This is the second to last in a series of posts by Susan Hassmiller, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Senior Adviser for Nursing, that chronicle her summer vacation spent retracing Florence Nightingale’s influential career.

Scutari was a “tragedy of epic proportions of which bureaucratic muddle and sheer human incompetence played the larger part, thrown in with a measure of bad luck.”

–Mark Bostridge, from his book, Florence Nightingale: The Making of an Icon

The Hospital: What Florence Experienced
It is almost incongruent that a woman who wrote more than 14,000 letters and 200 books said upon arriving at Scutari Hospital, a converted army barracks, that she was without words to describe what she saw. Of course, as time caught up with her, the words flowed quite freely. Death and mutilation surrounded her in this well-known deathtrap.  Her nurses slept (“in catnaps”) in cramped quarters. Men were cramped into rooms and spilled out into the long corridors as they lay on straw beds on cold stone floors. Attendants had to walk over the men who were, by Nightingale’s command, a requisite 18 inches apart. More men died than lived.

Nightingale hardly slept, took her meals by the spoonful, and spent most of her time caring for the men, overseeing the band […]