Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale is remembered as a lamp-carrying angel, but her sharpest weapon was a pie chart, and she kept a pet owl in her pocket.
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Quick Facts
- Born
- 12 May 1820, Florence, Italy, the city she was named after
- Died
- 13 August 1910, London, aged 90
- Known as
- Founder of modern nursing and a pioneer of statistical graphics
- Crimean War
- Arrived at Scutari in November 1854 with a party of 38 nurses
- Nightingale Training School
- Opened at St Thomas' Hospital, London, in 1860
- Famous book
- Notes on Nursing, published in 1859
- Honours
- First woman awarded the Order of Merit, in 1907
- Family homes
- Lea Hurst in Derbyshire and Embley Park in Hampshire
The owl in her pocket
Long before she was famous, Florence Nightingale rescued a little owl from a group of children in Athens during a trip in 1850. She called it Athena and carried it about with her, apparently in a pocket. When Athena died, Florence was heartbroken, and she later kept the stuffed bird as a keepsake. It is a telling detail. The woman who would take on the British Army was fiercely attached to small, overlooked creatures, and she never lost the habit of rescuing things that others had dismissed.
A rich girl who wanted to be useful
Born in 1820 to a wealthy family and named after the Italian city of her birth, Florence was expected to marry well and run a household. She was educated unusually thoroughly by her father, studying mathematics, classics and several languages. She said she felt called by God to serve, and in her late twenties she began to visit hospitals. Her family was horrified. Nursing at the time was often seen as work for the poor and the disreputable. She refused several suitors, including one she kept waiting for years, and in 1853 took charge of a small hospital for gentlewomen in London.
The truth about the lamp
In October 1854 Britain was at war in the Crimea, and reports of wounded soldiers suffering badly drew Nightingale to Scutari, near Constantinople. She arrived with 38 nurses and found a vast military hospital that was overcrowded and filthy, with soldiers dying in huge numbers. The Times later described her moving through the wards at night with a lamp, and the image of the Lady with the Lamp stuck. Soldiers did call her that. But the reality was less romantic and more effective. She ordered supplies, scrubbed floors, organised laundry and pressed for better drains and ventilation. Death rates in the hospital eventually fell sharply after a sanitary commission arrived in spring 1855 to clean the place up, and she kept pushing for reform.
The pie chart that shook the army
Back in Britain, Nightingale became convinced that most soldiers had died not from battle wounds but from preventable disease. To prove it, she worked with the statistician William Farr and produced vivid diagrams, including her famous polar area charts, sometimes called coxcombs, showing the causes of death month by month. They were designed to be understood by politicians and officials who would never read a table of figures. Her campaigning led to a Royal Commission on the health of the army, and to lasting reforms in barracks and military hospitals. In 1858 she was elected a fellow of the Statistical Society of London, later renamed the Royal Statistical Society, and she later became an honorary member of the American Statistical Association. She had turned numbers into persuasion.
The invalid who ran everything
Nightingale returned from the Crimea in 1856 and spent much of the rest of her life largely confined to her rooms, probably by a lingering illness she had caught during the war. Yet from her bed or sofa she wrote thousands of letters, advised ministers and reshaped public health. In 1860 she used the Nightingale Fund, raised by public gratitude, to open the Nightingale Training School at St Thomas' Hospital. Its trained nurses went on to staff hospitals across Britain and overseas. Notes on Nursing, published in 1859, was written for ordinary women caring for others at home, and it was not just a textbook for professionals. She also pushed for reform of sanitation in India and for improvements in workhouse infirmaries. She died in London in 1910 at the age of 90. She turned down a state funeral and is buried in the churchyard at East Wellow in Hampshire.
Where her mark remains
The Florence Nightingale Museum at St Thomas' Hospital in London tells her story, and it displays objects associated with her, including her famous lamp and memorabilia of her pet owl. Her statue stands in Waterloo Place in London, part of the Crimean War Memorial. Her influence is even more obvious in the profession she shaped. International Nurses Day is celebrated on her birthday, 12 May, and nurses around the world still talk about her as the founder of their profession. Her family home at Lea Hurst in Derbyshire is where she spent her childhood summers, and her grave at East Wellow is a quiet place of pilgrimage.
Notable people
- Florence Nightingale
- William Farr
- Sidney Herbert
- Mary Seacole
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