The Florence Nightingale Museum

I happened to find myself in London, looking up at a statue of Florence Nightingale on her birthday. At the time, I was on a tour of Ben Franklin’s life in London, of all things. But the Florence Nightingale Museum was on my list of Places to Visit, and two days later, I ventured into the precincts of St. Thomas’s Hospital and thence to the museum.

Like so many of my generation, I first heard of Florence Nightingale in elementary school. It took a few decades for me to realize her significance. Even so, the museum was an eye opener. You can read the Wikipedia article for a detailed account of her life and accomplishments. For now, I’ll simply share some of the museum experience.

Please be aware that I do not have my laptop, but am working with tablet and phone, neither of which is ideal for a blog post, it turns out, which means you may expect workarounds, and maybe not so many links as usual. But since everybody doesn’t get to spend a month in London and be all nerdy history all the time, I hope you’ll enjoy traveling with me, despite the glitches.

Below is a gallery of images from the museum. A couple of notes:

The photograph of Florence Nightingale was taken shortly after her return from the Crimea. She was ill, and had lost so much weight that her parents were horrified. She cut her hair while in the Crimea because it needed too much care—energy she wanted to reserve for her patients…and for dealing with the bureaucracy and the doctors.

By the way, she was quite tall for her time—5’8”—and I hope my metric system readers will be kind enough to translate that into understandable measurements.

The bed is the one she died in. (I may be mistaken, and it may be a reproduction, but I failed to make a note at the time.) Beside it is a phonograph, which allows you to hear a recording of her voice. You can access this recording on the Wikipedia page. The little box at the front of the photo contains a soap with her favorite scent.

I had heard of the chef Alexis Soyer. I hadn’t realized he was also in the Crimea, and made his own major contribution to saving lives.

Many of the placards are posted against what appear to be bandages or hospital dressings, and there is a sound effect meant to indicate rats scurrying through.

The courage of the women who went out to nurse under these nightmarish conditions is beyond my imagining. As to the men: War is hell, as, tragically, we continue to be reminded every day.

The Foundling Museum

Reporting from London:

Maybe this should start with a trigger warning, as the topic is abandoned infants, it starts in the early 1700s, and the picture isn’t pretty. Let me tell you that I wept. So, if you’re still with me, here goes.

Charles Dickens introduced me to Coram’s Foundling Hospital in Little Dorrit. In a time when there was, essentially, nothing in the way of birth control, a great many impoverished women ended up abandoning their babies on the streets of London. By the thousands. Thomas Coram, who’d made his fortune in the shipping trade in America, was horrified at what he saw. No doubt he wasn’t the only one, but he felt he had to do something about it. And so he campaigned for years, and eventually, with the help of a number of prominent people, and, finally, the King’s permission, in 1739 founded a hospital or home for these children.

The idea was, the babies would be left at the hospital with some sort of token identifying them, so that the parent could reclaim the child when/if able to support him or her. In reality, very few children were reclaimed. They were, however, cared for, and given some sort of training that would allow them to become apprenticed or go into domestic work when they were old enough. At the time, 14 was old enough.

No, it wasn’t an ideal situation. Conditions being what they were in the 18th and 19th centuries, many children did not survive. But the Foundling Hospital saved the lives of thousands of children, and in many cases allowed them to have a better adulthood than they might have otherwise expected. For the full story, you might want to look at the Wikipedia article here.

I visited the Foundling Museum on a beautiful, sunny day. Nearby, children played football (U.S. soccer) in a park, reminding us that life, while not perfect now, is better than it was.

The museum comprises three floors. The ground floor focuses on the collections of artifacts related to the children, from the earliest days of the organization to the 20th century, when the hospital was relocated to Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire. You can listen to audio accounts from some of these former residents.

The next floor contains reconstructions of some of the original rooms of the hospital, and includes many of its works of art. That collection is a story in itself. With art donated by the artists, it became the first public art gallery in the U.K., and a fashionable charity.

The topmost floor contains the Gerald Coke Handel Collection. There I sat for a while in one of the armchairs with built-in speakers and listened to Handel’s music to quiet my soul.

Another eBook deal: "A Duke in Shining Armor" is $1.99

It is my pleasure to report that from now until 1 March, the e-edition of A Duke in Shining Armor, the first book in the Difficult Dukes series, is on sale in the U.S. and Canada for $1.99.

I wrote this series in a disorderly fashion. Ripley’s story came first, and that was not a problem. The problem was that, practically from the beginning, I knew that (a) one of the dukes, Blackwood, was already married to Ripley’s sister, Alice, and (b) something was amiss in the marriage.

Making things difficult for myself is nowhere on my list of favorite things to do. But my brain has its own ideas about the stories, and since that brain has been in my skull my whole life, I have to work with it. So A Duke in Shining Armor came first, as it was intended to do. Then I planned to tell the Blackwoods’ story, because, after all, I had raised questions about them. But they weren’t ready for their closeup, so it was Ashmont and Cassandra next, in Ten Things I Hate About the Duke.

This did not make the third book any easier to write. In fact, it made the process hellishly difficult, with the additional aggravation of keeping track of who did what when, because even in fiction it’s a bad idea to have a character in two different places at the same time. Unless it is science fiction or fantasy, neither of which is in my skill set. And somewhere in all this mess came the writer’s block which, if you’ve been following this blog for a few years, you know all about.

It did finally dawn on me that what I didn’t want to write was a whole book about a troubled marriage. This is what led me to go back in time, to their courtship, and the fly they didn’t realize was in the ointment. This fly, which eluded me for ages, turned out to be an issue I ought to have pinned down right away. My brain knew all along, but as you have no doubt deduced, it chose not to let me in on the secret until it was good and ready. Still, it did all come together, as a sort of combined prequel and sequel, and the result, My Inconvenient Duke, made its debut in January.

I’m telling you all of this because a reader asked me why the third book starts before the first book, and I believed hers was a not unreasonable question. But my hope is that, wherever you start in the series; you start somewhere, and wherever you start, you have an agreeable reading experience. And if you’d like to start now—or lure a friend or family member or complete stranger into starting now—you can do it for the next few weeks at a bargain price.