The lady with the lamp... the lady with the bedpan would be more accurate
As hospitals in Florence Nightingale’s name are built to tackle the coronavirus, MARION McMULLEN looks at the nurse’s great legacy
IT IS said that when a 17-year-old Florence Nightingale announced she wanted to be a nurse her mother and sister promptly fainted with shock.
Nursing was seen as a lowly, ill-paid occupation at the time and Florence’s wealthy family did not approve of her choice. “It was as if,” she later wrote, “I wanted to be a kitchen maid.”
But Florence never lost sight of her goal and defied her family’s wishes by visiting hospitals in Europe and turning down a marriage proposal to focus on her dreams of a nursing career.
Her father eventually allowed her to train at a Christian school for women in Germany and she later became superintendent of a hospital for sick governesses in London’s Harley Street before heading to the Crimea in 1854 in charge of a team of 38 nurses to tend to wounded British soldiers at a hospital in Scutari.
Conditions were filthy at the military hospital and it led to the deaths of many patients – 16,000 men died of sickness in the hospital, compared with fewer than 2,600 in battle and 1,800 of their wounds.
Queen Victoria offered her support writing: “I wish Miss Nightingale and the ladies would tell these poor noble wounded and sick men that no one takes a warmer interest or feels more for their suffering, or admires their courage and heroism more than their Queen. Day and night she thinks of her beloved troops.”
Florence earned her nickname “the lady with the lamp” from her habit of doing nightly rounds with a simple lamp to check on the welfare of her sick patients. She introduced a strict new hygiene regime and ordered that “every nurse ought to be careful to wash her hands very frequently during the day. If her face, too, so much the better”.
She wrote letters home for the soldiers in her care, helped them send money to their families and even opened a reading room at the hospital.
“They call me the lady with the lamp. Why don’t they call me the lady with the bedpan? It’d be more accurate,” she later said.
The 200th anniversary of Florence’s birth will be celebrated next month on May 12 – the date which also now marks International Nurses Day.
The reformer was born in Florence in 1820 and named after her Italian birthplace. Now the legacy of the founder of modern nursing, who transformed healthcare, is being remembered with the NHS Nightingale Hospitals built around the UK to treat Covid-19 patients.
The first – the 4,000-bed hospital, at the ExCel convention centre in London, was officially opened by Prince Charles.
He said: “I need hardly say that the name of this hospital could not have been more aptly chosen. Florence Nightingale, the lady with the lamp, brought hope and healing to thousands in their darkest hour. In this dark time, this place will be a shining light. It is symbolic of the selfless care and devoted service taking place in innumerable settings, with countless individuals, throughout the United Kingdom.”
New Nightingale hospitals have also been set up in the Midlands and North West.
Florence herself returned home to Britain in 1856 after the Crimea to find she had become a national heroine, but declared: “The greatest heroes are those who do their duty in the daily grind of domestic affairs whilst the world whirls as a maddening dreidel.”
She was rarely seen publicly and took to her bed, spending much of her final 40 years at her London home at South Street, Mayfair.
The house was on four levels and she saw a constant stream of approved visitors, from co-workers and students from the Nightingale School of Nursing, to royalty and dignitaries.
Her work continued with the publication of her book, Notes On Nursing, which looked at cleanliness, ventilation, light and food in the sick room. She also once pointed out: “The very first requirement in a hospital is that it should do the sick no harm.”
Florence met Queen Victoria to discuss army medical reforms, which included the training of military doctors and hospital sanitation, and she became he first woman to be awarded the order of merit in 1907.
She received the Freedom of the City Of London the following year and donated £50,000 from a testimonial to the creation of the Nightingale Home for the Training of Nurses.
Florence died at the age of 90 on August 13, 1910, and requested on her deathbed that her body be “dissected for the purposes of medical science” and not buried at Westminster Abbey.
Her request to leave her remains to science was turned down and she was finally laid to rest at the Nightingale family burial site at the Church of St Margaret in East Wellow, Hampshire.
Florence once said: “I attribute my success to this... I never gave or took any excuse.”