Near Thebes, God called Florence Nightingale to nursing. In Egypt, Nightingale cruised the Nile and discovered ancient mysticism. In a Parisian salon, Mary Clarke showed Nightingale how bold, independent, intelligent, and equal to men a woman can be. She hoarded information pamphlets, especially those concerning laws, social conditions, and benevolent institutions. On trips through Europe, Nightingale displayed a natural inclination to record data: distance and times traveled were neatly cataloged in her journal. Her progressive father had her tutored in the classics - not uncommon for wealthy daughters of the day - but also the tools of power: mathematics and writing. Nightingale was born to landed gentry (1820, in Florence) and raised on family estates (in England). Her backstory reads like a “chosen one” epic. Worse, without data, only an anecdotal feel for these problems was accessible. Colonial natives “gradually disappeared” - died - as they came into contact with British civilization. Surgical outcomes were not understood in any coherent manner. Sex workers were compelled to invasive (and totally ineffective) inspections for disease. In 1995 Howard Wainer quipped, “for the British soldier the least dangerous aspect of the Crimean War was the opposing army.”īefore Nightingale, women died more often giving birth in hospitals than at home.
Dysentery, cholera, and typhus raged mortality rates to levels that exceeded London’s Great Plague. Dying patients crowded on floors of blood-soaked straw. Red tape choked the arrival of meager bandage and food supplies. Linens returned from the laundry with vermin. Religious orders served the sick only marginally better: their holy focus was to prepare souls for judgment, not effective medical reform.īefore Nightingale, disease destroyed military campaigns. These dissolute “nurses” were dismissed by Charles Dickens as incompetent, corrupt, and more interested in gin than patient welfare. If we see the problems she endeavored to solve then we may begin to better appreciate her victories.īefore Nightingale, the sick were cared for by untrained widows, ex-servants, and paupers. Nightingale tackled some of the ugliest problems her society had to offer. Heroic design begins with a plan for selfless victory. It is accomplished with the courage to see the plan through. That’s the Florence Nightingale I want to understand. The Englishwoman who wrote take 1,100 men out upon Salisbury Plain and shoot them. It is as criminal to have a mortality of 17, 19, and 20 per thousand in the Line, Artillery and Guards, when that in civil life is only 11 per 1,000, as it would be to take 1,100 men out upon Salisbury Plain and shoot them. Florence Nightingale was all of these, yet none capture Nightingale’s seminal effect - something better felt through her prose: