Reading Biographies: Spurgeon
Friday, August 20, 2010 at 11:53AM 
I’m reading Arnold Dallimore’s Spurgeon along with Tim Challies and others. This week’s reading included chapters 15-17 of this biography of Charles Spurgeon, with the first chapter dealing with the daily life of the Metropolitan Tabernacle, the second with the 10 peak years of Spurgeon’s minstry, and the last with some of the features of Spurgeon’s personality. I’ve got a busy day, so I’m just going to mention a couple of things that interested me
Chapter 15 dispels any notion that the Metropolitan Tabernacle was just a place for Sunday services. It was a very busy place with things happening there all day and evening every day of the week. It was very much a working church, with an awe-inspiring number of fruitful tasks accomplished in it.
I did have one question: What is a Bible nurse? Mrs. Spurgeon, we’re told, “maintained a Bible nurse at her own expense, and other such nurses also functioned from the Tabernacle.” Can you enlighten me?
Nearly half of the seventeenth chapter titled Personal Characteristics is an explanation of Spurgeon’s drinking and smoking habits. Yes, as you probably already know, Spurgeon smoked cigars and drank beer and ale. That he writes so much on this explains more about Dallimore, I think, than it does about Spurgeon. He concludes his bit on these “bad habits” by saying:
I reported these matters regarding Spurgeon with much reluctance. They seem sadly regrettable in the life of so righteous a man, yet in the name of either Christian honesty or scholarly accuracy they could not be omitted.
Dallimore explains that “these two practices” show us that Spurgeon was “a man of his times.” I’m thinking that these comments may show us that Dallimore was also a man of his times.
rebecca
Re: Bible nurses, I found this: The History of Nursing – Major Sources in the Metropolitan London Archives (pdf).
Mrs Ellen Ranyard established the London Bible and Domestic Female Mission in 1857 based at her home in Bloomsbury. Working class “Biblewomen” were employed to visit the poor, advise on domestic matters, and to sell Bibles by instalments. They were supervised by middle class female superintendents who read their reports once a week, paid their salaries and ran the mothers’ meetings held in each district.
In 1868 Mrs Ranyard added a nursing branch to the Mission. The Bible nurses, drawn from the respectable working class, were the first trained district nurses in London. Initially a Bible nurse’s training included only three months at a hospital, but by 1893 it had been extended to one year at a general hospital, attendance at a special hospital, then probationary training in the districts. By 1894 the Mission employed 82 nurses who made 215,000 visits to almost 10,000 patients. After 1907 it ceased to train its own nurses. In 1917 the name of the organisation was changed to the Ranyard Mission and its nurses became Ranyard Nurses.
Putting it together, I’m guessing Bible nurses were like an order of nurses that came out of “Biblewomen.”
Reader Comments (2)
“... a man of his times.”
Good observation. When someone writes my biography (ha!), I wonder how many of my opinions will indicate the same thing.
Man of his times, indeed. I thought that extra bit of editorializing was unfortunate, because it really pulled me out of the biography and drew my attention to the author.