121. After Crimea
from A History of England Hosted by David Beeson
After the signing of the Treaty of Paris, the troops came home from Crimea, as did the remarkable women we talked about last week: Mary Seacole and Florence Nightingale. They came back to different lives: Nightingale went on to do seminal work in nursing and in healthcare analysis – she revealed an unusual grasp of mathematical methods and became the first female member of the Royal Statistical Society – while Seacole faced bankruptcy and closed doors. Could that be down to her blood running, as she put it, “under a duskier skin” than that of most Brits? Before we finally leave Crimea, this episode includes a quick digression about another remarkable healthcare specialist, this time on the Russian side, the military surgeon Nikolay Pirogov. Then, like the troops, we return to England. There Palmerston was pursuing a liberal domestic policy programme, but as we’ll explore more next week, he was about to encounter events in foreign affairs that would put a spoke in his wheels. Illustration: Detail from Diagram of the causes of mortality in the army in the East (1858) by Florence Nightingale, a coloured pie chart to illustrate causes of death in the British Army. Public domain in its source country on January 1, 1996 and in the United States. Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.
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