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A hospital during the Crimean War

The Crimean Journals of the Sisters of Mercy

By Prof Pierce Grace 20th October 2023

When we think of the Crimean War, we think of Florence Nightingale. But Irish nuns had an equally important role to play – despite being written out of the history writes Prof Pierce A. Grace

When I was growing up I spent a lot of time in my grandparents house which was just down the road. On rainy days I used to look at Newnes’ Pictorial Knowledge which was a seven-volume encyclopaedia that my grandparents had bought for my father and his siblings in the 1930s. Although other nations were mentioned – even the plucky Irish Free State – the work was unashamedly British and extolled the ‘virtues’ of the Empire and its peoples.

So when I came across a reference to the ‘lady with the lamp’ I asked my grandmother – source of all my historical knowledge – who she was. With a ‘harrumph!’ she said the lady was Florence Nightingale who was credited with sorting out the hospitals during the Crimean War, while in fact the Irish Sisters of Mercy had done all of the work; my grandmother’s aunts were nuns, so she knew a thing or two about them. While Miss Nightingale cannot be airbrushed from history as my granny might have wished, neither should the contribution of the Irish Sisters of Mercy be forgotten.

In 1850 a serious row erupted between Orthodox and Roman Catholic monks as to who should control the Christian religious sites of the Holy Land – then part of the Ottoman Empire; several Orthodox monks were killed in the affair. Czar Nicholas I demanded that Russia be made protector of all Christians in the Ottoman Empire, but Napoleon III, Emperor of the French, had different ideas and seized control of the various holy sites.

The Ottoman sultan, Abdulmecid I, refused the Czar’s request and in July 1853 Russian troops invaded Turkey’s Danubian provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia (modern Romania). Turkey declared war on Russia whose Black Sea fleet promptly wiped out the antiquated Turkish navy at Sinope.

Fearing that Russian expansion into the eastern Mediterranean would interfere with the trade routes to their colonies in North Africa and India, France and Britain came to Turkey’s aid and declared war on Russia in March 1854. In January 1855 the Italian kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont joined the allies and everyone expected a short war.

In spite of the fact that the country had just experienced the Great Famine and the Young Ireland rebellion of 1848, there was considerable support for the imperial war in Ireland. Up to 35 per cent of the British army of the time was Irish and it is estimated that 30,000 Irish soldiers served in the Crimea, and many of the generals were Irish.

A large Irish civilian contingent comprising doctors, engineers, navvies and members of the Irish Constabulary also went to war. Some soldiers’ wives went and helped with cooking, washing and looking after the wounded. In September 1854 the Allies landed 60,000 troops on the Crimean peninsula with the intention of capturing Sevastopol, the main naval base of Russia’s Black Sea fleet.

As with all war, chaos ensued – witness the Charge of the Light Brigade – and thousands died from wounds, sepsis, cholera and typhus. The poor army medical facilities were quickly overwhelmed. All of this was observed and reported uncensored by Dublin-born journalist William Howard Russell and others – in highly critical reports to the newspapers.

In response Sidney Herbert, Secretary of State for War, turned to Florence Nightingale, a personal friend of his wife’s, asking her to tackle the problems in the British military hospitals.

Described by the medical historian, Roy Porter, as a ‘stern, starchy, but gifted organiser’, Miss Nightingale had learned nursing at Kaiserswerth in Germany and with the French Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul in Paris.

In 1852 she transformed a small London hospital, the Institution for Ill Gentlewomen, and also gained experience nursing cholera victims at the Middlesex Hospital; she was a superb organiser and force to be reckoned with. Gathering together a group of thirty-eight nurses, including some English Sisters of Mercy from Bermondsey, whose religious superior was Irish-born Mother M. Clare Moore, Nightingale set off for Turkey in October 1854.

While the fighting took place on the Crimean peninsula, the main hospital was at Scutari in Turkey, so the wounded had to be transported across the Black Sea for treatment. Armed with the title ‘Superintendent of the female nursing establishment in the English General Hospitals in Turkey’, Nightingale deployed her nurses in the face of hostility from some of the medical officers who resented her close association with the Secretary of State.

Elizabeth Thompson, Lady Butler, Calling the Roll After An Engagement, Crimea (1874; Royal Collection)

Nonetheless, she began to make a difference and became famous for her nightly rounds through the wards with her lamp looking at the conditions and visiting the soldier patients. She firmly believed in the miasma theory of disease and her commitment to hygiene undoubtedly saved many lives.

Attending to what we would consider the basics – washing the patients, providing them with clean clothes, beds and food, and most importantly getting the drains and sewers working properly – she and her nurses made a difference; the mortality rate at Scutari hospital fell from 42 to 2.2 per cent. She was also a good statistician.

However, unbeknownst to Miss Nightingale, Sydney Herbert sanctioned a second group of forty-six nurses for the Crimea led by Mary Stanley, another of his wife’s friends. This group included fifteen Irish Sisters of Charity whose contract with the War Office, negotiated on their behalf by the Irish bishops, was very different to the one agreed with Mother M. Moore in London. The revival of Catholicism in England was viewed with great suspicion.

The English Catholic hierarchy had only been re-established in 1850, and some high profile conversions from Anglicanism to Catholicism, such as John Henry Newman and Henry Edward Manning, had occurred. In this environment, the English nuns thought it politic to work under the direction of the Protestant Miss Nightingale.

Not so the Irish. The Irish sisters were to have their own Superior, and were not to be under the jurisdiction of Miss Nightingale in any realm except the management of the hospital; they were to answer directly to the military medical officers in all medical matters.

They were to have their own chaplain and their own quarters so that they could maintain the pattern of their communal life as much as possible. All the sisters were experienced nurses, having cared for cholera victims and others during the Great Famine.

Led by their Superior, the formidable Mother M. Francis Bridgeman, the nuns set off for Turkey via London, Paris and Marseilles in December 1854 as part of Mary Stanley’s party. They were encouraged to keep a record of their experiences, but only the diaries of Mother M. Bridgeman, Sister M. Aloysius Doyle and Sister M. Joseph Croke have survived.

When Mary Stanley’s group arrived off Constantinople on December 17, 1854, to their astonishment they were told in a letter by Miss Nightingale that she had ‘neither accommodation nor need of more nurses at Scutari’ and that it was ‘a gross mistake on the part of the War Office to send the party out’.

As Maria Luddy noted the three women, Florence Nightingale, Mother M. Moore and Mother M. Bridgeman were very wary of each other with none of them fully understanding the positions and strong feelings held by the others. Nightingale could not countenance the independence of Mother M. Bridgeman and her nuns.

For political reasons Mother M. Moore and the English sisters had agreed to be placed under the direct supervision and protection of Nightingale, but the Irish sisters had only accepted her jurisdiction in nursing matters and, as she had rejected them on arrival, Mother M. Bridgeman no longer felt bound even by that agreement.

Eventually, with the help of their new chaplain, Fr William Ronan, S.J., a compromise was reached and the Irish nuns agreed to work in a new hospital at Koulali, Turkey, in February 1855.

By October they had moved to the general hospital on the Crimean peninsula at Balaclava where Miss Nightingale’s writ did not run as she was superintendent of nursing ‘in Turkey’ only and not in the Crimea.

One area of contention was that the Irish nuns would proselytize among the injured soldiers, a charge vigorously denied by the sisters, but they did claim their right to provide spiritual support to Catholic soldiers, of whom there were many.

The fact that Mary Stanley and another English lady, Miss Taylor, converted to Catholicism while in the Crimea didn’t allay the suspicion that the sisters were trying to convert the soldiers.

After much agitation, Nightingale was made superintendent of all female nursing in the East in March 1856, and immediately headed for Balaclava – an unstoppable force met an immovable object.

Mother M. Bridgeman said that she would not acknowledge any right of interference from Nightingale and, as Nicholas I had died and an armistice signaling the end of the war had been signed on February 29, 1856, she and her nuns packed up their bags and headed for home.

Sr M. Aloysius’ diary provides a vivid account of the nursing at Scutari where she worked with four other nuns for a short period. Wounded and frostbitten soldiers arrived in the hospital having spent two or three days ‘tossing about on the Black Sea’. With nowhere to put them they were laid in rows on the floor ‘till the beds are emptied of those who are dying of cholera and every other disease’.

In spite of hot wine administered by the sisters, many just died on the floor. The treatment for cholera comprised stuping with a hot flannel sometimes sprinkled with chloroform and the application of mustard poultices.

Brandy followed by a piece of ice was given ‘to settle the stomach’, but mostly the patients ‘get into a kind of collapse, out of which they never rally’.

At Koulali Hospital Mr Robertson, purveyor-in-chief, noting that ‘the sisters were doing the work of the hospital’ arranged better accommodation for them and told Mother M. Bridgeman to ‘act as if the hospital were her own.’ While there the nuns experienced an earthquake which lasted for three minutes. Later, at the Balaclava General Hospital where they lived in huts, they had to contend with ‘a number of enormous rats… with an air of independence about them.’

However, they were helped in their struggles against the rodents by the purchase of a Russian cat for seven shillings. They also had several military orderlies ‘who were good and fairly sober’ assigned to help them with their chores. Unfortunately, two of their number Sr M. Winifred and Sr M. Elizabeth died at Balaclava from cholera and typhus respectively.

Sr M. Joseph recorded in her diary that at Balaclava the sisters had charge of two wards each, with fourteen patients and two orderlies to a ward. After their prayers and a breakfast of ‘the remains of the ragged beef, pretty good bread and extremely good tea with preserved milk’ the nuns started work on the wards at 9.00am on their first day.

However, sometimes the fare was ‘just a few hard sea biscuits to work on for the day’ but occasionally they were given a present of ‘a bottle of real milk’. Later they would have mass every day from the chaplains – who were constantly in attendance on the Catholic soldier patients. After some time Mother M. Bridgeman was able to get their accommodation improved by the addition of two new huts.

Sr M. Joseph noted that ‘we have little to do in the hospital save putting the wards into order’, but sometimes the sisters were up at night looking after cholera patients and wounded soldiers. Sr. M. Joseph became sick with ‘Crimean fever’ but with rest and a better food she recovered.

She occasionally wrote verse in her diary such as this on an unseasonably fine day in the cold December of 1855:
For here in this so fickle clime
A winter morning oft may bring
A summer noon, when glad birds chime
As if they bade farewell to spring.

The nuns were highly thought of by the military authorities who were very sorry to see them leave. The Inspector of Hospitals, Sir John Hall, the most senior doctor with the army in the East, wrote to Mother M. Bridgeman that he ‘unfeignedly’ regretted her departure and that she had given him perfect satisfaction in her administration of the hospital at Balaclava.

The Commander in Chief of the army in the Crimea, General Sir William Codrington, added that the sisters were held in high estimation by the medical officers and the many patients that they had attended during their time with the army. On their return home they had many letters of thanks from soldiers they had treated; in London, Dr Andrew Smith, Director General of Army Medical Services, reported that the sisters would be amazed at the amount of gratifying testimony he had received about their work.

The Crimean War was an imperial conflict engineered by Russia whose reactionary Czar, Nicholas I, hated democracy and saw an opportunity to dismember Turkey, ‘The Sick Man of Europe’. Britain and France, protecting their own interests, went to Turkey’s aid resulting in up to a million deaths, mostly from disease.

The British army’s medical services were appalling, and only when female nurses appeared on the scene did conditions improve and mortality decline. The three strong women who led the nursing cohorts, Nightingale, Moore and Bridgeman were all highly motivated to work hard and help their fellow human beings, but for personality, religious and racial reasons they were all very suspicious of each other. While Florence Nightingale’s fame has eclipsed the work of the others, nevertheless, the Mercy Sisters provided dedicated care to their patients, many of whose lives they undoubtedly saved.

They should be remembered. The awfulness of the Crimean War was graphically captured twenty years later by Elizabeth Thompson (Lady Butler, wife of general Sir William Butler from Bansha, Co Tipperary) in her huge painting The Roll Call exhibited at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition in London in 1874.

Further Reading

• David Murphy, ‘Ireland and the Crimean War 1854-6’ History Ireland 2003, https://www.historyireland.com/ireland-and-the-crimean-war-1854-6/, September 7, 2023.
• Maria Luddy (ed.), The Crimean Journals of the Sisters of Mercy 1854-56 (Dublin, Four Courts Press, 2004).
• C.J. Gill and G.C. Gill, ‘Nightingale in Scutari: Her Legacy Reexamined’ Clinical Infectious Diseases, 40 (2005), 1799–1805 https://doi.org/10.1086/430380.
• Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity From Antiquity to the Present (London, Harper Collins, 1998).

Author
Prof Pierce A. Grace is Adjunct Professor of Surgical Science, Graduate Entry Medical