Florence Nightingale was the founder of the profession of nursing for the English-speaking world. That profession was inevitability growing toward some realization and she stamped it “F.N.” in ways more significant than many founders of nation-state
s or religions could claim.
Many find something Marian in the way her founding spirit hovers over the secular profession of nursing. Because of Florence Nightingale, nurses have become respected for their honor and their scientific training as well as for their labor and service. Because of her they remain the guardians of our health. They are there for us.
In the unlikely event she had joined the Roman Catholic Church there would be a decree of beatification on the 100th anniversary of her death. That decree, I read, gives formal permission “to venerate one whose life is marked by the exercise of heroic virtue.”
She did not convert and was hardly Church of England, although very religious. More like a Quaker or a rebel Mormon woman (if those categories are meaningful to you). Such categories were not important to her. Most simply, she was one of those who have been called, one of the beautiful ones, one of those we have been waiting for.
In accord with her notion of Christ’s modesty, she wanted nothing but to be buried in an unmarked grave. If that proved impossible she wanted her grave marked only “F.N. Born 12 May 1820 Died 13 August 1910.” That w
as done.
Sketch artists and encyclopediasts, in their anonymity and vast audience, fail to convey Florence Nightingale’s many qualities and contributions. They leave her as an icon: “The Lady of the Lamp,” “The Angel of the Crimea.” Nevertheless, she has had fine biographers making contributions toward more fully understanding her: Sir Edward Cook in 1913; Ida O’Malley in 1931; Cecil Woodham-Smith in 1950, Gillian Gill in 2004; and Mark Bostridge in 2008. And there have been many other biographies and contributions. Several selections from Nightingale’s letters are works of some scholarship and care: Martha Vicinus in 1989; Sue Goldie in 1990; Mary C. Sullivan in 1999, and others. There are several fine studies of Nightingale’s contributions to public health, administration, and religious thought.
Now a Collected Works of Florence Nightingale is underway (the first volume of a planned 16 was published in 2001) under Lynn McDonald of the University of Guelph by the Wilfrid Laurier University Press in Waterloo, Ontario. Finally having her Collected Works will improve all new Nightingale writing. McDonald’s text, introductions, and annotations are very fine: generous and always scholarly.
All the products of this Nightingale industry—scholarly and, for the most part, responsible work—have and probably will continue to have a touch of imagination, of speculation, of wonderment about them. Not surprising that sketch artists fail.
We grope for a full understanding of Nightingale as if knowing would throw a switch somehow illuminating a great deal that concerns us. Or—with the nurses who always learn something from her—we turn her light onto contemporary issues and benefit from what it reveals.
No surprise that some have fought hard to diminish her, as if to keep their privledge, property, and preconceptions hidden. She has never been an easy woman.
Mark Bostridge in the most recent full biography chooses an apt head-note quotation from Nightingale’s close friend Mary Mohl (”Clarkey”)
I study Flo as if she were a language and as she is a deep one I have not mastered it by any means.
One thing can be said with certainty: there was a great force behind Nightingale’s association with others well beyond her extended family. Although she put considerable practical effort into conciliating her family and into diverting all credit for shared accomplishments onto men like Edwin Chadwick (the great sanitarian and Director of the Poor Laws Commission), William Farr (founder of the discipline of medical statistics), John Sutherland (colleague in War Office reorganization and something like “Surgeon General” of the UK), Sidney Herbert (repeatedly Secretary at War in the cabinet and her main ally in government), Benjamin Jowett (preeminent Oxford classicist), and many, many others, all owe a significant part of their reputations to their work with her. Herbert, Farr, Sutherland, the poet Arthur Hugh Clough, Jowett, and—excepting in Jowett’s case—their wives literally gave significant years of their lives over to Nightingale. Along with them were the resolute Bracebridges, the Shore aunts, the Smith, Bonham Carter, and Nicholson cousins, and others. From her twenties into her seventies she played life-defining, career-making, or influential roles in many additional lives. Many were eminent Victorians.
When reading even the most generous biographies or studies, I am always convinced that not enough has been said. I do not mean that I want to take away her intense personal privacy. But I do want more said that applies to major public events and issues, that sheds more of her light.
For instance, in likelihood, Nightingale did not go to the Crimea as a result of Billy Russell’s newspaper reports on the criminal conditions facing the troops (inadequate supplies, disease, no medical services, French superiority in health care through their nursing nuns). Nor did she go at the initiative of the Secretary at War. She had read the newspapers from before the Battle of Alma, knew the conditions from her correspondence, and herself initiated the Times’ reportage of the lack of medical services (through her military contacts, Ambassador Stratford de Redcliffe and Lady Stratford, young Thomas Chenery who actually wrote the first reports as a stringer for the Times, and Times editor Thomas Delane). The reportage had a powerful impact on the British public because of the new telegraph connection between the Crimea and London. More than likely she herself—in immediate days before spent investigating medical conditions among the poor with Sydney Herbert—initiated the plan for a team of nurses to be sent to the Crimea.
Again, in likelihood, Nightingale was mainly responsible for the weakening and fall of the Aberdeen government in 1855 and for the reform of the British War Department following the Crimean War, as well as the reforms brought about through Royal Commissions she urged to life, especially the Commission on India, and the performance of Indian Viceroys. There was much else.
Not much good can come from pandering to celebrity culture—with its powerful underwriters in publicity and marketing—nor from pushing a Great Man theory of history. And Nightingale herself teaches us what cooperation, colleague, and collaborator mean. However, there was such a force and pertinence about her that it weakens my reluctance to emphasize.
Her name should be associated with the dissolution of the British East India Company (a primary agency of Great Britain’s colonial depredations). Her name should be significantly associated with the whole course of English reform legislation (she had learned from Chadwick’s painful experiences). Her name should be associated with the founding and successes of the British Social Science Association—as it was known—and the London Epidemiological Society.
And there are many smaller matters. Nightingale’s family is never mentioned in history in connection with Adolphe Quetelet’s invitation to England and the consequent founding of what became the Royal Statistical Society (Malthus was there, Babbage was there). There is the significance of her use of statistics in Parliament (through her MP allies) and in statistical graphics. The anthropologist/eugenicist/coiner of words Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911) figures more prominently in the history of science than does Nightingale who was tutored by the great James Sylvester and with Quetelet her “dear comrade.” And so forth. There are many historical oversights and injustices.
I expect to discover much more about her accomplishments. For instance, the history of epidemiology—that foundation of social medicine—does not yet have a historian who will speak a single word about the significance of Nightingale’s fight against the primacy of graft—in the form of misused grants and funds, position, and privilege, as well as common trade in medicine-for-profit—in the history of their science. They avoid she who avoided nothing.
Also her name should be significantly associated with the novelist careers of major Victorian novelists. Nightingale felt that some of their most important accomplishments was work she might have and perhaps should have done. She was often conflicted about the use of her resources. However—true to form—she used the thought of writing great novels the way actors use the joke “I could have done that” to keep her head on straight. She knew full well a great writer when she read one and knew that her devotion lay elsewhere.
If Nightingale and English literary history seems a stretch consider that to leave her out is exactly like imagining that Nightingale—massive correspondent, activist, reader of everything, reformer, office/residence in London just off Hyde Park, burner of midnight oil and candles at both ends—had no contact with the revolutionary struggles for social change beyond the boundaries of gentry-acceptable reform politics. There too she is left out.
Sometimes you have to wonder about history writing. For instance, in behalf of historical business-as-usual there is a great underestimation of the Elizabethan license-to-power for women in the early sixteen hundreds. And the continuity of that license. Historian get stuck on the well-documented legalities and formalities of gender relations and ignore the living reality. Also, way too often, historians ignore or understate the power which deep and intimate learning (classical and scientific) conferred on women when they possessed it. As if to talk of such learning is to admit you yourself do not possess anything like it. That is an obvious truth and therefore a closed subject.
Also, very often, our own twentieth century class preoccupation with the home gets read back into Victorian culture where that preoccupation was only in its infancy. Dozens of studies tell history hind side to. Yes, the Victorians were giving rise to the middle class culture we know so well. But it is we, not they, and especially not Nightingale, who indulges all the limitations of that particular class phenomena. And as for her “invalid” status, a society that honors exercise over accomplishment and idle socializing over influence is in no position to judge Nightingale’s great energy and precious time and space.
You should also know that most prominent Victorians were censors, concerned with privacy, careful of reputations and of the feelings of others. Nightingale destroyed many reams of paper in her own fire and often ordered letters and papers to be destroyed. Undoubtedly her family and first biographer (a family friend) continued the practice on their own. The British Museum holds 15,000 Nightingale letters, spoken of as a great number. Yet that is far fewer than a letter a day over her 60 active years, while we know that she wrote constantly, day long and into the night, exercising her influence by correspondence. Yet only 15,000 or so letters remain. Even these generations later critics deliberately neglect or actively suppress aspects of Nightingale’s life for no more reason than their inability to provide their version of scholarly annotation.
I suspect they sometimes have darker reasons of their own. “How small a thing is woman.” Even such a woman.
Therefore, with Nightingale, may we not stretch the boundaries of propriety somewhat? Whole dramas could be composed of scenes of great interest. For instance, an aggressive, brilliant child interrupting her father and their neighbor Lord Palmerston at their weekend chess to demand answers to her incisive questions on British political issues; her meeting with Frederick Engels in Hyde Park and their inevitable discussion of The Conditions of the Working Class in England in 1844 and their own diverse aspirations; private conversations with the Brontë sisters; Nightingale on a horse at night in the rain overlooking a Crimean battlefield with a favorite officer—one of the many who became life-long friends and supporters—in discussion of the war.
We still lack even a developed scene in which she attempts to mesmerize a tame bear in the Oxford apartment of a friend, accompanied by her would-be fiancé, R. Milne, who was the first biographer of Keats and himself an extraordinarily accomplished strange duck and, inevitably, a MP, Lord, and life-long supporter of her causes. Clearly they all had a bit too much wine.
We do have many invented scenes from her childhood, necessary in the very numerous popular biographies of the Lady of the Lamp, but they are lame by comparison.
These are only poor illustrations.
Although she was a woman of machinations, angers, and lament—or as Sutherland said, “a woman of iron filings and sawdust”—Nightingale could also be an amusing woman, occasionally a comedian, mimic, and a scandalous delight for her sister, cousins, and close friends. Her humor was most often informed by her knowledge of the inadequacies of her nation, its 
leadership, and its culture. Replying to a friend’s question “What Is To Be Done?” she said, “Perhaps we should advertise for the answer.” Describing a defense of inadequate statistics, she said “He claimed there were even uglier bonnets in the store.” When the Crimean brass could not grasp the differences between a Latin or Greek cross or a Crescent for a Turkish cemetery monument at Scutari, she wrote that she had proposed Themistocles’ broken column, “only nobody could see the sentiment of it.”
If Nightingale had converted to Catholicism—which she seriously considered—that would have made Cardinal Manning’s career. He was a former beau and close friend, fellow reformer, and a most famous English convert. But far more than Manning’s career, her conversion would have changed the course of religious history in England and would have answered “The Irish Question.” Her Crimean experience lay ahead. For a considerable time she was the most famous woman in the world. Nightingale’s sense of religion was enormously radical. Religious caterpillars, as she called them, categorize too easily, as if religion were a bug or butterfly that you catch and that Science must give a scientific name.
Any woman knows what it is to be belittled. Nightingale does not allow it. There are now six million trained nurses in the English-speaking world. Every one of them knows something of Florence Nightingale.
Concerning getting a reform accomplished, Nightingale once said “I shall eat straight through England.” They will think they are in a forest of Nightingales.
She was a great tree of a woman and the scaffolding that made the profession of nursing possible. As a great tree does, she left behind a forest of leaves. As from such a solid scaffolding, schools of nursing throughout the world will celebrate the 100th anniversary of her death this August, 2010.
A note on her leaves follows. Also, I may append some of the many moving anecdotes. For one instance, when Japanese nurses—after days of horrors following the Hiroshima atomic bombing and in real danger of suiciding themselves or running home—repeated together each day the Nightingale Pledge, they stayed there in Hiroshima working at their profession.
When I can locate it, I will append a list of the many nicknames (some quite overwrought) by which Florence Nightingale was known in her time.
Jim (written in 2007, edited August 16, 2010)
