medhis5601_07 94..120


Douglas Hill (ed.), Letters from the
Crimea: Writing Home, A Dundee
Doctor (Dundee: Dundee University Press,
2010), pp. xi þ 224, paperback, ISBN:
978-1-84586-094-3.

This fascinating series of letters from a newly

minted surgeon, Dr David Greig, to his

mother, father and sister is a valuable addition

to the rich collection of memoirs of British

officers who served in the Crimean War. The

letters were discovered during a house

clearance and are reproduced from typed

copies dated 1906, not the original hand-

written letters. Whoever typed them was not

familiar with Russian place names or French

soldiers. For example, the Vorontsov or

Worontzow Road is spelled Worongow, the

Zouaves are Soaves, the Redan is sometimes

the Kedan and the Malakoff, the Zalakoff. The

editor does not give us the correct spellings or

explain the significance of these places, and

for those unfamiliar with the terrain, it would

be helpful to have a map. There are short

identifications of some of the characters in the

story and an introduction giving the larger

context of the war by the military historian

Trevor Royle. However, no explanatory notes

accompany the text and there is no index.

There are two appendices, one a chronology

of the war, and the second, ‘Florence

Nightingale and Dr David Greig.’ It is

indicative of the way Nightingale has come to

dominate the history of the Crimean War that

this appendix includes only Greig’s references

to Nightingale herself and not his more

interesting comments on her nurses and their

efficacy. He thought the orderlies could do just

as good a job as the nurses and considered the

religious Sisters, who are now generally

thought to have been the best of the British

nurses, meek, quiet creatures who, although

willing, were not able to do much. The

hospital nurses, he said, came from the better

class of nurses at home and were sadly

disappointed by the limited amount of work

they were permitted to do and wished that they

had remained at home. They expected to be

nursing heroes but instead found the soldiers

‘the most miserable specimens of humanity’

(p. 107).

Greig graduated from Edinburgh in 1853

and arrived, together with two colleagues, in

Scutari in November 1854. All three

contracted Crimean fever, and Greig, who at

one point was thought to be dying, was the

sole survivor. For Greig, the war was a

diversion, what would now be a year of

travelling abroad after finishing university and

starting one’s career. He joined the army, he

told his parents, ‘to get surgical practice, to see

the world, to get the éclat of being at the war,

and to get a year or two’s recreation before

settling into practice’ (p. 31). At the end of the

war, as he considered his future career, he

wrote that he did not consider the year and a

half in the East a complete waste of time. ‘I

would not have missed seeing what I have

seen for any sum of money and only regret

that I was not with the army from the very

first’ (p. 201), he wrote, but he had done more

than amuse himself. He was the Assistant

Surgeon in his regiment to whom all the most

serious operations were assigned and he

became a distinguished member of the Army’s

Pathological Board.

Greig worked in Scutari for his first two

months, the months when there were the

greatest shortages, then went to Koulali, and

finally to Balaclava and the camp before

Sevastopol, where he served in the trenches as

well as in the field hospitals. His observations

contrast strongly with those of the

Parliamentary commissioners and the nurses

who wrote about the war. He found it all very

‘jolly’: ‘We are all in first rate health and like

the style of things very well. We have of

course a great many hardships but I can tell

you we enjoy them gloriously’ (p. 29), he

wrote ten days after arriving in Scutari. He

maintained this attitude, at least to his family,

throughout the war. As well as his surgical

work he describes his domestic arrangements,

the floggings every third or fourth day which

he, as a surgeon, had to attend, the various

entertainments of stoning and shooting wild

dogs, theatres, rides through the camps, and

after the peace was signed, the parties with the

103

Book Reviews

https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025727300000375
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:36:10, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at

https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025727300000375
https://www.cambridge.org/core


Russian officers and an expedition to Baktchi-

Serai and Simferopol. Greig’s letters give us a

better picture of the day-to-day life of a

Crimean War surgeon than any other memoirs

published so far.

Carol Helmstadter,

University of Toronto

Sioban Nelson and Anne Marie Rafferty

(eds), Notes on Nightingale: The Influence
and Legacy of a Nursing Icon (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2010),

pp. ix þ 172, £12.50/$18.95,
paperback, ISBN: 978-0-8014-7611-2.

Florence Nightingale left as a legacy her ideas

and template for nurses’ training and public

health reforms based on statistical evidence. In

this book, eight nurse historians and scholars

write about facets of Nightingale’s life and

work; each paper provides information drawn

from primary sources about Nightingale’s

goals, actions, and achievements. She is

characterised as a spiritual person with

practical concerns about health care as she led

a delegation of nurses to care for soldiers in

British military hospitals in Scutari, Turkey.

She wrote books about nursing and hospitals,

reported about public health and sanitation

problems throughout the British Empire, and

organised a nursing school at St Thomas

Hospital in London. Ms Nightingale is revered

and criticised for her beliefs and actions, and

the authors frankly discuss her ideas and

dealings in nineteenth-century Victorian

society.

Nelson and Rafferty introduce

Nightingale’s areas of interest and influence,

and describe her evolution from an

impressionable young woman, to a politically

astute social activist and a revered icon.

Nelson traces the development of

Nightingale’s influence in the next paper, and

outlines ‘the Nightingale imperative’ (p.9) for

nursing seen in her organisation of care for the

sick in a London clinic, for casualties in

hospitals in the Crimea, and of a nursing

school in London in 1860. Nightingale brought

recognition of nursing as a respectable

profession for women who were able to

improve health outcomes for the sick and

injured. She campaigned to reform public

health and hospital care by corresponding with

influential people in the Sanitation Movement,

British Parliament and universities.

Helmstadter’s paper describes

Nightingale’s best-known humanitarian

mission, which was to lead a team of female

nurses to care for injured soldiers in military

hospitals in the Crimean War. Nightingale was

instructed by the Secretary of War to ensure

that all nurses would obey the orders of

military doctors and purveyors in the hospitals

implicitly, and prevent religious disputes.

Nightingale selected nurses from various

social and religious backgrounds, and

monitored nurses’ deportment in the military

hospitals. Nightingale faced many challenges

with her group of nurses in the Crimea;

however, she established a fully functioning

and respectable nursing service and proved

that female nurses could exercise authority

through their work, overcome social, religious

and gender biases.

Godden provides insight into conditions

that influenced nurses’ training at the

Nightingale Training School. Despite the

challenges encountered with the Nightingale

School, two Nightingale-trained nurses

established nursing services in Australia and

Canada.

Lynaugh discusses the emergence of trained

nurses in the United States. Nurses, under the

supervision of ladies, visited people in their

homes during the war of 1812 in the United

States. An experienced Nightingale School

graduate nurse, Alice Fisher, collaborated to

enact hospital reform at the Philadelphia

Hospital in 1885, selected trained assistants to

work in the hospital, and started a nurses’

training school; however, she did not use

Nightingale’s model of nurse teaching and

hospital discipline. In 1893, Isabel Hampton,

Lavina Dock, and Florence Nightingale

presented papers at a conference, each arguing

104

Book Reviews

https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025727300000375
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:36:10, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at

https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025727300000375
https://www.cambridge.org/core