Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Florence Nightingale : 1820-1910. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material is part of the Elmer Belt Florence Nightingale collection. The original may be consulted at University of California Libraries.
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![on Indian sanitary matters, and entertaining a large number of Indian gentlemen, educationalists, doctors, and administrators. In 1898 she re- ceived the Aga Khan. He was, she wrote in a private note, a most interesting man, but you could never teach him sanitation. ... I told him as well as I could all the differences, both in town and country, during my life. 'Do you think you are improving?' he asked. By improv- ing he meant believing more in God. Year by year her legend steadily grew. The world had taken her figure to its heart, but in an extraordinary, an unprecedented, way. No crowd of admirers waited outside her house in South Street; indeed, the greater part of the world supposed she was dead, had supposed she was dead for the past forty years. Even the survivors of the men she had nursed did not know what had become of her. I should have com- municated with you sooner, wrote the organizer of an annual banquet of Inkerman survivors in 1895, but I did not know your address. But whether she was dead or alive was unimportant: the image of her lived with vivid hfe. Not only in England but in the United States of America, in Turkey, Japan, in Brazil, her name had a magic possessed by no other. The year of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, 1897, added enor- mously to her legend. The Victorian Era Exhibition included a section representing the progress of trained nursing, and it was planned round Miss Nightingale; she was asked for Crimean relics, for pictures of Scutari, for her portrait, for the loan of her bust by Steell. She refused. Oh the absurdity of people and their vulgarity! she wrote. The relics, the representations of the Crimean War! What are they? They are first the tremendous lessons we have had to learn from its tremendous blun- ders and ignorances. And next they are Trained Nurses and the progress of Hygiene. These are the 'representations' of the Crimean War. And I will not give my foolish portrait (which I have not got) or anything else as 'relics' of the Crimea. It is too ridiculous. . . . However, one of the organizers of the exhibition was Lady Wantage, and Lady Wangate was exceptionally pretty and charming. She called, and Miss Nightingale, always susceptible to charm, gave way. She wished to substitute a few hard facts about the work of the Royal Sanitary Commissions for Crimean relics, but Lady Wantage, wrote Miss Nightingale, would not take [them] . . . she stuck to her point and she is so charming. A^Iiss Nightingale lent the bust by Steell and tracked down her Crimean carriage. O my dear Harry, she wrote to Henry Bonham Carter in March, 1897, that wretched Russian car with wretched but active boy and pony, all dismantled, haijgs round my](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b20452329_0382.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
