The nursing profession’s ties to Baylor date to 1909, when a diploma program was established at what is now known as the Baylor University Medical Center. Over the past century-plus, nursing education has been an integral part of the Baylor story, through decades of partnership with the Waco campus, the BUMC, and the present-day Louise Herrington School of Nursing in Dallas.
One of the most intriguing and little-known stories of the Nursing School’s long history is that of a collection of some 30 letters written by Florence Nightingale, perhaps the most famous nurse in Western history. Written to several different recipients between 1870 and 1891, they are largely addressed to “My dear Madame Werckner,” whom she had met amidst the devastation of the Crimean War.
Florence Nightingale ca. 1860 (around age 40). Image via Wikipedia
But how did these letters come to the BUMC? Who was Caroline Werckner? And what can this unique resource tell us about the earliest days of modern nursing, care for the wounded, and 19th century correspondence?
Thanks to the efforts of the Baylor Libraries’ Digitization and Digital Collection Preservation Services team – operating out of the Riley Digitization Center – these one-of-a-kind treasures are available to researchers around the world as high-resolution digital images, along with transcripts and a complete finding aid. Completing this process now allows Nightingale scholars, researchers, and students immediate access to these previously unpublished letters, expanding our understanding of the life and legacy of this modern-day medical pioneer.
Destination: Dallas
According to Dr. Linda Plank, Dean of the Herrington School of Nursing, the letters’ journey to Baylor and their eventual digitization in fall 2024 was a circuitous route involving the evolution of the nursing school’s partnerships with Dallas and Baylor University dating to the early 1900s, a petroleum magnate, and the establishment of Dallas’ long vanished Florence Nightingale Hospital.
“Since 1950, our nursing students have been on the Waco campus for two years and then coming to Dallas for two years of nursing school,” Plank said. “Since the nursing school has continued to be located on the campus of Baylor University Medical Center, the relationship remained close even after the legal relationship ended in 1997.”
The evidence for how the letters came to Baylor points to the involvement of Edwy Rolfe Brown and his second wife, Florrie Bess McCrery. According to his biography in the Texas State Historical Association’s Handbook of Texas Online, Brown was a pioneer oil man, forming his own company in Corsicana and later serving as general manager of the Magnolia Petroleum Company in Dallas in the 1910s. After a stint with the Standard Oil Company in New York, Brown returned to Dallas in the late 1920s and remained active in the economic and social scene there through the mid-1930s, even serving as one of the organizers of the 1936 Texas Centennial.
During their time in Dallas, the Browns became involved in philanthropy directed toward the city’s medical community, specifically nursing. Rev. George W. Truett had established Baylor Hospital in 1903, and work on the facility was completed in 1909, when it opened as the Texas Baptist Memorial Sanitarium (TBMS); among its facilities, the hospital housed a nurse training school.
In 1921, the TBMS’ name was changed to Baylor Hospital to emphasize its relationship with Baylor University in Waco. That year, the nurses’ training school was listed in the charter as one of the professional schools of Baylor University. Just one year later, a new building for women and children was completed and named the Florence Nightingale Hospital.
The Florence Nightingale Maternity Hospital, Dallas, ca. 1940. Image via the UT Southwestern Image Archives.
The Browns provided financial support for the hospital, with records indicating they helped provide important medical equipment and even air conditioning systems to the new facility. For a quarter century, the building served the Dallas area and trained hundreds of nurses before it was demolished in the 1950s to make way for a new Women’s and Children’s Hospital. It was during this time that the letters were donated to Baylor University Medical Center, likely as a donation from the Browns.
“Baylor University Medical Center had possession of the letters but gave them to me in Fall of 2023,” Plank said. “I recognized the value of these letters to the nursing profession and wanted them to be treated professionally and be shared with others, including the official Florence Nightingale Museum in England.”
“I am grateful for the expertise of our Baylor Libraries to digitize these unique documents and allow us to have them in Dallas and share with the nursing profession,” she added.
Florence and Caroline
So, what’s in the letters? Largely, they contain part of the story of the relationship between Florence Nightingale and Caroline Werckner (1829-1894).
Nightingale’s story is well-documented and her reputation as the founder of modern nursing is unquestioned. But beyond her work as a statistician, social reformer, and medical pioneer is the story of Florence Nightingale the person, whose inner thoughts and emotions are revealed vividly in her correspondence with others.
The letters in Baylor’s collection are all written by Nightingale, and the majority were addressed to Werckner, a fellow nurse who served during the Crimean War (1853-1856). Werckner was working with wounded French prisoners held in Breslau (then part of Prussia). Years later, Nightingale remarked on Werckner’s wartime service in an address to retirees at St. Thomas:
“At a large German station, which almost all the prisoners’ trains passed through, a lady went every night during all that long, long dreadful winter, and for the whole night, to feed and warm and comfort and often to receive the last dying words of the miserable French prisoners, as they arrived in open trucks, some frozen, some as dead, others to die in the station, all half-clad and starving.
“Night after night, as these long, terrible trains-full dragged their slow length into the station, she kneeled on its pavement, supporting the dying heads, receiving their last messages to their mothers; pouring wine or hot milk down the throats of the sick; dressing the frost-bitten limbs; and, thank God, saving many.
“Many were carried to the prisoners’ hospital in the town, of whom about two-thirds recovered. Every bit of linen she had went in this way. She herself contracted incurable ill-health during these fearful nights. But thousands were saved by her means. She is my friend. She came and saw me, and it is from her lips I heard the story.”
Nightingale died in 1910 at age 90. In her will, she left £100 to “Madame Caroline Werckner, who nursed the French prisoners in the Franco-German War” (approximately £14,700 in 2024 valuation).
A Brief – and Revealing – Example
Through almost three dozen letters, Baylor’s Nightingale correspondence offers interesting glimpses into the minutiae of daily life and the emotional state of its writer. Nightingale’s letters contain information on routine business, exhortations for her friend to stay safe (“God bless you & your work – in great press of business and illness” she writes in a July 5, 1871 letter to Werckner) and more.
Letter from Florence Nightingale to Caroline Werckner dated July 5, 1871.
It’s worth noting that the letters in this collection were all written many years after the Crimean War, where Nightingale’s commitment to her work would earn her lasting fame. Still, there is an immediacy and “you are there” quality to the letters that make them feel as fresh as the day they were written.
For example, in that July 1871 letter, Nightingale passes along some good news: she is sending Werckner a “cheque” for £200 from her “Aid Society” for the care of French soldiers to whom Werckner is ministering. By this point, those soldiers were some fifteen years removed from the battlefield, but the obvious need of funding for their care reveals the lifelong impacts battlefield wounds could impose upon the injured.
Connect with the Collection
Researching the contents of this collection prior to this month required an appointment with the School of Nursing in Dallas. Today, they are digitized and available for full access as part of the Baylor University Digital Collections.
The work of digitizing and placing them online was overseen by Beth Farwell, Director of the Arts & Special Collections Research Center; they were scanned and added to the Quartex system by Evangeline Eilers, Academic Consultant and Imaging Specialist in the Riley Digitization Center.
Access the collection’s finding aid
For inquiries about the collection, please email RareCollections@baylor.edu and include “Nightingale letters” in your subject line.