The Lady with the Lamp

When Florence Nightingale broached to her family her resolve to enter the nursing profession, panic took complete hold of her mother... And this is not strange, for in 1845 panic was bound to master any mother whose daughter thought of committing such a hazard! For the nurses of that day were known for filth, dissipation, and moral depravity...

Florence was well aware of all this, but she was determined to change it from one condition to another, for she perceived the lofty mission that awaited her — a mission whose effect would embrace the field of nursing and the army, and whose blessings would be enjoyed by common soldiers and great commanders alike.

Tears burst from her mother's eyes, and she afterward confided to a friend of hers: "It is as though I were a duck that has hatched a wild goose!..." No — that Florence was no wild goose. One well-known writer said, in a biography of her: she was an eagle!

Many writers, when they took up the sacred mission to which Florence Nightingale dedicated herself, have asked: what could her motive have been? Perhaps the only correct answer is the one reached by an American authoress, Cecil Woodham-Smith, who has written a book about the great heroine, published last month in some four hundred pages, after a search through the original old letters and documents that took six whole years. The answer is this: when Florence was sixteen years old, "voices" kept sounding within her, assuring her that God had appointed her for a special mission.

But those voices did not make plain to her the nature of the mission. They continued to visit her in obscurity until she reached her twenty-fourth year — yet she did not carry out what she had been appointed to do before her years numbered thirty-three. In the meantime her life was an exact copy of the life led by the girls of the upper class in Victorian society. Her father was devoted to the arts and crafts, and her mother was a prominent figure in society. As for Florence, who was slight of build with chestnut hair, she adored social gatherings and dances, and was fond of outings and travel, which led her on long journeys across the European continent. It was natural that she should catch the eye of suitors, and many of them gathered at her door. Among these was Richard Milnes, known at that time for his poetry and his love of good works and charity.

But there was something Florence was doing, alongside all that has been mentioned, of which the others knew nothing: she kept a full diary, containing an authentic and marvelous picture of herself — of herself not only as she was in the eyes of others, but as she was in her own eyes as well; not only of what she did, but also of what she ought to do — and not to do!

In her diary Florence would reproach herself, from time to time, for forever trying "to shine and glitter in society." She would imagine herself the wife of Milnes, whom we have just mentioned — but her dreams of marriage were built upon what she and her future husband might do together in the field of charity and good works. And when night fell, she would retire to her room, and there pore over the reports published by the government hospitals, reading them from cover to cover by the faint light of candles. She wrote in her diary: "My mind is wholly absorbed in the sufferings that man endures; they surround me on every side... And all the people I meet, I find worn down by care or poverty or disease."

And when these humane thoughts began to take command of her mind and heart, she set about preparing herself for the lofty mission she had for some time been yearning to undertake. We see her beginning to free herself from all the social bonds imposed upon her, and divorcing the pleasures she had been fond of, one after another — including Richard Milnes himself: "the man I adored," as she described him in her papers. And when the reader of the diary reaches the period in which Florence resolved once and for all to leave the world of pleasures and join the ranks of service, he reads in it these lines:

"Today I am thirty — the age at which Christ began his mission. From now on, no more childish things. No more love. No more marriage. From now on, Lord, let me think only of Thy will. Lord, of Thy will."

She was thirty-three years old when she took over the direction of a home for the care of "sick women in distressing circumstances." This event is a decisive stage in the history of Florence Nightingale, and in the history of English — and then of the world's — hospitals. For from the moment she set her hand to the plow, she never looked back. Despite the many vexations to which she was exposed, and the opposition of the great doctors and the men of the army, she went on striving and struggling until she was enabled to cleanse the English camps in the Crimea of their abundant filth. So she became "the Lady with the Lamp," who worked now as a sanitary officer, now as a sergeant over the stores, and was at every hour a saint — she became a world heroine, whose story the nations told; Queen Victoria decorated her with a lofty order, and she wished she might have a say in the War Office!

But Florence did not stop, in her ambition, at the limit of wishing... So she formed her own private War Office, which included the Secretary for War himself and a number of great doctors, poets, and men of science. Despite her failing health, and though she was an invalid and on the threshold of death, she managed within six months to write and compile a thousand pages of reports and information on the state of the English hospitals in the Crimea. From her sickbed she directed her assistants, drew up their plans, and prepared the means of defense against opponents.

And victory began to yield to her. The War Office set about revising the traditional organization; the military camps and hospitals were rearranged on sound sanitary lines; and schools of nursing were founded. Then she turned her attention to India, drawing up for it a sanitary code, and before her death she saw the drainage and irrigation projects put into actual practice there.

The work was grinding, but she was stronger than it. Yet a good number of her most devoted assistants fell by the way, and died. When one of her great assistants died, Florence Nightingale almost blamed God for having interrupted the course of "the work." But she reined in her feeling — and wrote in her diary: "I must remember that God is not my private secretary...!"

As for her, she neither flagged nor weakened, and she lived long after that, until she saw her dreams fulfilled and her bare hopes clothed in the garments of reality. Her house came to swarm with great and honored visitors, and became a place of pilgrimage for the country's great men and its thinkers.

In 1906 her mind began to fail, and the light faded from her sight. And on August 13, 1910 — Florence Nightingale having then passed her ninety-first year — the same "voices" came to her again, and God called her for the last time —

And as had been her habit all her life long, Florence heard the call, and answered it.