A Bearskin's Crimea: Colonel Henry Percy VC and His Brother Officers by Algernon Percy

Author:Algernon Percy [Percy, Algernon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 19th Century, Biographies & Memoirs, Crimean War (1853-1856), Great Britain, History, Military, Russia & the Former Soviet Union
ISBN: 9781844156436
Google: FCiFGQAACAAJ
Amazon: 1844153096
Publisher: Leo Cooper
Published: 2005-05-15T03:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Nurses and Hospitals

In the middle of December Henry received word from his father that his elder brother Josceline was coming to the East with a party of nurses, at the solicitation of Sidney Herbert, the Secretary at War, and his wife. Newspaper reports of the situation at the hospitals in Scutari had caused uproar in England, and Josceline, an MP who had an interest in health matters, was keen to be of some practical assistance.

Sidney Herbert had already enlisted his friend, Florence Nightingale, to take charge of a party of nurses to go to Scutari. He and his wife Liz had always been interested in providing hospitals for the poor, but, given the widespread suspicion of female nursing at that time, Miss Nightingale had until now never really found the role that she longed for. Herbert, though he was in the Cabinet, was junior to the Secretary of State for War, the Duke of Newcastle, who ran all the operational aspects of the conflict. He was merely in charge of finance and administration, and as such received all the blame for the appalling muddle that prevailed. But he found it deeply distressing that no matter how many instructions he issued for medical supplies to be sent out to the Crimea, they simply did not reach their destination. Most ended up at Varna; some ended up at the bottom of the Black Sea outside Balaklava; some even were returned home. As a result, men were dying in their droves and the rate of sickness was accelerating, leading to overloaded hospitals and overworked medical staff, and so was created a vicious spiral of disease, overcrowding, more diseases, universal suffering and a rising death toll – and all this before Inkerman and before the winter added cases of severe frostbite to the army’s list of woes. Towards the end of October, therefore, Sidney Herbert despatched Florence Nightingale and thirty-eight nurses to Scutari with carte blanche, and effectively a blank cheque, to sort out the mess.

Montague Burgoyne, the young Lieutenant who had been wounded in the leg at Alma, was one of those laid up in hospital at Scutari when Florence Nightingale and her nurses arrived in early November. He described the state of affairs in a letter to his mother:

I am glad to see The Times is ‘hustling’ the Medical Authorities – indeed they want it. 40 females have now arrived and are now a regular subject of ridicule. The very commonest medicines and appliances are wanting, and men are dying by scores for want of them. I wonder no one has written about the absurd system of ‘requisition’ in the hospital. That is the thing that causes all the mischief; instead of one doctor signing an order for any ‘necessary’, or ‘comfort’ and being able to draw it at once, it has to go through all sorts of ‘hands’, ‘delay’ and bother. Suppose a sick or wounded man arrives, he is laid upon the stones as he is, till some one

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