Ill Feelings: stories of unexplained illness by Alice Hattrick

Author:Alice Hattrick [Hattrick, Alice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000, BIO017000, MED022000, BIO007000, BIO022000, SOC028000, LCO015000
Publisher: Scribe Publications
Published: 2021-08-31T00:00:00+00:00

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‘It is a sad irony that Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing, who made such important contributions to public health through her advocacy of sanitation, statistics, and common sense,’ wrote AJ Young in the British Medical Journal in 1995, ‘should also be remembered as history’s most famous invalid and possibly as its most successful malingerer.’

Florence was not the only sick woman in the family. While still a teenager, Florence’s sister Parthenope was formally diagnosed by Queen Victoria’s doctor Sir James Clark with ‘absolutely no disease but a marked irritability of the brain’. She possessed ‘a fine intellect’ but needed exercise to combat her ‘state of debility’. Parthenope was staying with him in Scotland at the time. Concerned that ‘the extreme irritability of her nervous system, the total absorption of self, with, at times, chronic delirium’ might lead to imbecility if left untreated, Clark suggested she stay with a relative. Florence’s presence at home seemed to aggravate Parthenope’s condition, increasing her excitement and fostering her ‘monomania’. According to Florence’s biographer, Parthenope ‘believed herself unable to walk even the short distance downstairs’, while her ‘fancies are more in number than the sands of the sea’. She dictated letters every day, requesting new gowns from Aberdeen, and possessed an apparently insatiable appetite for pears. She bases some of this assertion on a line from a letter Parthenope wrote to a friend: ‘The floor whirls about my head.’ I have certainly felt the floor whirl about my head. Does that mean I too have only believed myself unable to walk; that my symptoms have always been fancies?

Before departing for Crimea, Florence absented herself from the family home to let her sister recover, and spent a year working in a nursing home on Harley Street. Her father William Nightingale had eventually given her an allowance of £500 a year (£30,000), which meant she could work at the nursing home without pay. News of the poor conditions at Scutari soon reached England when the Crimean War broke out. ‘Want, neglect, confusion, misery—in every shape and in every degree of intensity—filled the endless corridors and the vast apartments of the gigantic barrack-house,’ she wrote, ‘which, without forethought or preparation, had been hurriedly set aside as the chief shelter for the victims of the war.’ Her skills in account management and passion for statistics greatly reduced the number dying within six months, and the legend was born.

Florence fell ill while at Balaclava in May 1855, having just turned thirty-five. Brucellosis, the disease known as Malta or ‘Crimean fever’ could cause shaking chills, and extreme physical and mental exhaustion. Patients experienced generalized pain, insomnia, palpitations, depression and loss of appetite, exhibiting only minor physical abnormalities upon examination. Her convalescence was inevitably long, and she was re-admitted to hospital with severe sciatica in October, and then earache, chronic laryngitis, dysentery, rheumatism and insomnia. ‘I see her at times when she seems hardly able to walk across the room from fatigue & deeply depressed in spirits,’ wrote Aunt Main to the Nightingales in June 1856, as the army were preparing to leave Scutari.

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