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Social reformer and nursing campaigner, Florence Nightingale, who rose to fame after her work in the Crimea, was instrumental in establishing an army medical school at Fort Pitt, Chatham in 1860.

Three years earlier, Florence had been asked by Sir John Liddell, Director-General of the Navy Medical Department, to “introduce female nurses into naval hospitals.”¹ She visited Chatham, which was a military, as well as naval, station with Sir John and her friend Miss Carter in March 1857.²

During the visit, they inspected the Garrison Hospital at Chatham Barracks, Melville Naval Hospital and the General Hospital at Fort Pitt. It was reported that she spent “nearly three hours at Melville, during which she inspected the dispensing rooms, washhouses, &c., the whole of which met with her warm approval”.³ However, after the visit, Florence wrote to Sir John McNeill, Scottish surgeon and diplomat:

“This disgraceful state of our Chatham Hospitals, which I have been visiting lately, is only one more symptom of a system which, in the Crimea, put to death 16,000 men—the finest experiment modern history has seen upon a large scale, viz. as to what given number may be put to death at will by the sole agency of bad food and bad air.”⁴

McNeill, who had been sent to investigate the conditions of the Crimean hospitals as sanitary commissioner, had raised awareness of some of the “lamentable laxity and inefficiency” of Lord Raglan’s staff.⁵ In his report he had highlighted that the men encamped on Sebastapol suffered from “a deficiency of fresh meat, a deficiency of vegetables, a deficiency of fresh bread, particularly for the sick, and more especially for those whose gums were affected with scurvy.” He also commented on “a deficiency of hay and straw, to such an extent that enough could not be procured to fill the paillasses of the sick.”⁶

It was not only the men at Chatham who received Florence’s attention. While visiting the three hospitals she made enquiries about the Chatham Garrison Compassionate Institute, which provided “food, clothing and lodging” for the sick women and children of the garrison, afterwards giving the institute a donation of 50 guineas.⁷

Queen Victoria, who admired Florence Nightingale’s work in the Crimea, had written: ‘I envy her being able to do so much good and look after the noble heroes whose behaviour is admirable’.⁸ The Queen and Prince Albert had visited wounded soldiers at the hospital at Fort Pitt three times in 1855. After the war, the Queen invited Florence to Balmoral, where Florence outlined the reforms that were needed in military hospitals.⁹

Fort Pitt was used to receive and assess soldiers invalided back to Britain after service abroad. However, as Florence observed: “young men were sent to attend sick and wounded soldiers, who perhaps had never dressed a serious wound, or never attended a bedside, except in the midst of a crowd of students, following in the wake of some eminent lecturer, who certainly had never been instructed in the most ordinary sanitary knowledge”¹⁰

At the opening of the Army Medical Practical School on the 2nd October 1860, Deputy Inspector-General T. Longmore, Professor of Military Surgery, gave a speech in which he said:

“There is one, however, whose opinion derived from large experience and remarkable sagacity in observation, exerted an especial influence in originating and establishing this school. I should hardly have presumed to refer to Miss Nightingale by name, so unostentatiously was her influence in this matter exerted, had not one of the Royal Commissioners, prominent from his high position, and by all he had done to diffuse military sanitation knowledge, recently made public mention of this fact.”¹¹

The first students who arrived found that the school was not properly equipped, and Florence had to intervene again to make sure it was fit for purpose. She also made recommendations for the nominations of professors of hygiene and pathology. ¹²

In June 1862, Florence presented a paper at the Congres International de Bienfaisance on Army Sanitation Reform, in which she outlined the advantages of trained attendants at the Army Medical School at Chatham. She also took the opportunity to comment on the system of “regulation” of “camp vices” and the “open infamous trading in prostitution” that took place in the army, recommending that the men’s barracks should be made more like home with libraries, reading rooms and innocent games.¹³ However, despite her privately printed paper Note on the Supposed Protection Afforded Against Venereal Diseases, by recognizing Prostitution and Putting It under Police Regulation in which she outlined statistics on hospital admissions for venereal disease, the Contagious Diseases Prevention Act was passed two years later and Chatham’s purpose built Lock hospital, to treat those arrested under the Act, was constructed in 1869. In 1870, the “The Ladies’ National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts” was launched including Nightingale and Josephine Butler, who travelled to Chatham and other Kent towns on a campaign to repeal the Act.

Twenty years after establishing the Army Medical School at Chatham, Florence returned to Kent; this time, for her own health.¹⁴ After the death of her mother on the 2nd of February 1880, Florence suffered a nervous collapse and was prescribed “sea air” by her doctors. Taking their advice, she visited Ramsgate, which was billed as “the most bracing and invigorating seaside resort in England”.¹⁵ She checked in to the Granville, a smart hotel on Victoria Parade designed by Edward Welby Pugin, the son of Augustus Pugin. As a spa hotel it was equipped with hydropathic, ozone, saline, plunge and Turkish baths ¹⁶, as well as trained assistants and medical men. It was described in the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News as a perfect “pick up” during the “murkiest of the months” where “ladies who shrink from exposing their dainty forms in close-clinging dresses to the staring crowd on the sands, or dislike the clumsy, comfortless, old bathing machines may, on the days devoted to them, enjoy all the comforts and benefits of sea-water bathing with the privacy of home”.¹⁷ Florence wrote to her friend, Miss Pringle:

“The doctors tell me, “I must be ‘free’ for at least a year ‘from the responsibilities which have been forced upon me’ (and which, they might say, I have so ill fulfilled) and from ‘letters.’ But when is that year to come? I believe, however, I must go away again for a time, if only to work up the arrears of my Indian work, which weigh heavily on my mind.”¹⁸

However, despite the sea air and its state of the art bathing facilities, Ramsgate failed to revive Florence and she left the “Hygeiopolis” after three weeks.¹⁹ The woman who achieved so much to improve the health of others, failed to improve her own. Nevertheless, indefatigible, she lived until the age of 90, dying in 1910.

Four years later with the outbreak of the First World War, the Royal Naval Hospital, Chatham, erected in 1899-1905 to replace the Melville Hospital took on strategic importance as one of three principal naval hospitals in the UK. It was designed as a pavilion-plan hospital, a system which Florence had pioneered.²⁰

This article was written: 13 April 2025.

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