Nursing grievances in the Crimean War

Most people know something about Florence Nightingale’s nursing expedition to Scutari and the Crimea during the Crimean War, and the ‘kingdom of horror’ that she and her nurses found there: unsanitary conditions in the hospitals, a broken-down supply system and British soldiers dropping like flies from disease rather than battle wounds.

However, as Terry Tastard points out, one aspect of Nightingale’s Crimean nursing that is often overlooked is its reliance on the nuns who responded to the national outcry at the negligent care of the sick and dying. They were a familiar sight in the wards in their black hoods and habits, or ghostly white garments, sharing the hardships of the secular nurses, being exposed to the same risks of deadly infection and helping in the long run to establish nursing as a viable profession for women.

These were Anglican nuns as well as Roman Catholic Sisters of Mercy from Bermondsey, and from Kinsale in County Cork. Both groups hoped that their part in the Crimean enterprise would pay dividends. The Catholics saw it as their chance to overturn centuries of hostility to their faith, winning them greater acceptance in English society. The Anglican sisterhoods, only recently established, looked for a securer place within the Church of England.

Tastard reminds us of the kind of prejudice that Catholics were up against in 1854. Convents were regarded as hotbeds of treasonable activity and sinister places where sadistic practices prevailed. The Liberal MP Thomas Chambers, inciting lurid fears of the new ‘papal aggression’, alleged that nuns were being forced to make penances which amounted to torture. One example was the wearing of a bonnet rouge, a contraption fitted to the head which induced excruciating agony in the victim and a loss of consciousness within minutes.

Tastard’s study is vividly drawn and well contextualised.