Florence Nightingale – the queen of nurses

Miss Nightingale ministering to soldiers at Scutari.

With the current global pandemic raging, all minds have turned to healthcare. As a tour guide who is obsessed with history, that means a part of my mind has turned to the woman who is, without a doubt, the most famous nurse to have ever lived. I am, of course, referring to the Lady with the Lamp and the woman who gave her name to the city’s emergency NHS response hospital- Florence Nightingale. Lets remember her on her 200th birthday !
Born in and named for the Italian city of Florence in May 12th 1820, Nightingale came from a well-established British family with a history of liberal, humanitarian politics. She was a deeply religious woman, believing that in 1837 she received the first of many calls from God to enter a life of service to others.
Initially, her family were resistant to her entering the field of nursing- preferring her to follow the traditional role of a woman of her class and status, but, in 1844 she rebelled, much to the anger of her mother and sister, and announced her intention to become a nurse.
Much has been made of her role as a nurse, becoming almost a Victorian meme, and her contributions should not be disregarded, though it was in her ability to organise and lobby that she really made her mark.
As the Crimean War raged, Nightingale was shocked by reports of the conditions faced by wounded soldiers and resolved to do everything in her power to bring comfort to them. In the October of 1854, she used her influence to organise a mission of 38 nurses whom she had trained herself and 15 nuns who set off for the Crimea.
Arriving in November, she and her companions were shocked and disgusted by the conditions they found- infection was spreading like wildfire and there was no proper equipment to ensure that the wounded were properly fed. Perhaps most shocking of all was the impression that no one in a position of power seemed to really care about these conditions. Nightingale wrote to The Times and used this very public platform to plead with the government to do something.
Nightingale’s pleas did not go unnoticed. The Government commissioned perhaps the most eminent engineer of his time, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, to design a pre-fabricated military hospital which could be built in England and shipped to the warzone. The result was the Renkioi Hospital, which had roughly one tenth of the death rate of the hospital that Nightingale had found herself in charge of.
It’s been alleged that Nightingale saw the mortality rate of 42% to 2%, either by improvements in hygiene (such as insisting that nurses and doctors washed their hands between patients- a genuinely revolutionary approach at the time) that she insisted upon or as a result of her lobbying for the creation of the Sanitary Commission. The Commission made changes such as improving ventilation and flushing out the sewers- almost instantly improving the chances of survival for a soldier who found himself in Nightingale’s care.
Despite the undoubtedly remarkable results, Nightingale never claimed any credit for herself- she felt that this was her calling from God.
Upon her return to Britain after the war, Nightingale did not stop pushing. She started to gather evidence for the Royal Commission on the Health of the Army and became convinced that the high mortality rates seen amongst soldiers were down to living conditions. These findings would push her to advocate for sanitary living conditions for both soldiers and civilians- work which certainly improved the lives of countless millions. She was one of the strongest voices in the push for private homes to be connected to the mains water supply and for the devolution of powers over sanitation to local authorities. The effects on public health of these two simple changes cannot be overstated.
She is also credited with being one of the forces behind the professionalization of nursing. The Nightingale Fund was established while she was in the Crimea (created as the result of a public meeting to recognise her work rather than by Florence herself- such an act would have been hugely out of character for such a self-effacing person). Upon her return, she found herself with the gigantic sum of £45,000 which had been raised in her name.
Taking the fund and using it to establish the Nightingale Training School at St Thomas’ Hospital in London. After 5 years of training, the first nurses started work at the Liverpool Workhouse Infirmary. The school which she set up still exists today under the name The Florence Nightingale School of Nursing and Midwifery. The students of this school would go on to change the landscape of nursing, especially as experienced by the poorest members of society- for a taste of what care in the workhouses was like before this, read Charles Dicken’s Martin Chuzzlewit – the character of the nurse is only a very slight exaggeration by all accounts.
As well as personally training nurses, Nightingale also wrote perhaps the single most important book on the subject. Notes on Nursing was written in 1859 and became the cornerstone text on the subject. As well as serving as the basis for training of professional nurses the book sold well to members of the general public and brought a new knowledge of how to avoid getting ill in the first place.
As well as her direct contributions to nursing, Florence was a pioneer in statistics and the visual presentation of data- she is credited with developing the polar area diagram, a variant on the pie chart and occasionally the Nightingale rose diagram, an early precursor to the modern histogram chart.
Today, Nightingale is rightly honoured with memorials of all types across the world, particularly in the UK and modern Turkey where so much of her work was started. Examples in London include a statue at Waterloo Place as part of the Guard’s Crimea memorial- the plinth of which depicts her arguing for better care with the officers and the Florence Nightingale Museum at St Thomas’ Hospital where she established her nursing school.