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try to spot breast cancer tumours, amongst other things. During the 1900s, optical microscopes and staining techniques were being used to look at the structures of organisms, particularly infective ones. The first successful blood transfusion took place in 1905, and nine years later, blood was being treated with citrates to prevent it clotting and allow it to be stored. Electrocardiograms to monitor the electrical activity of the heart were invented by the Dutchman Willem Einthoven in 1906. Blood pressure measurement was rare in most countries before 1910, but by 1915, a large study by an insurance company in the United States had set the ‘normal’ values for blood pressure.
    Blood tests had become routine by 1910, with samples centrifuged to separate out cells from plasma, allowing an estimation of the volume of red blood cells to identify anaemia and check volume following blood loss. At the beginning of the first World War, attempts were being made to design dressings which did not stick to wounds: pulling off dry dressings that had stuck to blood and pus was a sure way to damage the healing tissue underneath. Louis Lumiere, a French surgeon, invented ‘tulle gras’ in 1914 – a dressing made of cotton gauze coated with a mix of plant resin and paraffin wax to prevent adhesion – which would remain in use for another 50 years.
    All of these developments were at the disposal of Florence’s doctors in the East Sussex Hospital in 1920, and would have been routine steps in her care. She may have had skull x-rays to determine the extent of the head injury and blood tests to find out how much blood had been lost. Nurses would have constantly monitored her blood pressure and pulse to spot signs of rising pressure on her brain that could lead to further deterioration. Non-adhesive dressings would have been required, and changed regularly, on the bleeding scalp wounds that overlay her more serious head injuries. On that first evening, however, with Florence’s condition so obviously life-threatening, it was clear that there was an urgent need to summon a relative or friend to the bedside. The person they called was Mabel Rogers.

Chapter 5
Young Florence Shore
    Mabel Rogers was engaged in a different kind of tragedy on the evening of Monday 12th January: she was watching
Hamlet
at Covent Garden. There she was told, between acts, that a message had been received at Carnforth Lodge with news of the attack on Florence, and the terrible injuries that had left her in a coma in the East Sussex hospital. Mabel’s immediate reaction was to go to her friend, in spite of the hour and the difficulties of travelling alone at night. She caught the 11.20pm train from London, which could take her only as far as Tonbridge in Kent – the same town where Florence had visited her aunt the day before. From here, she drove to Hastings, arriving at the seaside town at three o’clock in the morning. She went straight to the hospital, where she was taken to see Florence, unconscious in bed. Mabel didn’t leave the hospital again until after Florence had died, four days later.
    In the long hours at the hospital bedside, watching the nurses caring for Florence, Mabel must have been painfully reminded of all the years that she and Florence had worked together doing the same for their patients. They had met in 1894 in Edinburgh, where they had both chosen to do their nurse training. The Scottish capital would have been a bold choice of destination for Mabel, whose family was from Devon and who had gone to school in rural Oxfordshire. It was a more obvious destination for Florence, since it was her mother’s home city, and her father had trained there as a doctor.
    Offley Bohun Shore, Florence’s father, was the fifth child and third son of another Offley Shore and his wife Eliza. He was also cousin to the father of Florence Nightingale, the pioneering nurse for whom Florence Shore would be named. It was