Florence Nightingale 1820-1910
“Every nurse ought to be careful to wash her hands very frequently during the day. If her face, too, so much the better.”
How eerily fitting it is that she stares out from this photograph at us today, as if we could hear Florence Nightingale say those time-tested words of advice, one of the key things we should do to protect ourselves in the COVID world.
Today, May 12, is her 200th birthday and as she is forever known to be the founder of modern nursing, her story this year historically frames National Nursing Week in Canada.
Called the Lady of the Lamp from her time in the 1850’s as a nurse, visiting the dark bedsides of wounded soldiers during the Crimean War, Nightingale went on to found the Nightingale Fund, which led to the building of the Nightingale Training School at London’s St. Thomas Hospital in 1860. The Florence Nightingale Museum resides there today. You can read more of Nightingales amazing story, which tells significantly wider than you might know and in this Biography.com article.
However, it is worth mentioning here that in spite of the fact that she long suffered from the effects of Brucellosis, a highly contagious zoonosis she picked up during the Crimean War, Nightingale remained focused on social issues and contributed to work on improvements to hospital planning and she lived to the age of 90. Quite the promise of longevity given the shorter life expectancy norms of her times.
In my young life, at the age of seven, I did know a Florence Nightingale of my own. She was my mother. Though not a lady with a lamp, she did wear a mask every time she stood over my bed while I was quarantined for the better part of a year, with scarlet fever, and whooping cough back to back, and measles and mumps not long after that. In addition to her natural nursing talent, she was also my home school tutor and entertainment director. Perhaps her dry, wistful sense of humour was also good medicine. You can never overdose on that.
To some degree, my mother kept a lot to herself, a woman of mystery. Several adult years later when she and I were reminiscing about all this over cocktails, I asked her if she ever thought about becoming a nurse. “Oh, no”, she said, “I wanted to be a surgeon, but it was the depression, then the war and we never had enough money, so you know…”
There is more back-story of course (as there always is), not the least of which was the fact that she grew up alongside three other older sisters as her own mother died when she was a teenager. I know my mother would have been a great surgeon, evidenced by the fact that she would perform operations (wearing a mask) on my wounded teddy bears, on the kitchen table under a lamp when I was naïve enough to believe she really worked at Women’s College Hospital in Toronto, to which she did have a life-long allegiance.
Yes, nurses and other hospital workers are our 2020 health champions, all daughters and sons descendent from Nightingale. Quite the legacy.
Footnote.
One day some years ago, walking down Harley Street in London, as if tapped on the shoulder by some spectral hand (which does happen in London) I looked up suddenly and stopped. Directly, there on the side of a building engraved was this inscription: “Florence Nightingale left her hospital on this site for the Crimea, October 21st 1854.” My Marylebone lunch after that had more surprise, as it turns out, because at the table next to me, two surgeons sat discussing plans for attending their next conference.
For further reading, due out in paperback later this month is Florence Nightingale: The Woman and Her Legend: 200th Anniversary Edition by Mark Bostridge.