Marking the 200th anniversary of Florence Nightingale's birth 

An engraving of Florence done during her lifetime

Florence Nightingale 12 May 1820 – 13 August 1910 was a British social reformer and statistician, and the founder of modern nursing.

Born to a middle-class family, Florence felt she had a vocation for a profession that was looked down upon. 

She had to fight to make her mark as a nurse and a healthcare reformer, designing hospitals, training staff and working for ‘the sick poor’. 

She accomplished all this despite spending her later decades as an invalid after contracting ‘Crimean Fever’, now known as brucellosis. 

She died in 1910, aged 90.  

Florence Nightingale came to prominence while serving as a manager and trainer of nurses during the Crimean War, in which she organised care for wounded soldiers. She gave nursing a favourable reputation and became an icon of Victorian culture, especially in the persona of "The Lady with the Lamp" making rounds of wounded soldiers at night.

She transformed chaotic, unclean hospitals and revolutionised nursing, but it’s as a carer that she is most fondly remembered.

She helped save lives during a cholera epidemic, as many of the victims were taken to the Middlesex Hospital, where their treatment was superintended by her, who briefly joined the hospital in early September in order to help with the outbreak.  Later that year she bought comfort to those in need during the Crimean War.

‘What a comfort it was to see her pass even,’ wrote one soldier. 

‘She would speak to one, and nod and smile to many more, but she couldn’t do it to all. We lay there by our hundreds, but we could kiss her shadow as it fell and lay our heads on the pillow again, content.’ 

The Lamp she would have used: Artists used to mistakenly picture Florence carrying a bare candle or an oil lamp as she walked about tending to the sick in the former Turkish army barracks at Scutari, used by the British as a hospital in the Crimean War. It was how she was depicted on the back of the old £10 note (left), and also how she appears in the 1915 statue of her in Waterloo Place in London. But in fact she used one of these (right), a Turkish lantern or ‘fanoos’. The waxed concertina lantern is extremely practical. It can be folded up and stored in a pocket when it’s not being used. Then with a candle inside, it can be carried easily, stood up on its own or hung on a wall.

Florence took this medicine chest (pictured) to the Crimea. Most of the medicines in it were for treating gastric complaints, and many were highly toxic if used inappropriately. Paregoric Elixir had painkilling properties but was largely used as an anti-diarrhoea remedy, while Aromatic Confection was seen as a tonic that could also purge the system of trapped wind. Essence of Ginger, Citric Acid, Powdered Rhubarb and Carbonate of Magnesia and Soda were used to relieve flatulence and spasms of the stomach and bowels. She also carried quinine for malaria, and Carbonate of Potassium for fever. The chest also has a tiny set of scales and measures, and a beaker for measuring liquids.

This photograph of Florence, aged 33, was taken in 1853 while she was the Superintendent of the Establishment for Gentlewomen During Illness in Upper Harley Street in London. It was a small hospital for ‘gentlewomen, of good family, well educated’ but who were of limited income, which seemed to mean mainly governesses. Her father also gave her a generous allowance of £500 a year, equivalent to an income of £64,000 today. As so often in pictures of her, Florence is shown averting her eyes. After a year in the job she was bored, and when a cholera epidemic hit London in 1854 she rushed to volunteer at London’s Middlesex Hospital. More than 500 lives were lost in ten days, many of them prostitutes working around Oxford Street. Her move to the Crimea came shortly afterwards.

The huge Scutari Hospital building in Turkey (pictured) may have looked magnificent from the outside, but inside it was chaotic and filthy. It had been built above an open sewer, which meant that most of the soldiers’ deaths in hospital came from disease: 19,000 British troops died of illness (mainly infectious diseases), 4,000 from wounds. Florence arrived there to find the hospital overcrowded, appallingly under equipped medically, and lacking the basics such as food and bedding. Many of the doctors resented her at first, but she worked tirelessly to organise the hospital, fought for supplies to be sent by the government, and used her own money and funds sent by the public to buy scrubbing brushes and buckets, blankets, bedpans and even operating tables. Nevertheless when she left, she felt she had failed the soldiers, writing, ‘My poor men, lying in your Crimean graves.’ When Florence left Scutari for England on 28 July 1856, she rejected offers from the Royal Navy to travel home on a warship and instead traveled incognito as ‘Miss Smith’. She then took the train to Derbyshire and walked to her family home, Lea Hurst, arriving late on 7 August, 1856, opening the door and collapsing from fatigue.

Florence Nightingale’s nurses at Scutari Hospital wore the first known example of a nursing uniform (pictured). Over a grey woollen dress the women wore a white apron and a sash embroidered with ‘Scutari Hospital’ in red. Florence was keen to ensure that patients and doctors recognised her nurses and treated them with respect.

This register (pictured) records the names of the 229 women who served as nurses at British military hospitals during the Crimean War, and it starts with Florence Nightingale’s name. Before they arrived, journalists were reporting dire conditions, saying that the British had ‘not sufficient surgeons... no dressers and nurses... and not even linen to make bandages for the wounded’. Comparisons were made with the French, whose army had Sisters of Charity nurses with them. The entries on the Register make note of which hospitals nurses were sent to, while the ‘Remarks’ column includes information on whether they could cope or were sent home. Eleven of Florence’s nurses died of illness while working in the Crimea.

Charles Dickens helped foster the image of a nurse as a dissolute woman with the character Mrs Gamp in his novel Martin Chuzzlewit, serialised from 1843-4. Florence had to fight against this idea, but went on to become Dickens’s friend. During the Crimean War, he helped pay for new laundry equipment at Scutari Hospital, and later visited Florence at her London home as they shared an interest in social reform. Florence gave this copy of his book Oliver Twist (pictured) to her servant Mary Coleman in 1894.

Florence rescued this owl (pictured) in 1850 when she visited the Acropolis in Athens. She decided to keep her as a pet, and named her Athena after the Greek goddess of wisdom. She became Florence’s constant companion, and liked to sit on her shoulder or in her pocket. Athena had daily sand baths, but she was a mischievous bird – even eating Florence’s pet cicada Plato after it had died. Florence heard that Athena had died in 1854 just as she was preparing to depart for her new life in Turkey during the Crimean War. Devastated, she requested that the bird’s body be preserved, and wrote of her: ‘Poor little beastie, it was odd how much I loved you.’ 

Andrew Preston May 2020