Exhibition shows Edinburgh surgeon's key role in Florence Nightingale's work

Published on Saturday 15 May 2010 20:30

AN OVERLOOKED hero of Scottish medical history is about to take his rightful place in the limelight with the "Lady with the Lamp".

Florence Nightingale became a 19th-century heroine because of her work in military hospitals during the Crimean war (1853-6).

But a new exhibition on her life and works highlights the role of Edinburgh surgeon John Sutherland, who worked with her in cleaning up the insanitary conditions that were killing British soldiers during the Crimean campaign.

Although Nightingale won the adoration of the Victorian public after her story was carried in the press of the day, Sutherland's efforts went largely unrecorded.

On his death in 1891, Nightingale, eager to acknowledge the part he had played, wrote in a letter to the Times. "I was his pupil both in sanitary administration and practice and am anxious for my master's fame."

Caroline Worthington, the director of the newly refurbished Florence Nightingale Museum in London, said those who helped the world's most famous nurse deserved a bigger place in her story.

"We have tried to bring out the cast of characters that are around her, like Sutherland, and tease those stories out a bit more," Worthington said.

"He did the grunt work, and she ended up being the front woman, you might say."

Born in 1808, Sutherland graduated from Edinburgh University in 1831 and was a member of the Royal College of Surgeons. Interested in public health, he became a health inspector and sanitation expert, overseeing an inquiry into a cholera epidemic in the 1840s.

In 1855, he was appointed head of a commission sent to the Crimea in response to reports of horrendous hygiene conditions in military camps.

At the hospital in Scutari in Turkey, where Nightingale was working, Sutherland's team flushed out sewers and ensured clean water supplies. Documents at the London museum quote her comments that Sutherland's commission "saved the British Army".

Although his role is known to military historians – writer Cecil Woodham-Smith noted how he complained of being overworked and abused by Nightingale – popular history has presented her as a one-woman operation, ignoring her "kitchen cabinet" of mostly male allies and advisers.

Nightingale had been sent to Scutari as head of a 38-strong team of female nurses after mounting outrage over reports of the suffering of British soldiers in the campaign famed for failed generalship in the Charge of the Light Brigade.

The Nightingale legend was born when the Illustrated London News published a picture of a woman gliding through a ward of injured soldiers with a lamp lighting her way.

The notion of her as an angel of mercy – a reputation fanned by her sister Parthenope – made her a celebrity and went some way to obscuring her administrative and campaigning skills. She insisted on clean uniforms, embraced "military style" discipline and sacked nurses for drunkenness.

Along with exhibits on Nightingale's childhood and time in Crimea, the museum's new "Reform and Inspire" section explores her later work as a campaigner for health reform in Britain and overseas, from ward design to infection control and hospital hygiene.

It also explores the relationship between Nightingale and Sutherland on their return to Britain. Over the next three decades, he diagnosed her illnesses, penned drafts of her reports, advised her on how to win over Queen Victoria, and often got on her nerves.

Their correspondence in the British Library stretches to eight volumes of letters and notes. These became more frequent as he grew deaf.

"There are some people," she once wrote, testily "who always say the wrong thing," after he chided her for decorating her room like "a vain thing".

A hectored Sutherland once described himself to Nightingale as "one of your wives". In 1859, Sutherland advised her on an early outline of her Notes on Nursing, a book that transformed nursing care. He said she should be "more perceptive and less doctrinal", aiming for common-sense messages to appeal to ordinary women looking at a career in nursing.

Worthington said the new displays gave a fuller view of Nightingale. She said: "She is known as the Lady with the Lamp, but she's a much more interesting woman when campaigning for health reform."

The museum draws on the work of biographer Mark Bostridge, author of Florence Nightingale: The Woman and Her Legend, published in 2008.

Bostridge said Sutherland's part in Nightingale's life – she never married but was close friends with the doctor's wife – is relatively unknown

He said: "He became in effect her secretary and research assistant, did drafts of many of the reports she later issued, researching, and checking out statistics.

"Of the group of people around her, he is one of the most important and certainly somebody that deserves to be highlighted."