Florence Nightingale

              Florence Nightingale I  Acrylic on Illustration Board on Panel 20 x 16 inches

              Florence Nightingale 2  Acrylic on Illustration Board on Panel  20 x 16 inches

             Florence Nightingale 3  Acrylic on Illustration Board on Panel  20 x 16 inches

Florence Nightingale was born into a socially prominent English family on May 12, 1820 in her namesake, Florence, Italy.  Her father, born William Edward Shore, a wealthy landowner, was the heir of his mother’s uncle, Peter Nightingale, and took possession of  his estate at Lea Hurst (in Derbyshire, central England) on the condition that he assume the surname “Nightingale.”  Florence’s mother, Frances “Fanny” Smith, from a merchant family, was the daughter of William Smith, a social reformer and member of parliament who was an associate of the famed abolitionist William Wilberforce.  Florence grew up mostly on her father’s estates, Lea Hurst and Embley Park, Hampshire (in southwest England).  Florence and her sister Parthenope were tutored by their father, who had progressive ideas about the education of women — much in conflict with the prevailing views of the time.  Florence was bright, with a methodical and analytical mind.  Though possessing a quiet and complaisant personality, outwardly deferring to her controlling, society-conscious mother, she could also be willful and determined, a serious young lady bent on following her own star rather than conforming to convention.  

When she was 18, Florence became acquainted with Mary Clarke, an Englishwoman who was a famous hostess in Paris.  Eccentric and intellectual, “Clarkey”  had little use for women, especially aristocrat ladies, but she took a shine to Florence.  The two remained friends for 40 years.  Florence was probably influenced by her in her decision to reject marriage and motherhood and instead to dedicate herself to serving humanity.  Florence believed that in this regard she experienced repeated calls from Heaven.  Eventually she came to believe that these calls were urging her to become a nurse.  She was determined to follow that course, despite strong disapproval of her family.  Nurses were usually ignorant, untrained women of low class and often low morals.  For a lady to aspire to become one was, well, beyond the pale.

Charming and attractive, slender and graceful, the young Miss Nightingale did not want for suitors.  The most persistent of these was Richard Monckton Milnes.  Milnes was not only a member of parliament, but a promoter of literary figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Alfred Lord Tennyson, as well as a poet himself.   He also had a keen interest in parapsychology —- and pornography (!).  When, after nine years, Florence Nightingale definitively rejected him, Milnes married a baron’s daughter in 1851.  He himself was made a baron in 1863.  Milnes and Florence remained friends after his marriage and he and his wife would name one of their daughters Florence.  (The daughter would become the poet and novelist Florence Henniker).

Indeed Florence had a talent for acquiring the friendship of powerful men, many who would later exercise their influence to her benefit.  Among these was Benjamin Jowett, a scholar and Oxford don who was a translator of Plato and Thucydides.  Jowett never married and it is often surmised that he had been in love with Florence.  Another was Sidney Herbert, a politician whom Florence met in 1847 while he was on a honeymoon trip in Rome.  She befriended him and her wife.  He would become her supporter and she, his trusted adviser.  Herbert, twice a cabinet secretary, was made a peer before his death in 1861.   Herbert Sound in Antarctica is named after him.

As genteel and well-off ladies of her time often did, Florence Nightingale traveled both with her family and with friends.  She saw a great deal of the Mediterranean and the Middle East.  While she was in Athens, Greece, she rescued a young little owl (Athene noctua) from some kids that were taunting it.  Aptly naming it Athena, Florence kept the owl as a pet and often carried it about in her pocket.

In 1841 Florence visited a Lutheran institute in Kaiserwerth, Germany (near Dusseldorf on the Rhine), where deaconesses were trained not only in religion, but in nursing.  It aroused her personal interest.  When she revisited Kaiserwerth in 1850 she was so moved by what she saw there that she determined that she must become a nurse.  She stayed there for four months and underwent a course of medical training.

Returning to London, Florence found no demand for her newly acquired skills or means to fulfill her zeal for service.  Finally, though, in August of 1853 she attained a nursing position at the Institute for Care of Sick Gentlewomen in London.  Her dedication and her abilities impressed, and she was soon appointed the hospital’s  superintendent.  Florence was now able to be independent and to live comfortably, but only when her relenting father gave her a generous allowance, amounting to 500 pounds a year  — something like $65,000 in today’s money!

At this time the British Empire was involved in what would be known as the Crimean War, a bloody, ill-starred conflict that was precipitated by European concerns for the rights of Christians in the Holy Land, which was controlled by the Ottoman Turks, who were Muslims.   While France, under Napoleon III, and England, under Queen Victoria and Prime Minister Lord Palmerston, resolved differences with the Ottoman sultan, Czar Nicholas of Russia found in the situation a pretext for war.   By the fall of 1853 the Russians and the Ottomans were fighting each other in the Balkans.  France and Britain, fearing Russian expansionism and the consequences of a defeated Ottoman Empire, supported the Turks and declared war on Russia in March of 1854.

By the fall of 1854 the British were battling Russian forces  in the Crimea, a large peninsula on the northern coast of the Black Sea.  The British public were shocked when word reached home about the dreadful conditions of sick and wounded soldiers there.  Florence Nightingale felt it was her duty to do something about it.  She wanted to go there and bring a team of nurses to minister to her country’s soldiers.   Resigning her position at the institute, she gathered a group of 38 volunteer nurses that she had trained, as well as 15 nuns skilled in nursing sent to her by the Catholic Church.  Florence’s friend, Sidney Herbert, who was at that time the Secretary of War,  greased the way for her.  She was officially sanctioned by the British army and formally placed in charge of all its nurses in Turkey.

On October 21, 1854 the nurses left England on the long  journey to Turkey.  In Paris a group of five sisters from the Irish Sisters of Mercy, joined the Nightingale party.  They were led by Mother Mary Clare Moore, who became Florence’s valued colleague and lifelong friend.
 
On November 4, 1854, the Nightingale party arrived at Scutari, located in the Asian part of Istanbul.  There, some old Turkish army barracks, given over to British use, had been converted into a makeshift hospital.  The conditions there were horrendous, though.  With thousands of patients there was serious overcrowding.   The nursing staff, all male, was overworked and ineffectual.  Sanitary conditions were atrocious.  Patients went unwashed, wallowing in filth.  Wards were infested with bugs and rodents.  There were no kitchen facilities.  There were inadequate supplies of medicines.   For every soldier that died of battle wounds, nine died of disease, typhus, typhoid, cholera, dysentery, or malaria.  What was worse, the authorities seemed not to care.  But Miss Nightingale did.  With relentless determination would she apply herself to serving the wounded and sick.

During the first winter at Scutari, more than 4,000 soldiers died in the hospital.   Florence Nightingale believed that the deaths were mostly due to unsanitary living conditions, as well as inadequate nutrition and ventilation. (The germ theory of disease, a mere notion at the time, would not be widely accepted for decades).   Miss Nightingale eschewed the mostly poisonous medicines of the time and instead instituted hygienic regimens that she believed would facilitate cures.  Besides having the wards scrubbed, she mandated hand washing, which was not a common practice at the time.  She established a proper laundry and supervised the kitchens to provide nourishing and appropriate food for the patients.  In March, 1855, at her request, the British government sent a commission to improve the hospital’s ventilation and, more importantly, to flush out its sewage system, for it was found that the original barracks had been built over a cesspool.   Florence organized a veritable army of Turkish workers to replace the hospital’s lice-and-flea-infested floor.  In six month’s time these efforts reduced the death rate at Scutari dramatically.

Also, as a result of Florence Nightingale’s pleading, the British government commissioned the construction of a prefabricated hospital.  The greatest civil engineer of the time, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, quickly designed a temporary wood and canvas structure that was shipped and assembled in Turkey.  The so-called Renkioi Hospital was positioned down the coast from Scutari in an area free from malaria.  Although it did not open until October 1855 and closed in July 1856 (months after the Crimean War ended) and only treated 1300 men, it was a great success and hailed as a model hospital.  The death rate there was a tenth of that at Scutari.  It was under civilian control and, as such, not under the purview of Florence Nightingale.  She, however, praised it highly, even though she never had the opportunity to visit it.

Despite her success in treating patients and saving lives, Florence Nightingale earned the enmity of  the authorities, especially the army doctors, who did not want some outsider, especially a woman, meddling in their business, criticizing them, and showing them up.  Dr. John Hall, the Inspector-General of Hospitals and head of the Scutari hospital, found her objectionable and resented the power she had.  Dr. Duncan Menzies, the chief medical officer at Scutari, found her a nuisance as well and tried to impede her at every turn.  (Denied funds, she often used her own money to buy what she needed for her patients).   Florence  also had conflict with some Sisters of Mercy nurses that arrived unannounced and unrequested in December 1854.  Their leader, Sister Mary Francis Bridgeman, unlike Mother Mary Clare Moore, refused to acknowledge her authority or to work under a secular Protestant.
    
Miss Nightingale’s patients, though, and the soldiers in the ranks, who quickly came to hear of her, adored her.  Back in England she became a heroine, a source of national pride, a legend even.  She came to be known as “The Lady with the Lamp,’ for her habit of of patrolling the corridors of the hospital at night after all had retired, checking on each and every patient.  In his 1857 poem Santa Filomena Henry Wadsworth Longfellow famously made reference to her.  (Her lamp, unlike those depicted in artistic representations, was a rather unromantic paper concertina lantern).

On May 2, 1855, Florence Nightingale visited the hospital in Balaclava in Crimea, close to the front. She fell ill with fever almost immediately and, though, for a time, near death, she was soon out of danger.  Her complete recovery, however, took months.   Dr. John Hall took advantage of her illness to make her rival Sister Mary Francis Bridgeman the Superintendent of the Balaclava General Hospital in October.   In April of 1856 a recovered Miss Nightingale regained management of the hospital, after which a disgruntled Bridgeman and her nurses returned to England.   The Crimean War had ended in February of 1856, not really a victory for England and her allies, but definitely a defeat for Russia.

Florence Nightingale returned home to England in the summer of 1856.  She was greeted with a hero’s welcome and found herself a national heroine, her name and deeds known to every Englishman.  To honor her, Queen Victoria presented her with a brooch designed by her husband Prince Albert.   Mostly Florence was embarrassed by the adulation.

While Florence was still in Turkey, Sidney Herbert helped establish the Nightingale Fund, which would finance the Nightingale Training School at St. Thomas’ Hospital established in 1860.  (It is now part of King’s College London).   The creation of nursing as a profession, a respected career, is due primarily to Florence Nightingale.  Her students and those she mentored became the elite of the profession.

After she came back from Crimea,  Florence was afflicted with chronic brucellosis which caused spondylitis, an inflammation of the neck and spine.  For the next 37 years she was home bound and mostly bedridden.  But she continued her work and received visitors, prominent ones even, from her bed. She became the world’s foremost authority on nursing and sanitation.  Armies and governments consulted her.  Her sister Parthenope, who once deplored her wanting to be a nurse, acted as her manager.

In later years Florence slowed down, losing her sight and her mental faculties.  She peacefully passed away on August 13, 1910, 90 years old.  In accordance with her wishes, a national funeral was forgone.  There was merely a modest funeral service when Florence Nightingale was  interred in her family plot in Hampshire.  She was the recipient of numerous honors, including, in 1907, the Order of Merit, bestowed upon her by King Edward VII.  In 1915 the Crimean War Memorial, originally erected in Waterloo Place, London, in 1861 was  expanded to include a statue of Florence Nightingale and her friend Sidney Herbert.  There is also the Florence Nightingale Museum in the grounds of St. Thomas’ Hospital near the south end of Westminster Bridge in London, across the Thames from Big Ben.   
 
In addition to her contributions to nursing Florence Nightingale also pioneered the use of statistics, especially the use of graphics such as the pie chart.  She was the first woman to be admitted to the Royal Statistical Society.  A prolific writer, Florence Nightingale’s most well-received book was Notes on Nursing, published in 1860.  It was translated into several languages and tens of thousands of copies were sold, although Florence probably received little money from it.   A large number of other books and pamphlets were self published.  There was a large amount of private correspondence and travel notes, as well as professional papers and addresses and even a novel, Cassandra.

Florence Nightingale belonged to the Church of England her whole life, although she entertained views inconsistent with orthodoxy and was critical of organized religion in general.  She was certainly a Universalist, that is, a believer in the eventual redemption of all souls.  Her private writings reveal that she was also something of a closet mystic with a healthy respect for religions other than Christianity.  There is no doubt she regarded her service to humanity as service to God.  And, like a nun similarly dedicated, she remained chaste and unmarried throughout her life.

Florence Nightingale has been depicted many times in film.  She was played by Kay Francis in The White Angel (1936), by Dame Anna Neagle in the 1951 British film The Lady with a Lamp, and by Laura Fraser in the 2008 TV movie Florence Nightingale.  Actress Helena Bonham Carter is Florence Nightingale’s first cousin, several times removed (through Florence’s mother, whose sister married politician John Bonham-Carter).

 

More work by Stephen Warde Anderson can be seen at swa-art.com