The Crimean War and Disease: Background information when reading Flight of the Wild Swan

The Crimean War and Disease

This article relates to Flight of the Wild Swan

The Crimean War of 1853–1856 pitted the Russian Empire against an alliance of British, French, Turkish and Sardinian troops on the Crimean Peninsula on the Black Sea. Britain entered the war in March 1854 to protect its trading interests with Turkey, while France saw an opportunity for revenge against the Russians after Napoleon's defeat in 1812. In military terms, according to naval historian Andrew Lambert, "it was a midway point between Waterloo and World War One."

The war foreshadowed the horrors of the American Civil War, employing Napoleonic tactics with improved weaponry. The human death toll was appalling—roughly 25,000 British, 100,000 French and up to a million Russians died. But the vast majorities of these deaths were not from battle wounds. The biggest killer in the Crimean War was disease.

As novelist Melissa Pritchard so hauntingly captures in Flight of the Wild Swan, the Crimean War would become Florence Nightingale's war: a fight against disease and unsanitary conditions but also the struggle to equip, train and support the nursing field from a governmental level. Arriving at the Scutari military hospital in November 1854 (in what is now Istanbul, Turkey), Nightingale and thirty-eight nurses discovered wounded and dying soldiers in ghastly sanitary conditions. According to an article in the American Journal of Public Health, "ten times more soldiers were dying of diseases such as typhus, typhoid, cholera, and dysentery than from battle wounds."

The suffering Nightingale encountered in the Crimea was a catalog of horrors, many of which were entirely preventable. Not only were soldiers poorly cared for, but supplies of essential medicines and other necessities were lacking, infections spiraled and filth added exponentially to everyone's miseries: "Nightingale found there was no clean linen; the clothes of the soldiers were swarming with bugs, lice, and fleas; the floors, walls, and ceilings were filthy; and rats were hiding under the beds. There were no towels, basins, or soap, and only fourteen baths for approximately 2000 soldiers."

Recognizing the key issues as "diet, dirt, and drains," Nightingale and her nurses set about procuring better food and thoroughly cleaning the abysmal hospital wards. This experience would focus Nightingale's efforts, during the war and beyond, to champion sanitation as a key factor in a patient's ability to fight off disease and stave off infection. Indeed, the Crimean War was "formative" for Nightingale, as her primary biographer, Lynn McDonald notes.

Through her tireless letter-writing campaigns to British government and medical officials, Nightingale was the ultimate source of "the creation of a new profession of nursing in Britain and major reforms in healthcare and nutrition for ordinary soldiers in the British Army." Many historians cite the Crimean War hospital wards under Nightingale's supervision as the place where nursing "emerged from its infancy" and took on the shape and form of the true profession as we know it today.

'Miss Nightingale in the Hospital in Scutary [sic]', 1856, colored lithograph by and after Max and Simeon A Beeger, courtesy of National Army Museum

Filed under People, Eras & Events

This article relates to Flight of the Wild Swan. It first ran in the April 17, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.