It Was The Nightingale

I was going to post about this yesterday, but had to hurry out of town to join a walk in deepest Sussex. This, in the event, involved an afternoon of trudging through mud in howling wind and stinging rain (with no hat) - very bracing - at the chilled, soaked, bedraggled end of which, my mobile rang and it was Bryan phoning in an exalted condition from Cawston Church, one singularly blessed in the hammerbeam roof and rood screen departments (check out the Picture Gallery). By contrast, on the route of my walk - though happily I missed it - was this perfectly good church, extensively vandalised by some of the very worst painters ever to dip a brush.
Anyway, to retun to Lord Mancroft, who, it seems to me, has done a good job by making public what is the actual experience of many who have fallen into the clutches of the state hospital system. What struck me most was that his description of today's young nurses (yes yes of course not all of them - certainly not my niece who is a nurse)was an exact restatement of what nurses were like before Florence Nightingale came along (drunken, slipshod, grubby, sexually promiscuous etc). Sixty years of state control of hospitals has managed to re-create the pre-Nightingale situation, complete with filthy wards and rampant hospital infections - and institutions from which patients have to be 'rescued' if they're to survive. 'Professionalising' nursing - i.e. divorcing it from the actual business of looking after patients, let alone attending to basic hygiene - finally made this outcome inevitable. I hope we hear more from the redoubtable Lord M, but something tells me he will have been silenced by now.