Sophia’s Visions · Other lives · The Crimean War, 1854–1856 · B2–C1
Seacole and Nightingale: Two Women at War
Sophia’s Visions: eighteen centuries from now, two women will go to a war to care for its soldiers. One will be remembered as a legend, the other almost forgotten, until people begin to argue about them both. Talking about what is said, believed and claimed (she is said to have…, it is often claimed that…, she is thought to have been…), with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
I saw a hospital tonight, Demetria: a long barracks full of wounded soldiers, and a woman walking between the beds at night with a lamp in her hand.
A woman, in charge of an army hospital? In which century?
The nineteenth. And a few miles away, another woman was cooking for the soldiers, selling them wine and sandwiches, and treating their wounds, sometimes on the battlefield itself.
In 1854 Britain and France went to war with Russia in the Crimea, on the Black Sea. The British army was badly supplied and badly led. For the first time, newspaper reporters sent reports from the front by telegraph, and readers in London learnt, within days, how badly the sick and wounded were treated.
In those days, nursing was not a respected profession. Army hospitals were dirty and overcrowded, and nobody yet understood how germs spread disease. Far more soldiers died of cholera, dysentery and typhus than of wounds.
A war reported in the newspapers, in an age without antibiotics.
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