Florence Nightingale
Posted on by admin
Florence Nightingale OM, RRC ( /ˈflɒrəns ˈnaɪtɨŋɡeɪl/; 12 May 1820 – 13 August
1910) was a celebrated English nurse, writer and statistician. She came to
prominence for her pioneering work in nursing during the Crimean War, where she
tended to wounded soldiers. She was dubbed “The Lady with the Lamp” after her
habit of making rounds at night. An Anglican, Nightingale believed that God had
called her to be a nurse.
Nightingale laid the foundation of professional nursing with the establishment,
in 1860, of her nursing school at St Thomas’ Hospital in London, the first
secular nursing school in the world, now part of King’s College London. The
Nightingale Pledge taken by new nurses was named in her honour, and the annual
International Nurses Day is celebrated around the world on her birthday.
In her diary, an entry shortly before her seventeenth birthday reads: “On
February 7th, 1837, God spoke to me and called me to his service.” She did not
know what the service would be, and therefore decided that she must remain
single, so as to have no encumbrances and be ready for anything. With this in
mind, she rejected a proposal of marriage from a young man whom she dearly
loved. She suffered from “trances” or “dreaming” spells, in which she would lose
consciousness for several minutes or longer, and be unaware when she recovered
that time had passed. (Could this be a form of petit mal epilepsy? No biographer
of hers that I have read uses the word.) She found the knowledge that she was
subject to such spells terrifying, and feared that they meant that she was
unworthy of her calling, particularly since she did not hear the voice of God
again for many years. In the spring of 1844 she came to believe that her calling
was to nurse the sick. In 1850 her family sent her on a tour of Egypt for her
health. Some extracts from her diary follow:
March 7. God called me in the morning and asked me would I do good for Him, for
Him alone without the reputation.
March 9. During half an hour I had by myself in my cabin, settled the question
with God.
April 1. Not able to go out but wished God to have it all His own way. I like
Him to do exactly as He likes without even telling me the reason.
May 12. Today I am thirty–the age Christ began his mission.
Now no more childish things. No more love. No more marriage. Now Lord let me
think only of Thy Will, what Thou willest me to do. Oh Lord Thy Will, Thy Will.
June 10. The Lord spoke to me; he said, Give five minutes every hour to the
thought of Me. Coudst thou but love Me as Lizzie loves her husband, how happy
wouldst thou be.” But Lizzie does not give five minutes every hour to the
thought of her husband, she thinks of him every minute, spontaneously.
The Lady with the LampDuring the Crimean war, 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.
“Nightingale receiving the Wounded at Scutari”, a portrait by Jerry BarrettThe
phrase was further popularised by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1857 poem “Santa
Filomena”:
Lo! in that house of misery
A lady with a lamp I see
Pass through the glimmering gloom,
And flit from room to room.
On Christmas Day when she was sixty-five, she wrote: “Today, O Lord, let me
dedicate this crumbling old woman to thee. Behold the handmaid of the Lord. I
was thy handmaid as a girl. Since then, I have backslid.” She wrote a manual
called Notes for Nurses, and a set of instructions for the matron in charge of
training nurses, emphasizing the importance for a nurse of a schedule of daily
prayer. A few years before her death, she was the first woman to receive the
Order of Merit from the British government. She died at ninety, and, by her
directions, her tombstone read simply, “F.N. 1820-1910″.