We have made Miss Nightingale's acquaintance, and are delighted and very much struck by her great gentleness and simplicity, and wonderful, clear, and comprehensive head. I wish we had her at the War Office.--QUEEN VICTORIA (Letter to the Duke of Cambridge, 1856).
"When one reads such twaddling nonsense," wrote Dr. Hall in November 1855 from the Crimea to Dr. Andrew Smith in London, "as that uttered by Mr. Bracebridge, and which was so much lauded in the _Times_ because the garrulous old gentleman talked about Miss Nightingale putting hospitals, containing three or four thousand patients, in order in a couple of days by means of the _Times_ funds, one cannot suppress a feeling of contempt for the man who indulges in such exaggerations, and pity for the ignorant multitude who are deluded by these fairy tales."[125] The contempt and pity of the Inspector-General of the hospitals in the East were not unmixed, I think we may surmise, with a good deal of anger, which, we may also surmise, was shared by his friend, the Director-General of the Medical Department in London. Such feelings were in the course of human nature, and the exaggeration in the statements cited by Dr. Hall is palpable. Miss Nightingale was not a magician. It would be an idle fairy tale to represent that by her exertions, either in a couple of days, or a couple of months, she effected a complete transformation scene. And it would be unfair to attribute solely to Miss Nightingale the gradual improvements which, though largely due to her initiative and resource (as described in preceding chapters), were in fact the result of the exertions of many persons both at home and in the East. "I have an unbounded admiration of Miss Nightingale's qualifications," said a deputy medical inspector, "and of the manner she applies them, but I see dozens of things placed to her credit which I happen to know she had nothing to do with."[126] Such was doubtless the case. Yet though in one sense Dr. Hall was perfectly right, in another he was profoundly wrong. Neither he, however, nor any of the other medical men who shared his views, need be blamed for their misapprehension. The facts of the case can only be fully understood now that access is obtainable to the private correspondence of Miss Nightingale and other actors in the drama.