Arpan K. Banerjee
Solihull, England

Florence Nightingale is best remembered as the founder of modern nursing. She opened her famous nursing school at St Thomas’ Hospital, London, in 1860. Her principles of nurse training were based on her experiences in the Crimean War a few years earlier.

In this interesting and well-written book, the author, herself a trained nurse and historian, has delved into the lives of the people who were also nursing during the Crimean War contemporaneously with Nightingale. These persons, who made significant contributions to nursing, are little remembered and largely forgotten today.

The opening chapter provides a brief overview of the history of nursing from ancient Egypt and Greece to Victorian nineteenth-century Britain, in which this book is set.

By the time of Hippocrates, considered the father of modern medicine, it was known that disease was not due to spirits but due to imbalances in the body. Hippocrates first mentioned physician assistants in his writings and although they were men, they were entrusted to deliver what we would perhaps regard as early nursing care today. Early nursing care also existed in a primitive form in the monasteries. In the seventh century, Whitby Abbey in England had a building for the infirm and dying.

In the sixteenth century, Sir Thomas Moore, in his idealistic book Utopia, mentions the importance of caring for the sick in public hospitals in an ideal society. Religious organizations provided nursing care for the poor from the 15th to the 19th centuries. In Victorian Britain nurses sadly had a low status, and poor standards were the norm, as described by Charles Dickens in his 1844 book Martin Chuzzlewit through the fictional character of Mrs. Gamp. Pioneering nurses of this time included Louisa Twining (1820–1912) from the wealthy tea family who improved the state of nursing in workhouses in Britain. Mention is also made of Angelique Pringle, one of Florence Nightingale’s favorite students who improved nursing standards at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary.

The book then describes Florence Nightingale’s time in the Crimean War (1854–1856) and her relationship with two little remembered yet perhaps just as remarkable women of their time, Betsy Cadwaladyr and Mother M. Francis Bridgeman. Cadwaladyr, of Welsh descent, went to Crimea at 65 years old, working first in Scutari Hospital and later in Balaclava, nearer the frontline. Bridgeman, head of nursing of the Irish Sisters of Mercy, and her nuns worked at Balaclava Hospital in the Crimea.

The book chronicles the period in Crimea when these three remarkable women made great contributions to nursing, although there was often a clash of personalities. The strained relationships with doctors such as Dr. John Hall, the distinguished military surgeon whose dislike of Florence Nightingale is well known, confirm the often fraught relationships that often existed in these difficult settings.

The author in this well-researched book provides a fascinating insight into this period in Florence Nightingale’s career. It is nice to be reminded that there were other remarkable pioneering nurses from this period in time whose names are today overshadowed by Florence Nightingale but also deserve to be better remembered today.

Florence Nightingale’s Rivals: Nursing Through the Crimea
Louise Wyatt
Pen and Sword Books, Barnsley, UK, 2024
ISBN 9781399006651