Florence Nightingale Accepts the Assistance of a British Officer Stationed in India, Most Likely for Her 1876 Crusade to Bring More Sanitary Conditions to India

Florence Nightingale, known as the Lady with the Lamp, was a nurse who changed the face of nursing and hospitals during the Crimean War. In 1876, she was busy with her book “On Trained Nursing for the Sick Poor”, which said in part, “The beginning has been made, the first crusade has been fought and won, to bring…real nursing, trained nursing…to the bedsides of cases wanting real nursing among the London sick poor, in the only way in which real nurses can be so brought to the sick poor, and this by providing a real home within reach of their work for the nurses to live in—a home which gives what real family homes are supposed to give:—materially, a bedroom for each, dining and sitting rooms in common, all meals prepared and eaten in the home; morally, direction, support, sympathy in a common work, further training and instruction in it, proper rest and recreation, and a head of the home, who is also and pre-eminently trained and skilled head of the nursing…” Promoting her idea of the need for sanitary conditions, she wrote in September, on the “proceedings of the Madras [India] Govt. regarding their Drainage works”.

Lt. Col. Frederic Brine was in the Royal Engineers and Nightingale had known him for decades. In 1856, regarding the Crimean War, she had written him thanking him for his “kind recollection of us & the part we were privileged to take in our Country’s late glorious calamity”. Brine wrote about that war in a book, “Last of the Brave: Or Resting Places of Our Fallen Heroes in the Crimea and at Scutari.” In the 1870s, Brine was stationed in India.By 1879 Brine had left India, where, according to the Times of India, he had the distinction of pioneering in post cards and getting them legalized there.

Autograph letter signed, two pages, Park Lane, November 6, 1876, to Brine, likely on meeting to discuss her passion of the moment – bringing more sanitary conditions to India “I write a word to say how very sorry I am that I shall not be able to be in London before the end of next week at earliest. Too late, I deeply regret to see you. I trust that you did not ‘put off’ your return to India with inconvenience. I shall prove my gratitude for your most kind promise – more than kind – of ‘true agency’ by availing myself of it. And pray believe me, in great haste, ever yours most faithfully, Florence Nightingale.” One wonders from her language if Brine had offered to represent Nightingale in India.