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Florence Nightingale, OM, RRC (; 12 May 1820 – 13 August 1910), who came to be known as "The Lady with the Lamp", was a pioneering nurse, writer and noted statistician.
ence Nightingale was born into a rich, upper-class, well-connected British family at the Villa Colombaia, Florence, Grand Duchy of Tuscany, and was named after the city of her birth. Florence's older sister Parthenope (pronounced ParTHENopee) had similarly been named after her place of birth, a Greek settlement now part of the city of Naples
Her parents were William Edward Nightingale (1794–1874) and Frances ("Fanny") Nightingale née Smith (1789–1880).
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Perhaps, if prematurely we dismiss ourselves from this world, all may even have to be suffered through again — the premature birth may not contribute to the production of another being, which must be begun again from the beginning.
Passion, intellect, moral activity — these three have never been satisfied in a woman. In this cold and oppressive conventional atmosphere, they cannot be satisfied. To say more on this subject would be to enter into the whole history of society, of the present state of civilisation.
Poetry and imagination begin life. A child will fall on its knees on the gravel walk at the sight of a pink hawthorn in full flower, when it is by itself, to praise God for it.
People do not go into the company of their fellow-creatures for what would seem a very sufficient reason, namely, that they have something to say to them, or something that they want to hear from them; but in the vague hope that they may find something to say.
The family uses people, not for what they are, nor for what they are intended to be, but for what it wants them for — its own uses. It thinks of them not as what God has made them, but as the something which it has arranged that they shall be.
Religious men are and must be heretics now — for we must not pray, except in a form of words, made beforehand — or think of God but with a prearranged idea.
Encyclopedia
Florence Nightingale, OM, RRC (; 12 May 1820 – 13 August 1910), who came to be known as "The Lady with the Lamp", was a pioneering nurse, writer and noted statistician.
Biography
Early life
Florence Nightingale was born into a rich, upper-class, well-connected British family at the Villa Colombaia, Florence, Grand Duchy of Tuscany, and was named after the city of her birth. Florence's older sister Parthenope (pronounced ParTHENopee) had similarly been named after her place of birth, a Greek settlement now part of the city of Naples
Her parents were William Edward Nightingale (1794–1874) and Frances ("Fanny") Nightingale née Smith (1789–1880). William Nightingale was born William Edward Shore. His mother Mary née Evans was the niece of one Peter Nightingale, under the terms of whose will William Shore not only inherited his estate Lea Hurst in Derbyshire, but also assumed the name and arms of Nightingale. Fanny's father (Florence's maternal grandfather) was the abolitionist William Smith.
Inspired by what she took as a Christian divine calling, experienced first in 1837 at Embley Park and later throughout her life, Florence announced her decision to enter nursing in 1845, despite the intense anger and distress of her family, particularly her mother. In this, she rebelled against the expected role for a woman of her status, which was to become a wife and mother. Nightingale worked hard to educate herself in the art and science of nursing, in spite of opposition from her family and the restrictive societal code for affluent young English women.
She cared for people in poverty. In December 1844, she became the leading advocate for improved medical care in the infirmaries and immediately engaged the support of Charles Villiers, then president of the Poor Law Board. This led to her active role in the reform of the Poor Laws, extending far beyond the provision of medical care. She was later instrumental in mentoring and then sending Agnes Elizabeth Jones and other Nightingale Probationers to Liverpool Workhouse Infirmary.
Nightingale was courted by politician and poet Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Baron Houghton, but she rejected him, convinced that marriage would interfere with her ability to follow her calling to nursing. When in Rome in 1847, recovering from a mental breakdown precipitated by a continuing crisis of her relationship with Milnes, she met Sidney Herbert, a brilliant politician who had been Secretary at War (1845–1846), a position he would hold again during the Crimean War. Herbert was already married, but he and Nightingale were immediately attracted to each other and they became lifelong close friends. Herbert was instrumental in facilitating her pioneering work in the Crimea and in the field of nursing, and she became a key adviser to him in his political career. In 1851, she rejected Milnes' marriage proposal, against her mother's wishes.
Nightingale also had strong and intimate relations with Benjamin Jowett, particularly about the time that she was considering leaving money in her will to establish a Chair in Applied Statistics at the University of Oxford.
Nightingale continued her travels with Charles and Selina Bracebridge as far as Greece and Egypt. Though not mentioned by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, her writings on Egypt in particular are fascinating testimony to her learning, literary skill and philosophy of life. Sailing up the Nile as far as Abu Simbel in January 1850 she wrote that "I don't think I ever saw anything which affected me much more than this", considering the temple: "Sublime in the highest style of intellectual beauty, intellect without effort, without suffering... not a feature is correct – but the whole effect is more expressive of spiritual grandeur than anything I could have imagined. It makes the impression upon one that thousands of voices do, uniting in one unanimous simultaneous feeling of enthusiasm or emotion, which is said to overcome the strongest man." At Thebes she wrote of being "called to God" while a week later near Cairo she wrote in her diary (as distinct from her far longer letters that Parthenope was to print after her return): "God called me in morning and asked me would I do good for him alone without reputation." Later in 1850, she visited the Lutheran religious community at Kaiserswerth-am-Rhein where she observed Pastor Theodor Fliedner and the deaconesses working for the sick and the deprived. She regarded the experience as a turning point in her life, and issued her findings anonymously in 1851; The Institution of Kaiserswerth on the Rhine, for the Practical Training of Deaconesses, etc. was her first published work.
On 22 August 1853, Nightingale took the post of superintendent at the Institute for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen in Upper Harley Street, London, a position she held until October 1854. Her father had given her an annual income of £500 (roughly £25,000/US$50,000 in present terms), which allowed her to live comfortably and to pursue her career. James Joseph Sylvester is said to have been her mentor.
Crimean War
Florence Nightingale's most famous contribution came during the Crimean War, which became her central focus when reports began to filter back to Britain about the horrific conditions for the wounded. On 21 October 1854, she and a staff of 38 women volunteer nurses, trained by Nightingale and including her aunt Mai Smith, were sent (under the authorization of Sidney Herbert) to Turkey, about 545 km across the Black Sea from Balaklava in the Crimea, where the main British camp was based.
Nightingale arrived early in November 1854 at Selimiye Barracks in Scutari (modern-day Üsküdar in Istanbul). She and her nurses found wounded soldiers being badly cared for by overworked medical staff in the face of official indifference. Medicines were in short supply, hygiene was being neglected, and mass infections were common, many of them fatal. There was no equipment to process food for the patients.
Death rates did not drop; on the contrary, they began to rise. The death count was the highest of all hospitals in the region. During her first winter at Scutari, 4,077 soldiers died there. Ten times more soldiers died from illnesses such as typhus, typhoid, cholera and dysentery than from battle wounds. Conditions at the temporary barracks hospital were so fatal to the patients because of overcrowding and the hospital's defective sewers and lack of ventilation. A Sanitary Commission had to be sent out by the British government to Scutari in March 1855, almost six months after Florence Nightingale had arrived, and effected flushing out the sewers and improvements to ventilation. Death rates were sharply reduced. It is directly through her thorough observations that the association linking sanitary conditions and healing became recognized and established. “Within 6 months of her arrival in Scutari, the mortality rate dropped from 42.7 percent to 2.2 percent“. Florence insisted on adequate lighting, diet, hygiene, and activity. “She understood even then that the mind and body worked together, that cleanliness, the predecessor to our clean and sterile techniques of today, was a major barrier to infection, and that it promoted healing”.
Nightingale continued believing the death rates were due to poor nutrition and supplies and overworking of the soldiers. It was not until after she returned to Britain and began collecting evidence before the Royal Commission on the Health of the Army that she came to believe that most of the soldiers at the hospital were killed by poor living conditions. This experience influenced her later career, when she advocated sanitary living conditions as of great importance. Consequently, she reduced deaths in the army during peacetime and turned attention to the sanitary design of hospitals.
The Lady with the Lamp
During the Crimean campaign, Florence Nightingale gained the nickname "The Lady with the Lamp", deriving from a phrase in a report in The Times:
She is a ‘ministering angel’ without any exaggeration in these hospitals, and as her slender form glides quietly along each corridor, every poor fellow's face softens with gratitude at the sight of her. When all the medical officers have retired for the night and silence and darkness have settled down upon those miles of prostrate sick, she may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds.
The phrase was further popularised by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1857 poem "Santa Filomena":
Lo! in that hour of misery
A lady with a lamp I see
Pass through the glimmering gloom,
And flit from room to room.
Return home
Florence Nightingale returned to Britain a heroine on 7 August 1856, and, according to the BBC, was arguably the most famous Victorian after Queen Victoria herself. Nightingale moved from her family home in Middle Claydon, Buckinghamshire, to the Burlington Hotel in Piccadilly, where she was stricken by a fever, probably due to a chronic form of brucellosis ("Crimean fever") that she contracted during the Crimean war. She barred her mother and sister from her room and rarely left it.
In response to an invitation from Queen Victoria – and despite the limitations of confinement to her room – Nightingale played the central role in the establishment of the Royal Commission on the Health of the Army, of which Sidney Herbert became chairman. As a woman, Nightingale could not be appointed to the Royal Commission, but she wrote the commission's 1,000-plus page report, that included detailed statistical reports, and she was instrumental in the implementation of its recommendations. The report led to a major overhaul of army military care, and to the establishment of an Army Medical School and of a comprehensive system of army medical records.
Later career
While she was still in Turkey, on 29 November 1855, a public meeting to give recognition to Florence Nightingale for her work in the war led to the establishment of the Nightingale Fund for the training of nurses. There was an outpouring of generous donations. Sidney Herbert served as honorary secretary of the fund, and the Duke of Cambridge was chairman. Nightingale was considered a pioneer in the concept of medical tourism as well, based on her letters from 1856 in which she would write of spas in Turkey detailing the health conditions, physical descriptions, dietary information, and other vitally important details of patients whom she directed there (where treatment was significantly less expensive than in Switzerland). It may be assumed she was directing patients of meagre means to affordable treatment.
By 1859 Nightingale had £45,000 at her disposal from the Nightingale Fund to set up the Nightingale Training School at St. Thomas' Hospital on 9 July 1860. (It is now called the Florence Nightingale School of Nursing and Midwifery and is part of King's College London.) The first trained Nightingale nurses began work on 16 May 1865 at the Liverpool Workhouse Infirmary. She also campaigned and raised funds for the Royal Buckinghamshire Hospital in Aylesbury, near her family home.
Nightingale wrote Notes on Nursing, which was published in 1860, a slim 136-page book that served as the cornerstone of the curriculum at the Nightingale School and other nursing schools established. Notes on Nursing also sold well to the general reading public and is considered a classic introduction to nursing. Nightingale would spend the rest of her life promoting the establishment and development of the nursing profession and organizing it into its modern form.
Nightingale was an advocate for the improvement of care and conditions in the military and civilian hospitals in Britain. Among her popular books are Notes on Hospitals, which deals with the correlation of sanitary techniques to medical facilities; Notes on Nursing, which was the most valued nursing textbook of the day; Notes on Matters Affecting the Health, Efficiency and Hospital Administration of the British Army.
Nightingale's work served as an inspiration for nurses in the American Civil War. The Union government approached her for advice in organizing field medicine. Although her ideas met official resistance, they inspired the volunteer body of the United States Sanitary Commission.
In 1869, Nightingale and Dr Elizabeth Blackwell opened the Women's Medical College.
In the 1870s, Nightingale mentored Linda Richards, "America's first trained nurse", and enabled her to return to the USA with adequate training and knowledge to establish high-quality nursing schools. Linda Richards went on to become a great nursing pioneer in the USA and Japan.
By 1882, Nightingale nurses had a growing and influential presence in the embryonic nursing profession. Some had become matrons at several leading hospitals, including, in London, St Mary's Hospital, Westminster Hospital, St Marylebone Workhouse Infirmary and the Hospital for Incurables at Putney; and throughout Britain, e.g., Royal Victoria Hospital, Netley; Edinburgh Royal Infirmary; Cumberland Infirmary and Liverpool Royal Infirmary, as well as at Sydney Hospital in New South Wales, Australia.
In 1883, Nightingale was awarded the Royal Red Cross by Queen Victoria. In 1907, she became the first woman to be awarded the Order of Merit. In 1908, she was given the Honourary Freedom of the City of London.
By 1896, Florence Nightingale was bedridden. She may have had what is now known as chronic fatigue syndrome. Her birthday is now celebrated as International CFS Awareness Day. A recent biography cites instead brucellosis and associated spondylitis. During her bedridden years, she also did pioneering work in the field of hospital planning, and her work propagated quickly across Britain and the world.
Relationships
Although much of Nightingale's work improved the lot of women everywhere, she had little affection for women in general, preferring the friendship of powerful men. She often referred to herself in the masculine, as for example "a man of action".
She did, however, have several important and passionate friendships with women. As a young woman she adored both an aunt and a female cousin with lover-like attachment. Later in life she kept up a prolonged correspondence with an Irish nun, Sister Mary Clare Moore, with whom she had worked in Crimea. Her most beloved confidante was Mary Clarke, an Englishwoman she met in 1837 and kept in touch with throughout her life.
In spite of these deep emotional attachments to women, most scholars of Nightingale's life believe that she remained celibate for her entire life, perhaps because she felt an almost religious calling to her career, or perhaps because she lived in time of sexual repression".
Death
On 13 August 1910, at the age of 90, she died peacefully in her sleep in her room at 10 South Street, Park Lane. The offer of burial in Westminster Abbey was declined by her relatives, and she is buried in the graveyard at St. Margaret Church in East Wellow, Hampshire.
Contributions
Statistics
Florence Nightingale had exhibited a gift for mathematics from an early age and excelled in the subject under the tutorship of her father. Later, Nightingale became a pioneer in the visual presentation of information and statistical graphics. Among other things she used the pie chart, which had first been developed by William Playfair in 1801. After the Crimean War, Nightingale used the polar area diagram, equivalent to a modern circular histogram or rose diagram, to illustrate seasonal sources of patient mortality in the military field hospital she managed. Nightingale called a compilation of such diagrams a "coxcomb", but later that term has frequently been used for the individual diagrams. She made extensive use of coxcombs to present reports on the nature and magnitude of the conditions of medical care in the Crimean War to Members of Parliament and civil servants who would have been unlikely to read or understand traditional statistical reports.
In her later life Nightingale made a comprehensive statistical study of sanitation in Indian rural life and was the leading figure in the introduction of improved medical care and public health service in India.
In 1859 Nightingale was elected the first female member of the Royal Statistical Society and she later became an honorary member of the American Statistical Association.
Literature and the women's movement
While better known for her contributions in the nursing and mathematical fields, Nightingale is also an important link in the study of English feminism. During 1850 and 1852, she was struggling with her self-definition and the expectations of an upper-class marriage from her family. As she sorted out her thoughts, she wrote Suggestions for Thought to Searchers after Religious Truth. The three-volume book has never been printed in its entirety, but a section, called Cassandra, was published by Ray Strachey in 1928. Strachey included it in The Cause, a history of the women's movement. Apparently, the writing served its original purpose of sorting out thoughts; Nightingale left soon after to train at the Institute for deaconesses at Kaiserswerth.
Cassandra protests the over-feminization of women into near helplessness, such as Nightingale saw in her mother's and older sister's lethargic lifestyle, despite their education. She rejected their life of thoughtless comfort for the world of social service. The work also reflects her fear of her ideas being ineffective, as were Cassandra's. Cassandra is a virgin-priestess of Apollo who receives a divinely inspired prophecy, but her prophetic warnings go unheeded. Elaine Showalter called Nightingale's writing "a major text of English feminism, a link between Wollstonecraft and Woolf."
Theology
Suggestions for Thought is also Nightingale's great work of theology, her own theodicy, where she develops her radical heterodox ideas.
Nightingale was a Christian universalist. On 7 February 1837 – not long before her 17th birthday – something happened that would change her life: "God spoke to me", she wrote, "and called me to His service."
Legacy and memory
Nursing
The first official nurses’ training program, the Nightingale School for Nurses, opened in 1860. The mission of the school was to train nurses to work in hospitals, work with the poor, and to teach. This intended that students cared for people in their homes, an appreciation that is still advancing in reputation and professional opportunity for nurses today.
Florence Nightingale's lasting contribution has been her role in founding the modern nursing profession. She set an example of compassion, commitment to patient care, and diligent and thoughtful hospital administration.
The work of the Nightingale School of Nursing continues today. The Nightingale building in the School of Nursing and Midwifery at the University of Southampton is named after her. International Nurses Day is celebrated on her birthday each year.
The Florence Nightingale Declaration Campaign, established by nursing leaders throughout the world through the Nightingale Initiative for Global Health (NIGH), aims to build a global grassroots movement to achieve two United Nations Resolutions for adoption by the UN General Assembly of 2008 which will declare: The International Year of the Nurse–2010 (the centennial of Nightingale's death); The UN Decade for a Healthy World–2011 to 2020 (the bicentennial of Nightingale's birth). NIGH also works to rekindle awareness about the important issues highlighted by Florence Nightingale, such as preventive medicine and holistic health. So far, The Florence Nightingale Declaration has been signed by over 18,500 signatories from 86 countries.
During the Vietnam War, Nightingale inspired many US Army nurses, sparking a renewal of interest in her life and work. Her admirers include Country Joe of Country Joe and the Fish, who has assembled an extensive website in her honour.
Four hospitals in Istanbul are named after Nightingale: F. N. Hastanesi in Sisli (the biggest private hospital in Turkey), Metropolitan F.N. Hastanesi in Gayrettepe, Avrupa F.N. Hastanesi in Mecidiyeköy, and Kiziltoprak F.N. Hastanesi in Kadiköy, all belonging to the Turkish Cardiology Foundation.
The Agostino Gemelli Medical School in Rome, the first university-based hospital in Italy and one of its most respected medical centres, honoured Nightingale's contribution to the nursing profession by giving the name "Bedside Florence" to a wireless computer system it developed to assist nursing.
There are many foundations named after Florence Nightingale. Most are nursing foundations, but there is also Nightingale Research Foundation in Canada, dedicated to the study and treatment of chronic fatigue syndrome, which Nightingale is believed to have had.
There is a psychological effect known as the "Florence Nightingale Effect", whereby nurses and doctors fall in love with their patients.
Museums and monuments
A statue of Florence Nightingale stands in Waterloo Place, Westminster, London, just off The Mall.
There are three statues of Florence Nightingale in Derby - one outside the Derby Royal Infirmary, one in St. Peter's Street, and one above the Nightingale-Macmillan Continuing Care Unit opposite the Derby Royal Infirmary. A public house named after her stands close to the Derby Royal Infirmary.
There is a Florence Nightingale Museum in London and another museum devoted to her at her sister's family home, Claydon House, now a property of the National Trust.
The northernmost tower of the Selimiye Barracks building is today a museum, and in several of its rooms, relics and reproductions relevant to Florence Nightingale and her nurses are on exhibition.
When she first arrived in Turkey, Nightingale would travel on horseback to make inspections. She then transferred to a mule cart and was reported to have escaped serious injury when the cart was toppled in an accident. Following this episode, she used a solid Russian-built carriage, with a waterproof hood and curtains. The carriage was returned to England after the war and subsequently given to the Nightingale training school for nurses, which she founded at St Thomas's Hospital. The carriage was damaged when the hospital was bombed by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. It was later restored and transferred to the Army Medical Services Museum in Mytchett, Surrey, near Aldershot.
A bronze plaque, attached to the plinth of the Crimean Memorial in the Haydarpasa Cemetery, Istanbul and unveiled on Empire Day, 1954 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of her nursing service in that region, bears the inscription:
"To Florence Nightingale, whose work near this Cemetery a century ago relieved much human suffering and laid the foundations for the nursing profession."
Florence Nightingale's voice was saved for posterity in a phonograph recording from 1890 preserved in the British Library Sound Archive.
Theatre
The first theatrical representations of Nightingale was Reginald Berkeley in his "The Lady with the Lamp", premiering in London in 1929 with Edith Evans in the title role. This does not portray her as an entirely sympathetic character and draws much characterisation from Lytton Strachey's biography of her in Eminent Victorians. It was adapted as a film of the same name in 1951. Nightingale also appears in Edward Bond's Early Morning, in which she is depicted having a lesbian affair with Queen Victoria and offering sexual favours to the hospitalised soldiers.
In 2009, A stage musical play representation of Nightingale was produced by the Association of Nursing Service Administrators of the Philippines (ANSAP), entitled "The Voyage of the Lass". The play depicts the story of love and vocation on the nursing communities' icon Florence Nightingale, shown on all Fridays of February 2009 at the AFP Theatre, Camp Crame, Philippines. The play tells the story of Nightingale's early life and her struggles during the Crimean War. "The Voyage of the Lass" was a two-hour play that showcased Philippine local registered nurses from various hospitals of the country, exposing their talents on the performing arts.
Television
Portrayals of Nightingale on television, in documentary as in fiction, vary - the BBC's 2008 Florence Nightingale emphasised her independence and feeling of religious calling, but in Channel 4's 2006 Mary Seacole: The Real Angel of the Crimea she was portrayed as narrow-minded and opposed to Seacole's efforts. In 1985 a TV biopic "Florence Nightingale", starring Jaclyn Smith as Florence, was produced.
Film
In 1912 a biographical silent film titled The Victoria Cross starring Julia Swayne Gordon as Nightingale was produced.
In 1915 another biographical silent film titled Florence Nightingale was produced starring Elisabeth Risdon.
In 1936 a biographical film titled White Angel was produced, starring Kay Francis as Nightingale.
A 1951 a second "talkie" biographical film titled The Lady With The Lamp was produced starring Anna Neagle.
Banknotes
Florence Nightingale's image appeared on the reverse of Series D £10 banknotes issued by the Bank of England from 1975 until 1994. As well as a standing portrait, she was depicted on the notes in a field hospital in the Crimea, holding her lamp.
Photography
A rare black and white photograph of Florence Nightingale taken in 1910 by Lizzie Caswall Smith in her London home in Park Lane was auctioned on 19 November 2008 by Dreweatts auction house in Newbury, Berkshire, England, for £5,500.
Other
Several churches in the Anglican Communion commemorate Nightingale with a feast day on their liturgical calendars. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America commemorates her as a renewer of society with Clara Maass on 13 August.
Beginning in 1968, the U.S. Air Force operated a fleet of 20 C-9A "Nightingale" aeromedical evacuation aircraft, based on the McDonnell Douglas DC-9 platform. The last of these planes was retired from service in 2005.
See also
Works
- Cassandra (1851)
- Notes on Nursing: What Nursing Is, What Nursing is Not (1860)
- Suggestions for Thought (to Searchers after Religious Truth)
- Mysticism and Eastern Religions
- Florence Nightingale's Theology
- Florence Nightingale's Spiritual Journey
- The Family, a critical essay in Fraser's Magazine (1870)
- Una and Her Paupers, Memorials of Agnes Elizabeth Jones with an introduction by Florence Nightingale. Diggory Press ISBN 978-1905363223
- Letters from Egypt: A Journey on the Nile 1849-1850 (1987) ISBN 1-55584-204-6
Sources
- Baly, Monica E. and H. C. G. Matthew, "Nightingale, Florence (1820–1910)"; Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press (2004); online edn, May 2005 * McDonald, Lynn ed., Collected Works of Florence Nightingale. Wilfrid Laurier University Press
- Pugh, Martin; The march of the women: A revisionist analysis of the campaign for women's suffrage 1866-1914, Oxford (2000), at 55.
- Sokoloff, Nancy Boyd.; Three Victorian women who changed their world, Macmillan, London (1982)
- Webb, Val; The Making of a Radical Theologician, Chalice Press (2002)
- Woodham Smith, Cecil; Florence Nightingale, Penguin (1951), rev. 1955
Further reading
- Edward Chaney, 'Egypt in England and America: The Cultural Memorials of Religion, Royalty and Revolution', in: Sites of Exchange: European Crossroads and Faultlines, eds. M. Ascari and A. Corrado (Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York,2006), 39-74.
External links
- by Lytton Strachey
- established by the Nightingale Initiative for Global Health (NIGH)
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- at American Statistical Association: Statisticians in History
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