Enlisted on the 2nd of January 1855.
No other enlistment details are shown.
Joined the regiment in the Crimea on the 3rd of August 1855.
Sent to Scutari on the 12th of September 1855.
Medal roll states "Dead." No indication of the date or place is shown, but he died in the General Hospital at Scutari on the 21st of September 1855.
He left no will, and had £2/4/0 in his "credits".
Entitled to the Crimean medal with clasp for Sebastopol.
Not recorded by Lummis and Wynn.
Medal roll states "Dead." No indication of the date or place is shown, but he died in the General Hospital at Scutari on the 21st of September 1855.
He left no will, and had £2/4/0 in his "credits".
[RM: A letter concerning his death was written by Florence Nightingale from Scutari on the 22nd September 1855. It is now in the collection of School of Nursing of the University of California at San Francisco. It was donated by Florence Nightingale's family.]
[PB, March 2017: I found a reference to this letter online at here, with a brief summary:
Original handwritten signed letter by Florence Nightingale dated September 22, 1855 and addressed to Mr. John Dancey informing him of the death of Private Nicholas Flint of the 13th Dragoons who died of typhus fever in Barrack Hospital in Scutari.
[Source: Florence Nightingale letter. UC San Francisco. Special Collections.]
At first it seemed no transcription was available, and in any case copyright is clearly strictly controlled. I wondered whether it might be included in Lynn MacDonald's edited Collected Works of FN, or in one of the online FN collections of correspondence, of which there are several to follow up?
However, photographs of the letter can be seen online at [??] I notice two letters from NF to his family in Brtiain were also incuded in the bequest, along with a letter from an antiquarian book dealer who valued the letters. [ADD & TRANSCRIBE].
Who was John Dancey?
Nicholas Flint's illness and death are described in detail in Robert Lyons's A treatise on fever, or, Selections from a course of lectures on fever: being part of a course of theory and practice of medicine (1861). Lyons carried out an autopsy on NF. [ADD DETAIL]
This can viewed online at the Wellcome Library, and is also available for download in various formats at
http://search.wellcomelibrary.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb2236815__Snicholas%20flint__Orightresult__X3;jsessionid=770B9800B7DB0EB9F61EC3E256C8045E?lang=eng&suite=cobalt
A treatise on fever, or, Selections from a course of lectures on fever : being part of a course of theory and practice of medicine / delivered by Robert D. Lyons. / delivered by Robert D. Lyons Lyons, Robert Spencer Dyer, 1826-1886. mediaName E-books | Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts | 1861.
See Wikipedia: Robert Spencer Dyer Lyons.
[PB: Lyons was, I think, the chief pathologist to the Army in Crimea. Check. Why specifically did Lyons carry out post mortems? He both knew and didn't know the "cause of death". What is the significance of the soldiers he singled out as examples, including Flint and a number of others from the Light Brigade [NAME]. "Fever" was obviously a profound problem for doctors in the nineteenth century. The idea of the body in some sense "burning up" was difficult to account for. They could see that many different-seeming diseases the British Army was currently experiencing (cholera, diarrhoea, typhus, typhoid, smallpox, yellow fever and so on [scarlet fever, measles, pneumona]) all had "fever" in common. List the different "fever" diagnoses. Some of these diseases were not encountered back home in Britain. They also lacked an adequate theory of causative agents ("germs", microbes, bacteria, viruses, parasites etc), and of mechanisms for the transmission of disease (touch, air, water, insects and so on). How does this relate to the (subsequent?) differentiation of typhoid and typhus?]
See a frecent article on the history of ideas about fever here: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/09/running-hot-a-cultural-history-of-the-fever/405643/.