Grasping Mysteries Read online

NIGHTINGALE

  (1820–1910)

  A Girl’s Education

  HAMPSHIRE, ENGLAND, 1832

  Florence offers drops of water to a bird with a bent wing.

  Her mother doesn’t complain about that, but she finds faults

  in fractions of Florence, tells her not to tramp

  through fields, bandage a farmer’s limping dog,

  or study mathematics books in the stable.

  The maid who braids Florence’s hair and buttons her dresses

  in the back complains that burrs and brambles stick in the silk.

  The governess wishes Florence

  was more like her older sister,

  who doesn’t study spiders or champion families of mice.

  She’s not the first governess to go.

  When Florence turns thirteen, Father takes over lessons

  in history, languages, composition, physics, and astronomy.

  He’s not skilled in Florence’s favorite subject, so orders

  mathematics books and arranges for a cousin to tutor.

  Florence likes balancing columns of numbers,

  checking sums and being certain she’s right.

  Subtraction is soothing, though she dislikes

  landing on zero. Something is missing. She wants more.

  Divided

  Mother says it’s proper to bring beef broth,

  jellies, and egg pudding to the sick in the village.

  Florence should pray for the poor, but not give away

  her own shawl or linger in a farmer’s cottage

  to wipe feverish foreheads. Mother believes

  Florence takes goodness too far.

  God loves all people alike, she reads in the Bible,

  but the history of England insists on differences.

  Florence tends to sick babies of families who live

  in homes smaller than any of the fifteen bedrooms

  in the Nightingale manor. She steps back out

  into air scented with wild roses.

  Chickens cluck as a rooster struts, flings back

  his head so sunlight strikes the red coxcomb.

  The Palace Garden

  Queen Victoria, crowned last year, is nineteen,

  and Florence eighteen,

  when rich girls are presented at the court.

  Mother orders her a white dress from Paris.

  A maid elaborately twists and pins her smooth hair.

  Florence bends her knees to the proper angle,

  gathers her skirt to the correct height.

  As she shuffles backward, careful not to turn the wrong side

  to royalty, she wonders what the queen thinks about power:

  she can rule an empire, but no woman can be a member

  of Parliament, preach, go to a university, or vote.

  Outside the throne room, duchesses raise china cups,

  wave silk fans, then snap them shut.

  Florence steps to the garden, where a field spider

  scuttles in circles, raising a leg to make a web.

  Each fragile strand shows her where to go next.

  Seeking

  During her twenties, Florence tutors factory girls,

  translates German articles for her father,

  dances at balls, inventories the household silver, and

  makes fifty-six pots of gooseberry jam one afternoon.

  She turns down proposals from two good men.

  While she’s not certain of what she wants to find,

  she believes marriage might limit her views.

  Florence sets down her embroidery hoop. Its stretched

  fabric had multiple tiny squares, places to stitch

  small crosses of varied colors that build a picture.

  By candlelight, she reads books about hospitals,

  learns that most offer surgery and medicine,

  but no one to make sure

  patients are eating, sleeping, kept clean and calm.

  She tells her mother, I want to be a nurse.

  That’s no work for a lady. Mother approves of those

  who might faint when faced with blood or naked skin.

  She hopes Florence’s restlessness will be cured

  by traveling with a maid to chaperone and tend to her hair.

  In Egypt, Florence sails down the Nile River,

  rides a camel across the desert and climbs a pyramid.

  In Alexandria, carrying two chameleons in her pocket,

  she tours a hospital run by nuns.

  In Greece, she rescues a baby owl fallen from a nest

  from boys who poke it and laugh.

  She strolls among stone relics and temples in Rome

  with Lord and Lady Herbert and other British tourists,

  eating hot chestnuts from a folded handkerchief.

  She spends half an afternoon lying on the Sistine Chapel

  floor, looking up at Michelangelo’s painted ceiling.

  What she sees is astonishing, but Florence wants more.

  In Germany, she finds a new job for her maid

  and books a room in a hospital run by a religious sisterhood.

  At thirty years old, for the first time

  Florence parts and pins up

  her hair herself. After months of caring for patients,

  she’s awarded a nursing certificate by the nuns.

  The Chance

  Florence takes a job

  at the Institution for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen,

  where she’s an excellent manager as well as nurse.

  After England, France, and Turkey declare war

  on Russia, her old friend Lord Herbert asks for help.

  Florence buys and packs portable stoves, spare pairs

  of sturdy shoes, a toolbox, and binoculars.

  She buys white caps to keep her hair off her face

  and dark dresses: none with hoops sewn in the hems

  that would keep her from getting close

  to those who need help.

  She recruits thirty-eight more nurses, mostly

  Protestant or Catholic nuns, to take a train to the shore

  where ships bring soldiers shot on battlefields.

  In November 1854, when she and the nurses arrive

  at the hospital, a general says, Go home.

  This is no place for ladies.

  Florence doesn’t turn back. She makes plans

  and meets newspaper writers who are shunned

  by military officers who dislike

  their grim reports about deaths and battles lost.

  Late one afternoon, Florence finds her binoculars,

  watches birds swoop over the Black Sea. The sky darkens.

  She sees Venus, Mars, and a bright spot

  that might be Saturn, once thought to mark

  the farthest part of the universe, but that changed.

  Breaking Rank

  TURKEY, 1854

  At last doctors admit they’re desperate for help.

  On the Crimean Peninsula, for the first time

  women nurse British military men.

  The thirty-nine nurses get seven rooms for storage,

  work, and sleeping. They’re allowed two cups of water a day.

  Florence chooses clean hands and face over tea.

  She counts buckets, brooms, beds, twenty chamber pots,

  and seven latrines for more than six hundred patients,

  some lying on floors or in tents set up around the building.

  She can’t count the smell, blood, flies, fleas, rats, or screams.

  Doctors tell her how military men are ranked and say,

  We treat officers before the common soldiers.

  Florence doesn’t care about badges or buttons

  embossed with swords, stars, and wreaths.

  The world is not meant to be so divided

  between rich and poor, generals and infantrymen.

  She tells the nurses, Care for whoever is
sickest first.

  The Hammer

  Florence seeks ways to get more clean water, healthy food,

  blankets, a little peace and order. She measures

  the inches between beds to document crowding,

  takes notes on how many enter the hospital

  and how many leave alive.

  She’s too busy to compare records from before

  she came and now, but looks forward to doing the math

  when she’s not cracking open windows,

  ordering two hundred scrub brushes, cleaning

  for patients’ comfort and to stop the spread of disease.

  When she asks doctors to wash their hands

  and surgical knives between treating patients,

  they say, Don’t tell us how to do our job, Miss Nightingale.

  They refuse to unlock the closet where medicine is stored.

  Florence doesn’t have time to wait for them

  to dole out what can heal. Patients need help now.

  She finds a basket and hammer. She folds her hand

  around the hammer’s smooth handle and aims it at the lock.

  The metal cracks. The cabinet door splinters.

  She scoops up tinctures, salts, tins of pills,

  extracts, and fills the wicker basket.

  She carefully measures and records the doses

  given to patients grateful for the gentle touch

  of her uncurled fist. After dark,

  she quietly carries an oil lamp, checking bandages

  and fevers, listening to soldiers who can’t sleep.

  Some reach out to touch the shadow she leaves behind.

  One Plus One

  The nurses struggle to keep men still during amputations.

  They help others stand and walk,

  hold the hands of dying men.

  Some nurses become ill themselves, or are homesick,

  sad, scared, or stung by the doctors’ insults.

  Within weeks, a quarter of them go back to England.

  Florence is exhausted but keeps on,

  asking patients on the mend to care for other soldiers,

  bidding their wives to wash clothes,

  mop floors, and sew sacks to stuff with straw.

  Needing more help, she talks to reporters

  who are grateful she’s given them stories

  to write with both honesty and hope. Reporters organize

  fundraisers for medicine, food, and warm clothes,

  write that soldiers call her an angel

  or “the Lady with the Lamp.” They don’t mention

  doctors call her “the Lady with the Hammer.”

  Ledgers

  As Florence tends to patients, she notes and tallies

  who gets better and who worse. Counting helps

  keep her calm, but she steels herself for subtraction.

  Long past midnight, she addresses letters to England.

  She sends families a soldier’s last words

  and sometimes the remains of his salary.

  She asks some people for help, thanks

  those who send socks, soap, flannel, doormats,

  raspberry preserves, and ginger biscuits.

  The queen, having heard that hospital smells

  are unpleasant, offers to send a case of eau de cologne.

  Florence gracefully declines. She wishes

  everyone would save postage and just send money.

  After the War

  Florence returns to England ill herself, deeply tired.

  She is the second-most-famous woman in Europe.

  The most famous invites her to the palace.

  Florence is highly praised for saving lives,

  but it’s not enough. More wars are bound to come.

  Diseases won’t go away. Before visiting the queen,

  she pores over her lists of patients, what ailed them,

  the treatments, and the length of each stay.

  She draws columns of those who lived or died.

  Within six months of her arrival, the death rate

  dropped from 42 percent to 2 percent.

  Can she show that if one hospital changed,

  with some addition and multiplication,

  a single story can fan into many?

  The busy queen may grant her three minutes:

  longer than a curtsy, but shorter than sipping a cup of tea.

  How can Florence tell even a little of what she knows

  about sickness and health? Numbers can hold

  more than words in the same small space,

  but she doubts the queen has patience for much paper.

  Florence makes diagrams to show at a glance

  what the hospital was like when she came

  and the more hope-filled one she created.

  Bars of different lengths are set in rows

  since amounts seen side by side tell more

  than when shown alone. Still she needs more.

  Mulling, she walks in the park, smells rosebushes,

  spots a spiderweb’s delicate and orderly patterns.

  She rushes back home and draws a circle

  divided into twelve wedges that stand for each month

  of the year to show changes over time.

  She adds layers within the slices, some protruding

  like rose petals, notched like a rooster’s red coxcomb.

  Dates and causes of illness overlap and can quickly be seen

  on her rose diagram, coxcomb graph, and pie charts.

  Circles on a Tea Table

  Florence curtsies to the queen, who thanks her

  for her kindness. After niceties, Florence hands her

  the rose diagrams and coxcomb graphs she created.

  They show dates and causes of illness side by side

  or overlapping, so connections can be seen at a glance.

  Florence explains that hospital survival rates rose

  when bedding, floors, and doctors’ hands were clean.

  The queen lifts her silk fan. Florence worries

  she’s being dismissed, but instead servants carry

  in a pot of tea, stacks of biscuits, and silver dishes of jam.

  The queen asks to hear more, listens, unbuttons

  her white gloves, and looks over charts that show

  that for every man who died of wounds from weapons,

  about seven died from disease caught in the hospitals.

  Queen Victoria’s eyes grow smaller, as if she’s pinching

  back tears. She says, This must never happen again.

  Please send this information to the war office.

  Past the Window Frame

  Settled in London, Florence gathers still more numbers.

  She hammers out eight hundred pages of words

  and two hundred more of graphs and charts

  she sends to military men and doctors, who read,

  discuss, and soon treat patients more effectively.

  Florence founds the Nightingale Training School for Nurses.

  For the first time, women can train in a hospital

  not run by a church. In the course of her life,

  Florence pens fourteen thousand letters, many advising

  Americans working near Civil War battlefields.

  She writes a book about nursing that shows the science

  behind patient care that women have long given:

  plants and flowers freshen the air,

  clean bedding keeps disease from spreading,

  and kind words create a steadier pulse and heartbeat.

  Florence knows people are sick or dying not only in war,

  but women, children, and men are at risk

  right here in the capital of England.

  To convince members of Parliament of the need for change,

  she asks workers to count how many people live

  in one room and the number of windows in a home.

  She charts the
sources of water and heat,

  pipes and plumbing, if any,

  to show how health and housing are related.

  The world should be less divided, more fair.

  Florence oversees studies of child labor, poorhouses,

  and deaths from childbirth, making records

  she hopes will convince city and country leaders

  of the need for reform.

  She tries to keep her aim steady as noon light,

  though statistics are shaped not just by numbers

  but also chance, wishes, and despair.

  Even sturdy records have shadows that shift.

  More

  In Florence’s old age, a lifeboat, a racehorse,

  and babies are named after her. Admirers write ballads,

  piano pieces, and books in her honor.

  A pledge named after her

  is recited by devoted nurses around the world.

  Merchants print her portrait on grocery bags.

  She becomes the first woman elected

  to the Royal Statistical Society.

  Florence is almost ninety when she puts down

  her pen on a desk covered with stacks of letters,

  some with sealing wax stamped with a crown.

  She switches on a new lamp that needn’t be filled with oil,

  pushes back the lace curtains, looks out

  at protesters who wave signs reading: VOTES FOR WOMEN!

  Florence remembers the girl she used to be,

  and silently, happily, counts women who want more.

  EXPLORING CURRENTS

  HERTHA MARKS AYRTON

  (1854–1923)

  The Watch Repairman’s Daughter

  PORTSMOUTH, ENGLAND, 1861

  A girl balances on a branch, peers through green leaves.

  Her brothers shoot marbles, shout, skylark on the street.

  Phoebe Sarah Marks, who’s called Sarah,

  jumps down from the tree, dashes up to the two rooms

  over a shop, home to the family of nine.

  The youngest crawl or circle the desk

  where their father works. His hands

  hover quietly as prayer over the insides of a watch.

  Look inside. Look closer. Papa explains

  that the hands of the watch go around

  when the force of an unwinding spring pushes gears,