Nightingale’s journey
200 years after she was born in Florence, Mark Bostridge follows in Florence Nightingale’s footsteps, from Scutari to Harley Street
No Victorian has had a more decisive impact on our daily lives than Florence Nightingale. From founding the first secular training school for nurses, to pioneering the use of statistical data in health care, to establishing the principle that society has a collective responsibility for the health of all its members – just three of her more important innovations – Nightingale’s influence has been felt worldwide.
On 12th May, the world will celebrate the bicentenary of Florence Nightingale’s birth. Encapsulating her life and work, here are ten key sites that allow us to follow in the footsteps of this great reformer.
Escape from the crowds besieging the city of Florence, take the Porta Romana along the Via Senese and, as you climb the steep hill, you will quickly come to the Villa La Colombaia at a bend in the road. Now a Roman Catholic school run by the Sisters of the Adorers of the Blood of Christ, it was the country house selected by William and Fanny Nightingale for the birthplace of their second daughter (the elder one, Parthenope, was born in Naples (originally called Parthenope) the previous year, on the first leg of the Nightingales’ honeymoon tour). A kindly nun will show you the ‘grand salon’, where Florence is said to have been born. Outside, a walk down a tree-lined path will bring you to a stunning, panoramic view overlooking Brunelleschi’s cathedral dome.
Florence was brought up at two family homes. Lea Hurst in Derbyshire, on the edge of the village of Holloway, was the Nightingales’ summer residence, developed from a Jacobean manor house
on the family estates. In recent years it has been renovated and several rooms are available for bed and breakfast. Listen to the roar of the River Derwent from the upper casement windows and take with you a copy of Mrs Gaskell’s North and South. Gaskell finished writing her condition-of-england novel in one of the bedrooms upstairs in the winter of 1854.
It was always a wrench to leave Lea Hurst at the end of the summer. Living there, Florence enjoyed a life of relative tranquillity and she was in easy reach of the sick poor. Her lifestyle at the Nightingales’ Hampshire residence, Embley Park, was a complete contrast. This vast, red-brick house, set in 4,000 acres, was where the family entertained the good and the great (it was next door to the Palmerstons’ home at Broadlands). Since 1946 it’s been a school; if you enter the grounds, you may see the two majestic cedar of Lebanon trees under which Florence reputedly received her ‘call’ to God’s service, aged 16.
After almost a decade of struggling to be allowed by her family to follow her vocation of nursing, in 1853 Florence became superintendent of a London institution, the Establishment for Gentlewomen during Illness. The original house at 1 Upper Harley Street (now 90 Harley Street) has long since disappeared, but there is a plaque to mark the site’s significance. It was here that Nightingale developed some of the ideas about care of the sick that surfaced in her bestselling Notes on Nursing at the end of the decade.
The Crimean War was of course what brought Florence Nightingale authority, influence and everlasting fame as the ‘Lady with the Lamp’. In October 1854, Sidney Herbert at the War Office asked her to lead a team of nurses to Scutari (modern Üsküdar), on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, opposite Constantinople. Here they found the British Army atrociously underequipped medically and lacking essential supplies. Nightingale’s reforms, and the arrival of a sanitary commission from England to flush out the sewers, eventually reduced the terrifyingly high mortality rate from disease.
The Barrack Hospital is currently the closely guarded HQ of the Turkish First Army. This gigantic structure has to be seen to be believed. Visits to the small Nightingale museum there are permitted by arrangement with the Protocol Office. Be warned that security is high – I almost had my camera confiscated by an armed soldier while taking pictures – and that the North-west tower, where the museum is located, is almost certainly the wrong tower. Nightingale’s quarters were on the other side of the building – not open to the public.
22 Albemarle Street W1 doesn’t have a commemorative plaque, but it should have. Nightingale worked here on the Royal Commission on the Health of the Army and designed the famous ‘coxcomb’ statistical diagram showing the causes of mortality in the Army, which she included in her report.
The aftermath of the war left Nightingale suffering from a crippling disease, severe brucellosis, and turned her into a recluse, dedicated to her reforming work. She lived in the Burlington Hotel in Old Burlington Street (demolished in the 1930s), and in rented accommodation in central London and Hampstead. In 1865, she finally settled at 35 South Street, off Park Lane (later renumbered 10 South Street W1). An apartment block now stands on the site, marked with a blue plaque. Nightingale probably never realised that one of her neighbours opposite was the great courtesan, Catherine ‘Skittles’ Walters, lover of, among many others, Napoleon III of France and the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII).
Claydon House, Bucks (National Trust), was where Nightingale frequently stayed in her later years, following Parthenope Nightingale’s marriage to Sir Harry Verney. She often brought her menagerie of cats with her (a story did the rounds that she kept 17 cats, with a nurse to attend to each, and that the cats were periodically sent to the country for a change of air). Admire the staircase of inlaid ivory and marquetry, but also ask the staff to show you the servants’ bell for ‘Miss Nightingales [sic] Bed Room’ near their offices.
Nightingale was an expert on hospital construction, consulted by governments all over the world on design according to the soundest sanitary principles. Her prize ‘pavilion’ hospital was the 588-bed St Thomas’ Hospital, opposite the Houses of Parliament, opened by Queen Victoria in 1871. It had seven pavilions – now down to four, thanks to enemy action during the Second World War – and was designed by Henry Currey in fashionable Italianate style.
Florence Nightingale died at the age of 90 in 1910, and was buried in the churchyard at East Wellow, near Embley, in a grave with a simple inscription.
Her major national memorial is at London’s Waterloo Place, off Pall Mall. This is a nine-foot statue on a pedestal, sculpted by A G Walker, showing Nightingale in her famous guise as the ‘Lady with the Lamp’ (though holding a Grecian oil lamp, not the folding Turkish fanoos that Nightingale would have been familiar with at Scutari).
Unveiled without ceremony on a snowy February day in 1915, during the depths of the First World War, it was the first public statue in the capital of a woman, other than royalty. The new statue narrowly avoided being blown to smithereens when it was discovered that there was a gas main running directly beneath the site.
A miniature version of Walker’s Nightingale sits today in the White Drawing Room at 10 Downing Street. She’s probably shaking her head in disbelief at the dire shortage of nursing staff in the UK – and the current stresses they’re working under.