Florence Nightingale

FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE

The nineteenth century in Europe is distinguished by the awakening of social consciousness in the souls of Europeans; for in the wake of the spread of the principles of the French Revolution — the principles of liberty, fraternity, and equality — and the declaration of the rights of man, the sons of a single homeland began to feel that they were brothers, with no difference in rights between the high and the lowly among them, and no distinction of one over another save the distinction of personal merit; that it was their duty to cooperate, and that each of them bore a responsibility he was bound to discharge toward his society. So the people of energy rose up to combat the existing evils, such as poverty, ignorance, and the other varieties of social misery; the humanitarian writers (Humanitarians) called on one another to uphold these principles and devoted their pens to the service of right and justice; and works of poetry and prose appeared saturated with the spirit of humanity, going to great lengths in describing the wretchedness of the deprived classes. It is enough for me to mention, among these humanitarians, immortal writers like Charles Dickens, author of “David Copperfield,” “The Old Curiosity Shop,” and “Great Expectations”; Victor Hugo, author of “Les Misérables”; and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who set down in some of her poems the misery of child laborers — it is enough to mention these three for you to know what new feelings were surging in the breasts of the sons and daughters of the nineteenth century, and to see how keenly the select few among them felt the social evils around them and the necessity of striving to remove them.

Into this atmosphere saturated with the spirit of humanity came Florence Nightingale, the woman who, by her humane works and her service to suffering mankind, left a greater mark than any humanitarian writer who appeared in her age.

Until that time the art of nursing had been all but confined to the nuns of the convents; other women held it a lowly, despised occupation, practiced at times by servant girls when, along with the household chores, they assisted the hospital nuns and doctors. But when a woman of noble birth and lofty character like Florence Nightingale took it up as a profession, the veils of ignorance fell from people's eyes; they cast convention to the winds, and every educated woman in Europe came to look upon the art and its founder with esteem and reverence. So it is with every work we undertake: its value does not depend on its kind or its quantity, but on the way we perform it and the excellence of our mastery of it.

Florence Nightingale was born in 1820 in England, into a noble family enjoying many social privileges, and this allowed her to obtain a breadth of culture rarely granted a girl in that age. From childhood she was known for her inclination to the service of the sick, and she broached to her family her insistent desire to make nursing her profession. She met with fierce resistance from them, but she did not despair; she repeated her request and waited patiently until she obtained their consent, after years during which she practiced nursing the sick among her own kin. At thirty-one she traveled to Germany and stayed two weeks, and then three months, studying the art at the hands of the Fliedners' German Evangelical sisters, called Deaconesses, at Kaiserswerth. She continued her travels and studies across western Europe, visiting the hospitals of Dublin in Ireland, then spending a month in training with the Sisters of Charity in Paris; after that she practiced nursing in a small hospital in London and then in the Middlesex Hospital. But most of her schooling was her own, for intelligence and desire were joined in her with opportunities for practice and trial, until she reached in her work a level of mastery that no nurse of her day, or before it, had attained.

At this point the Crimean War broke out, in 1854, when Florence's fame in nursing had already flown through England. Among her intimate friends was the British Secretary at War, Mr. Sidney Herbert, known for his works of reform and his humane deeds. He resolved to entrust Florence with the direction of nursing for the army, though none but nuns had ever before been given such a charge; but the English army then stood in need of such a young woman, for the French and the Russians had their nursing Sisters of Charity, who had no counterpart among the English.

Florence consented to shoulder the task, and in October she sailed to the East with forty English nurses whom she had gathered from different hospitals. The military hospital in which she took up her post at Scutari was in the worst state of neglect and filth, and the death rate among the sick ran from fifty to sixty percent.

In a short time Miss Nightingale managed to organize all the hospitals of the Crimea, and the nurses under her supervision came to number two hundred. She then devoted herself to devising a new system for the management of health affairs in the British army, and thanks to her skill and her marvelous energy the death rate fell from 50 percent to 22 per thousand — a proportion without precedent at that time.

She was the first nurse to concern herself with the soldiers' recreation and with establishing permanent centers for that purpose in the camps. She made successful efforts to provide modern mechanical means of cleaning and disinfection, to supply the camps with all kinds of clothing, food, surgical instruments, and medicines, and she strove to equip them with medical departments and then with such means of recreation as could be had: an army post office, a savings bank, convalescent homes, reading rooms, recreation clubs, and special care for the soldiers' families.

Her singular personality and rare gifts shone forth: her mere passing among the sick brought about an improvement in them, and they would await the coming of her lamp on the round of inspection each evening as the sick man awaits the coming of health.

Yet despite her glorious deeds in the Crimean War she was not spared the malice of enemies and enviers, who wove plots to bring her down and belittle her; but the English people's attachment to her, and her influence with the royal family, blocked those endeavors. From that time the government of England secured her position by granting her a permanent post in the War Office and giving her the title of General Superintendent of the corps of nurses.

In the Crimea she was stricken with a severe illness, and this, added to the hardships she had met with in the war, told badly upon her health, and its effects accompanied her all her life. Had she allowed herself a long rest she would have recovered her strength entirely, but she would consent to nothing but to continue the labor and carry on the work she had begun.

She did not sever her connection with the army after the Crimean War, but strove to complete the reforms she had set on foot. She drew up confidential reports for the government on the deficiencies she had witnessed and the needs she had come to know, and thanks to her criticisms and proposals the most important of the reforms carried out in the administration of the army were accomplished.

The question of raising the standard of health in India drew her attention, and she undertook wide-ranging investigations covering major subjects such as the land, irrigation, and taxation, drawing up on all this ample reports, which were taken as the basis of what the governors did toward the cleansing of India and the improvement of the health of the British army there.

The British government valued her services and granted her a great money reward, which she spent on realizing the idea that had haunted her for so long: the founding of a school for the training of nurses according to her new method. She attached this school to St. Thomas's Hospital and watched over its birth and growth to the end of her long life. Her greatest concern was to bring up good nurses, fit not only for nursing but also for training others and spreading the modern principles of the art; for this reason she called them missionary nurses — that is, ready to go to the farthest ends of the earth to spread their message.

What was that message which Florence Nightingale wished to spread, and what is the pivot of the method known by her name? She left a number of books in which she set down her experiences and expounded her theories, the most important being “Notes on Hospitals” and “On Nursing: What It Is and What It Is Not.” From what she wrote we may conclude that the first of the reform measures she called for was that the administration of the nursing staff be taken out of the hands of men — that is, of the doctors and the hospital directors — and placed in the hands of a woman who should herself be a nurse of wide culture and experience. From that time her theory was put into effect in all modern hospitals and became the mainstay of the system called by her name.

As for the second point she pressed in her writings, it was the summons to people to change their view of the art of nursing — the urging that it be counted among the ideal women's professions, requiring long preparation and wide scientific study, and that people give up regarding it as a work of pity and sacrifice fit for nuns and penitents; for in it there is wide room for fruitful service that wins the soul contentment and joy and makes its practice a wellspring of delight, not a path of penance or self-mortification. It was perhaps, at that time, the only women's profession that offered educated women a work uniting dignity with the spirit of adventure and of constructive reform.

Her fame reached the United States, and the great reformers, men and women, corresponded with her — such as Harriet Martineau, who worked with her on a project for combating prostitution. Florence left correspondence and opinions on all manner of health and social subjects, and took part in a number of public projects, such as the reform of the Liverpool hospital and the assistance of the Swiss Henry Dunant in founding the international Red Cross society.

And despite her seclusion in her room by reason of her failing health, she went on striving, corresponding, and watching the developments of her age, sending out her radiance to every corner of the world, until she reached her ninetieth year and that flame was extinguished which had lit its age and wrought in the world of health and nursing a revolution no less important than that which Pasteur wrought in the world of medicine. She was buried, according to her will, in her family's burial place; had it not been for this, the English people would have buried her in Westminster Abbey beside the great figures of the world who raised England's name among the peoples of the earth.