Nightingale is a tough nut to crack. Lytton-Strachey brought this out pretty well a century ago in his mini-biography of her in Eminent Victorians. She was a single person set up against an entire system of studied neglect who managed through pure will to make permanent changes in that system, and in the entire country attached thereto, and a character that large and impressive is bound to have some pretty big foibles.
Namely, she was ruthless with any signs of weakness in the people who worked with her. They could be at her side for ten years, giving every second of their lives for her cause, but as soon as they got tired and wanted to slow down, they were dead to her. She gave increasing blocks of time to religious speculation and the development of programs to indoctrinate the working classes for their own moral good. As she grew older, she grew into a spidery reclusive issuing dicta from her room, insisting increasingly on her particular version of the ideal hospital even as the potentially deadly flaws in it became apparent. But then she became a bit senile, and was by all accounts quite pleasant thereafter.
– Count Dolby von Luckner
http://www.ftg-comic.com/2009/04/23/index.php
Flave Returns! But how will Newton’s Ever-So-British heart deal with the presence of so much Funky Goodness so close? Find out in Episode 212: Culture Shock!
– The Count and Geoff
The Count does tend to measure things in dead babies.
On that subject, a meta syntactic exercise:
What is worse than [number] dead babies in a [container]?
One dead baby in [number] [containers].
–Geoff
Around the time of our 200th episode, I commissioned a piece of Frederick art from Adriana Ferguson of Stop the Comic and Very Very fame. And it just came!! Check it out!
Way Awesome, isn’t it? Thank you Adriana!
In entirely other news related to today’s comic, I have to admit that, for the greater part of my life, I have not thought about sewers a great deal. Then the Countess thrust a copy of The Big Necessity into my hands and, damn if it doesn’t stir the action centers of a fellah. You start off at, “Oh, a book about poo, this will be amusing” and then end up at “Ah, so that is how many babies are going to die this year because assholes like me are unwilling to really look into what is done with my excreta once it is blissfully banished from my presence.”
Bazalgette shows up from time to time in that book, and now he’s meandered over here too it would seem!
– Count Dolby von Luckner