In the hopelessly disorganised Allied army which fought Russia in the Crimean War 1853 - 1856, 15 Sisters of Mercy from Ireland played an heroic role in establishing revolutionary nursing practices in the chaos of the terrible hospitals of the day. They undoubtedly saved hundreds of lives, and brought comfort to the young injured and dying men, and laid out principals for modern nursing which were widely regarded as the standard for decades to come.
Of the British army’s 111,000 men who fought in that war, over one third were Irish, of whom 7,000 were killed. Of the 1,400 killed at the Battle of Alma, September 1854, a little over half were Irish soldiers. Two months later Irish regiments were once again in the thick of the fight at Inkerman. As good as any medicine must have been the reassuring Irish voices of those generous women.
Mother Aloysius Doyle was one of that group, and would later, with other sisters from Carlow, be the founder of the Mercy Sisters’ convent at Gort. It occupied the town’s Bridge House for 165 years until it closed last year. Aloysius, however, left a written testament of her time in Crimea.
After the British Government appealed for nurses Florence Nightingale and Mother Catherine McAuley, founder of the Sisters of Mercy, answered the call. Both women arranged for volunteers to accept the challenge. McAuley appealed for volunteers from convents around Ireland. Fifteen sisters came forward with Nightingale leading her own group, and with Mother Mary Francis Bridgeman leading the Irish group set out for the Crimea in the late summer of 1855.*
Florence Nightingale, who was appointed Superintendent of the Scutari and the Koulali hospitals, was already there with her own staff of 38 volunteer women. She was of strict Anglican beliefs, and not pleased to be joined by Irish nuns. When requested to do so, Bridgeman refused to give up her authority over the sisters to Nightingale. Relationship between the two women, both strong and determined, remained frosty to the end, yet between them they would enforce a regime of clean, orderly nursing care that would be emulated across the world.
‘The Light Infantry’
Initially the sisters worked at Scutari (now known as Uskudar ) a small town facing Constantinople from the Asiatic shores of the Bosphorus, in an enormous Turkish Artillery barracks, still in existence. It was known as the General Hospital. Mother Doyle observed, that the ‘hospital’ was empty, dilapidated and neglected. Huge sewers underlay the building. Flith abounded in the corridors, the floors were so rotten that they could not be scrubbed. Moisture oozed from the walls. There were no beds - just straw stacks thrown on to the rotten floor. The blankets were brown with fleas, which the soldiers aptly called ‘the Light Infantry’!
Sheets were of the coarsest canvas, no furniture of any kind; no surgical or medical appliances, no nurses. Only the strongest survived those first days in hospital…at the front amputations were performed without anaesthetics, bandages or sterilisation. This was followed by a three hundred mile journey across the Black Sea, with men in the clutches of cholera and dysentery and others lying on the open deck, their wounds undressed. The sick were tended by the sick; the dying were left to die.’
In the first weeks 4,017 men died from typhus, typhoid, cholera and dysentery. Gradually as nutrition, clean air and improvements in waste disposal improved, the death rates dramatically declined.
Kind-hearted soldiers
It was said that the graves were not dug deep enough and that the very air was putrid. As there were no coffins, canvas and blankets had to suffice. ‘Many of the soldiers suffered from frost-bite. Their clothes had to be cut off, as in most cases the flesh and clothes were frozen together’
‘One poor frost-bitten soldier told the sisters that while lying one night at Balaclava he tried to stir his feet, but found them frozen to those of another soldier whose feet were lying against his. The food was very unpalatable - goat’s flesh and something called mutton, but blue, black and green’. Sr Aloysius could never say enough of those kind-hearted soldiers and their consideration for the nuns, even in the midst of their own sufferings.
Protestant clergy
A second hospital was opened at Koulali, five miles further north, under the supervision of Mary Stanley, a kind friend to the sisters, who now flourished away from the relentless pressure from Nightingale. This time the sisters’ natural friendliness came to the fore, and letter-writing for the patients was added to their daily routine. The summer of 1855 was unbearably hot encouraging swarms of fleas, flies, ants and mosquitoes ‘making it extremely difficult to get any sleep’. Although Nightingale had warned that under no circumstances was proselytising to take place, ‘no Catholic left Koulali without receiving the sacraments’.
Sr Aloysius wrote: ‘We had some kind friends among the Protestant clergy….we often got letters from the War Office, they used to amuse us very much, they accused us of interfering with the religion of the Protestant soldiers, and informed us that we were only nurses, that St Paul said women were not to preach or to teach! It is not our way to force the conscience of anyone…’
One Protestant clergyman admired the clean, starched clothes of the Sisters, wishing his collars were as white. From that day on the sisters washed and ironed all the Protestant collars.
New General Hospital
In October 1855, after the fall of Sebastopol, Sir John Hall, the principal medical officer in the Crimea, who disliked Florence Nightingale’s officious manner, asked Sr Bridgeman would she and her sisters take over the running of the new General Hospital of Balaclava. This had to be a blow to Nightingale’s status, as it was a very public vote of confidence in the sisters. They immediately set about the task of getting some kind of order into a hospital scattered over 15 or 16 small huts full of patients. Among them were Russian prisoners and civilians, Maltese, Greeks, Italians, Americans, Germans and Africans, and a deadly infestation of rats. One night Sr Paula woke to find a rat licking her forehead. Sleep was out of the question. A gift of a large Russian cat kept the rats at bay. But at Christmas, the nuns had saved eggs and chickens for a Christmas dinner only to find that the rats enjoyed the feast before them.
89th Regiment
Disease, however, was always present. Within a week of arrival at the new hospital Sr Winifred fell ill with cholera at 3 pm one day, and died that same evening. The sisters had to watch in case the rats would touch the body. Florence Nightingale attended the funeral and joined in the prayers along with soldiers, doctors and officers. The 89th, an Irish regiment, erected a marble cross over Sr Winifred’s grave. Later that year, Sr Elizabeth Butler died of typhus, and again the 89th Regiment requested the honour of carrying her coffin, and to erect a white marble cross over her grave.
One of the duties of the sisters were to instruct the orderlies on how to keep the wards clean, the rats outside, and to do simple medical procedures. The sisters and the orderlies got on well. When one of them committed some misdemeanour he was flogged in the open court. ‘It was painful to hear his cries’, recalled Sr Aloysius, ‘we were sick almost’.
Glorious chapter
In April 1856 just months before the end of the war, Nightingale, who had influential friends in London, was given the charge of the General Hospital of Balaclava. Later, when the sisters were getting ready to leave, It appears (see NOTE ) that Nightingale invited the sisters to stay under her supervision. But Sr Bridgeman refused. It was time to go home. Sir John Hall ensured the sisters were given a private salon on ‘the Cleopatra’, which left for England on April 12. They got a tremendous welcome in Baggot Street, the mother-house of the order in Dublin, when they arrived on May 22.
Sisters Aloysius Doyle and Stanislaus Heyfron could hardly wait to get home to Carlow. Everyone in the town wanted to see the ‘Russian Nuns’. After a well-earned rest they returned to minister to the people. Veterans from the Crimean campaign continued to visit them for many a year.** Sr Aloysius and companions came to Gort, Co Galway in November 1857. The 16 months spent in Crimea must be one of the most glorious chapters in the history of the Mercy Sisters’ community.
Notes* Sisters from Galway and Westport also volunteered but Archbishop Mc Hale would not allow them travel.
** Sr Elizabeth Hersey’s brother, a young officer 20 years’ of age, came to visit the sisters. About 30 years later, as Brigadier-General FJ Hersey, he financed the building of the garrison church of St Patrick, at Renmore, Galway.
An interesting anecdote on the relationship between Bridgman and Nightingale is recorded by Therese C Meehan (Irish Nurses in the Crimean War ) ‘ It was a sad reality of the time that the relationship between Mary Francis Bridgeman and Florence Nightingale became immersed in the web of intense cultural, political and social conflict. It was complicated further by their individual personalities. They had different approaches to nursing practice and different administrative styles. Nonetheless, both were women of great courage and determination who loved nursing and contributed in their own particular ways to its early modern development.
Towards the end of the war Florence visited Mary Francis and her group at the Crimean hospitals to invite them back under her nursing direction, an invitation which they declined. Nonetheless, Florence requested details of their nursing system. Mary Francis's journal records that 'Miss N took notes on our manner of nursing which [Mary Francis] hoped someone might profit by it’.
When peace was declared, the group returned unobtrusively to Ireland, exhausted from sixteen months of intense and dangerous work. The circumstances of the time did not allow for formal recognition of their contribution to the war effort. For their part they believed it would be unbecoming to broadcast about themselves and were quickly caught up again in the nursing and other needs of their local communities (including taking over the organisation of the Galway Workhouse ). Three of their journals survived the ravenous appetites of the hordes of hospital rats; those kept by Mary Francis, Mary Joseph Croke and Mary Aloysius Doyle. These were retained in convent archives and gradually became little noticed.
The only financial recompense they received was from the Sultan Abdul Medged . His donation of £230 was divided between the various communities involved.
Sources this week included Near Quiet Waters, a History of the Sisters of Mercy at Gort, by renowned historian Sr Mary de Lourdes Fahy, South Galway genealogist and co founder of the Kiltartan Museum.
