With the Ottoman and French armies, the British military laid siege to Sevastopol, headquarters of the Russian fleet. In 1854, British troops invaded the Russian-held Crimean Peninsula in response to aggressive moves by Czar Nicholas I to expand his territory. “The main and real object of the war,” asserted Britain’s Prime Minister Lord Palmerston, “is to curb the aggressive ambition of Russia.” And she cared for prostitutes during a cholera epidemic in 1853.Ĭrimea, where Russia had established a naval base at Sevastopol, became a flash point in a geopolitical struggle. She served as superintendent of the Institution for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen on Upper Harley Street in London, a hospital for governesses. She traveled widely in continental Europe, mastering her profession at the highly regarded Kaiserswerth nursing school in Germany. “Both sisters were trapped in a gilded cage growing up,” says Bostridge, “but only Florence broke out of it.”įor years, she divided her time between the comforts of rural England and rigorous training and caregiving. Nightingale overcame her parents’ objections. Her parents-especially her mother-opposed the choice, since nursing in those days was regarded as disreputable, suitable only for lower-class women. At 16, she experienced a religious awakening while at the family’s second home, at Embley Park, in Hampshire, and, convinced that her destiny was to do God’s work, she decided to become a nurse. She “craved for some regular occupation, for something worth doing instead of frittering away time on useless trifles,” she once recalled. Right, Athena, Florence’s owl, an Athene noctua, or little owl, on display at the Florence Nightingale Museum, London. Left, a page from Florence Nightingale's Pet Owl, Athena: A Sentimental History by Parthenope, Lady Verney. This article is a selection from the March 2020 issue of Smithsonian magazine Buy Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12 But while her sister followed their mother’s example, embracing Victorian convention and domestic life, Florence had greater ambitions. Tutored by their father in mathematics and the classics, and surrounded by a circle of enlightened aristocrats who campaigned for outlawing the slave trade and other reforms, Florence and her older sister, Parthenope, grew up amid intellectual ferment. Her father, William Nightingale, had inherited at age 21 a family fortune amassed from lead smelting and cotton spinning, and lived as a country squire in a manor house called Lea Hurst in Derbyshire, set on 1,300 acres about 140 miles north of London. Her parents had gone there after being married. She was named in honor of the Italian city where she was born on May 12, 1820. “The British officers didn’t want her here, but she was a very insistent lady, and she established her authority. “Florence was a big personality,” he said. To better understand this epic figure, I not only interviewed scholars and searched the archives but went to the place where the crucible of war transformed Nightingale into perhaps the most celebrated woman of her time: Balaklava, a port on the Crimean Peninsula, where a former Russian military officer named Aleksandr Kuts, who served as my guide, summed up Nightingale as we stood on the cliff near the site of the hospital where she toiled. “I think misogyny has a lot to do with it.” “We are very uncomfortable still with an intellectually powerful woman whose primary aim has nothing to do with men or family,” Bostridge told me. Mark Bostridge, author of the biography Florence Nightingale, attributes much of the controversy to Nightingale’s defiance of Victorian conventions. But researchers are calling attention to her pioneering work as a statistician and as an early advocate for the modern idea that health care is a human right. Meanwhile, perhaps surprisingly, some British nurses themselves have suggested they are tired of working in her shadow. Yet as Britain prepares to celebrate Florence Nightingale’s 200th birthday on May 12-with a wreath-laying at Waterloo Place, a special version of the annual Procession of the Lamp at Westminster Abbey, a two-day conference on nursing and global health sponsored by the Florence Nightingale Foundation, and tours of her summer home in Derbyshire-scholars are debating her reputation and accomplishments.ĭetractors recently have chipped away at Nightingale’s role as a caregiver, pointing out that she served as a nurse for only three years. She’s the “avenging angel,” the “ministering angel,” the “lady with the lamp”-the brave woman whose name would become synonymous with selflessness and compassion.
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