A Century or So of Florence Nightingale

The NETLEY HOSPITAL became a teaching hospital for military doctors and some few civilian doctors, and with the war of 1914-1918, received not only British wounded but a few American soldiers from the conflict in France 22 miles away.

When World War I had died down, again the hospital received and taught doctors, including DOCTOR WATSON, the friend of the great detective Sherlock Holmes (cite introduction to STUDY IN SCARLET!)

But that fiction aside, by World War II, the hospital had become the haven of wounded from the Nazi attacks and was still considered a quasi-military medical center, under the aegis of the British army.

Enter an impossible scenario, a very personal one.

This writer, a stripling of just aged 18, arrived in Scotland on the good ship ACQUITANIA with several hundred other Navy personnel, and he a seaman first class. After a quasi-military stint in North Ireland, the seaman first class found himself on a boat, and several trains, and arriving at an Anno Domini 300 Roman barracks by the Netley Hospital.

The hospital, now called U. S. Naval Base Hospital 12, or SNAG 56 (Special Naval Assignment Group 56) was unwillingly and testily turned over to the Yanks by a jealous British army, the goal being a surgical unit to handle the worst cases from Normandy in the invasion.

That was done, and by the middle of June 1944 the hospital was roaring ahead, with 7,500 major operations. Our seaman (this writer) was promoted to operating room and ward of 34 patients, and with that at night; he was to sleep in the 100 foot up clock-tower, and to put in service the air raid sirens when phoned by the British alert service. There, he watched in terrified fascination, as the Nazi planes ran directly at his window on the tower, and turned to bomb the docks at Southhampton, sparing the hospital.

But just before the Naval Medical outfit had finished with France and its wounded and gone on to Iwo Jima, the last night our corpsman slept in the tower, he had mounted the rope ladder up 100 feet, and once in the clock tower, left the trap-door to the ladder open.

At precisely midnight, as he sat smoking wih legs dangling out the trap, (no NAZI planes tonight so far) he was amazed to see a gorgeous female figure dressed in diaphenous white gauze, and carring an antique lamp with a candle lit in it, traverse the floor 100 feet below, and enter the side door of the chapel.

It was the Lady with the Lamp, back again, and this time solacing Americans, and going to the Chapel to pray for them, lamp and all.

When this person viewing this attained the breakfast mess the next a.m., he sat with the grizzled physician with whom he had worked in the operating room…he told of the appearance.

The graying old surgeon laughed, and said, that was probably beautiful nurse BLANK, in her nightie, and on her way to the Chapel, to confess and pray her way out of her current just executed love assignment with some surgeon!

But when our sailor told the ancient Scots gatekeeper, of the hospital grounds, eighty years old, of the appearance, the old old man replied seriously,”Eh, yeh,Shee’s still aroun’, our Leddy with the Lamp!” and meandered into other tales of her appearance when he was a wee lad.

This writer thinks it was Florence Nightingale, and that she will forever protect and try to aid any soldier fighting for freedom and democracy.