture, clothes, towels, soap, knives, plates. There were no bandages and no linen to make bandages, few medicines and scarcely any proper food. Luckily (or perhaps it wasn't luck but good organization) she had brought with her large quantities of food, soups, wines, jellies and medical supplies. Everywhere she met with inefficiency and confusion, and everywhere difficulties were put in her way by the officials in charge. She bought boots, socks, blankets, shirts by the thousand. To the stone wall of officialdom she opposed a will of iron. " It can't be done, " said a doctor, objecting to an order that she gave. "It must be done," she said quietly. And it was.
HOB: She sounds more like an eagle than a nightingale!
MR. PRIESTLEY: She spared no one, least of all herself. She often worked for twenty-four hours on end, dressing wounds, helping surgeons in their operations, easing the pain of the sick, comforting the dying. Every night, carrying a little oil-lamp to light her way, she walked by the beds, four miles of them. To the soldiers she was the "Lady with the Lamp", and they worshipped her. But that is only one side of the picture. The "Lady with the Lamp" was ^lso the hard, practical woman. She and her nurses got down on their knees and scrubbed floors and walls. She organized the cooking of the men's food and the washing of their clothes. The rate of deaths fell from sixty per thousand to three per thousand.
