Talk:Florence Nightingale

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[edit] Early life

Florence Nightingale was born into an upper class, lavish, well-connected British family at the Villa Colombaia, Florence, Italy, and was named after the city of her birth.

Her parents were William Edward Nightingale (1794–1875) and Frances Fanny Nightingale née Smith (1789–1880). William Nightingale was born William Edward Shore. His mother Mary née Evans was the niece of one Peter Nightingale, under the terms of whose will William Shore not only inherited his estate Lea Hurst in Derbyshire, but also assumed the name and arms of Nightingale. Fanny's father (Florence's maternal grandfather) was the abolitionist Will Smith.

Embley Park, now a school, was the family home of Florence Nightingale

Inspired by what she took as a Christian divine calling, experienced first in 1837 at Embley Park and later throughout her life, Nightingale committed herself to nursing. This demonstrated a passion on her part, and also a rebellion against the expected role for a woman of her status, which was to become a wife and mother. In those days, nursing was a career with a poor reputation, filled mostly by poorer women, "hangers-on" who followed the armies. In fact, nurses were equally likely to function as cooks. Nightingale announced her decision to enter nursing in 1845 evoking intense anger and distress from her family particularly her mother.

She cared for poor and indigent people. In December 1844, in response to a pauper's death in a workhouse infirmary in London that became a public scandal, she became the leading advocate for improved medical care in the infirmaries and immediately engaged the support of Charles Villiers, then president of the Poor Law Board. This led to her active role in the reform of the Poor Laws, extending far beyond the provision of medical care. She was later instrumental in mentoring and then sending Agnes Elizabeth Jones and other Nightingale Probationers to Liverpool Workhouse Infirmary.

In 1846 she visited Kaiserswerth, Germany, and learned more of its pioneering hospital established by Theodor Fliedner and managed by an order of Lutheran deaconesses. She was profoundly impressed by the quality of care and by the commitment and practices of the deaconesses.

Nightingale was courted by politician and poet Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Baron Houghton, but she rejected him, convinced that marriage would interfere with her ability to follow her calling to nursing. When in Rome in 1847, recovering from a mental breakdown precipitated by a continuing crisis of her relationship with Milnes, she met Sidney Herbert, a brilliant politician who had been Secretary at War (1845–1846), a position he would hold again during the Crimean War. Herbert was already married, but he and Nightingale were immediately attracted to each other and they became lifelong close friends. Herbert was instrumental in facilitating her pioneering work in Crimea and in the field of nursing, and she became a key advisor to him in his political career. In 1851 she rejected Milnes' marriage proposal against her mother's wishes.

Nightingale also had strong and intimate relations with Benjamin Jowett, particularly about the time that she was considering leaving money in her will to establish a Chair in Applied Statistics at the University of Oxford.[1]

Nightingale's career in nursing began in 1851, when she received four months training in Germany as a deaconess of Kaiserswerth. She undertook the training over strenuous family objections concerning the risks and social implications of such activity, and the Roman Catholic foundations of the hospital. While at Kaiserswerth she reported having her most important and intense experience of her divine calling.

On August 22, 1853, Nightingale took a post of superintendent at the Institute for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen in Upper Harley Street, London, a position she held until October 1854. Her father had given her an annual income of £500 (roughly US$50,000/£25,000 in present terms), which allowed her to live comfortably and to pursue her career. James Joseph Sylvester was her mentor.

According to [1], the polar area charts weren't called coxcombs by Nightingale. The coxcombs were the booklets that contained the study results. It was her biographer who first called the polar charts coxcombs. --seav 10:02, Jan 1, 2004 (UTC)

I have changed "She later claimed that she had received divine calling" to "She later told that she had received divine calling". Being the type of extreemely honest and intelligent person she was, she was surely also honest about this. Barfoed 08:40, 6 Jan 2004 (UTC)

I changed the Project Gutenberg link back to leading to the bibliographic record, as this is often more useful than leading directly to a certain file. The bibrec lets the user choose which format and what site to download a title from, and avoids the possibility of beginning to download a large file unexpectedly. See also: How do I link from book articles to the online text at Project Gutenberg? Andrew Sly 22:28, 8 Jun 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Pictures query

Most of the time, when i am browsing wikipedia, i come accross articles which seems to include a picture on the top right side, but the picture is not "visible". Okay i can see some kind of a frame, but not the image. I always assume that there is no picture available to be uploaded at the moment, but on the other hand, a title like "A young Florence Nightingale" lead me to assume that may be my Vaio isn't set up right, and i should really be seeing something. I run Linux (Fedora) and wonder if others are experiencing the same problem or am i missing some proprietary mess. wkm

what browser are you using?

Not that this is really the place for this (?), but you may have an option in your browser that allows the viewing either of images from anywhere or just images that come from the same place as the text. Or you may have accidentally blocked the site the images come from, either on your browser or on your router. AL.

[edit] Hard-Working But Critical

FN worked tremendously hard at what she did and was committed to the very difficult job at hand under sometimes harrowing conditions. However, she was human and a product of the times she lived in, as we all are. She did have a great deal of trouble giving others credit where credit was due. This extended to Catholic clergy (nuns who were nurses) who worked alongside her in the Crimea. She called things as she saw them but her honesty could be painful, and at times unfair, for those she worked with. I get this information from an interesting book that is a compilation of her personal letters called, "Florence Nightingale: Letters from the Crimea" edited by Sue M. Goldie published by Mandolin, an imprint of Manchester University Press, 1997.

[edit] Polar area chart

I changed the entry to say the polar area charts are similar (not the same as) pie charts. Here's a succinct comparison: "A pie chart has a fixed radius and varies the angle. ... These plots have fixed angles and vary the radius." (http://lists.webtic.nl/pipermail/infodesign-cafe/2005-February/143729.html) Isidore 11:42, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)


I believe that Nightingale did call her charts coxcombs - I feel sure I have seen this in her correspondence with Benjamin Jowett - but I cd be mistaken.

They are actually rather inferor - because if you take 'a fixed angle and vary the radius', you get an area whihc is proportional to the radius squared, which is not quite what you want!

Johnbibby 21:02, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] International Nursing Day

May 12 is being observed as International Nursing Day in all nursing care institutions throughout the world. Obviously it is the birthday of Nightingale. Would somebody give more info on this INDay?

  • 61.0.164.152 15:08, 11 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Statistics almost certainly wrong.

The text claims she:

  • dropped mortality rates by 40 % to just 2 %

That implies that mortality was 3.3 % originally. I don't believe it. Perhaps the author meant that mortality went from 42% to 2%.

I know that confusion of percent change with percent is common, but it really is a basic error. Florence Nightingale was supposed to be good at medical statistics. It would be ironic if an article about her contained a basic mistake like that. Can anyone provide a source for this dubious claim? Bobblewik 12:25, 22 October 2005 (UTC)


Maybe you shoulf try to look on the bright side, she did well!

Maybe you should try and research about Mary Seacole more then FDlorence Nightingale she is an outstanding figure in History

According to a review of The Collected Works of Florence Nightingale recently published (18 Nov. 2005) in the Times Literary Supplement "A recent Channel 4 documentary portrayed a vindictive Nightingale, jealously setting out to deny Seacole recognition from the Establishment, even though evidence exists which suggests something closer to the opposite." Perhaps the author of the article (Mark Bostridge) could indicate what this evidence is so that the Wikipedia page could be updated on this subject. Serandou 11:54, 31 August 2006 (UTC)


[edit] Research on Florence Nightingale Syndrome

I researched the phrase “Florence Nightingale Syndrome” and found that it has multiple meanings. The most frequent google result is associated with a campaign to change the name of CFS/ME to “Florence Nightingale Syndrome”. (Less often, the term is used in connection with Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome and Gulf War Syndrome.) The second most common use is the act of a selfless caring, often in the context of duty to county or society. I consider this the “traditional” use of the phrase. I found another, less frequent use, the romantic-love relationship that develops between a nurse and their patient. This term seems to substitute “Florence Nightingale’’ for the generic word “nurse”. None of these seem pertinent to the biography of the women, Florence Nightingale.

There is one text that describes Florence Nightingale Syndrome better than what the above explained. I ask that it is cleared in Wikipedia that this commonly used eponym be attributed to Nightingale's care for others. http://www.psicounsel.com/earlcurley/chapter2.html Also, the eponym was only suggested to be, and is not commonly known as CFS, much less PTSS. http://home.vicnet.net.au/~mecfs/general/name.html 208.190.94.2 02:06, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Architecture

I moved this from the main page because it has no reference. Someone care to expand (or at least verify and/or explain?) Fagstein 18:31, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

Florence Nightingale had significant influence on hospital architecture and floor plan layouts.

[edit] crimea nurses

suggest interested people look for not just mary seacolr & f. nightingale, but also elizabeth davis betsy CADWALLADER a welsh woman who also went to scutari. F.N. is said to have called her "that wild woman from the welsh hills".

[edit] Mortality Rate Drop

Whosoever wrote that mortality rates had dropped "40% to just 2%" probably committed an error. If the mortality rate had been 42%, as the language seems to imply, then the drop from 42% to 2% would have been a 95.2% drop. If this isn't true, then the mortality rates must have only been 3.3% to start with, and the drop is then far less impressive an achievement.

[edit] Scutari

I don't know where to begin with what's wrong with this section. It perpetuates the sentamentalised and romantic myth of the "Lady with the Lamp" that does not deserve to belong in an encyclopedia. Unfortunately this myth is rampant across the internet, and it is difficult to find sources that do not include this. One such source I did manage to locate on the internet is a bbc address: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/discovery/medicine/nightingale_02.shtml which I will refer to.

The death toll actually rose during her time at Scutari, as I quote from the BBC article:

"Historians are now waking up to the shocking truth that the death toll at Nightingale's hospital was higher than at any other hospital in the East, and that her lack of knowledge of the disastrous sanitary conditions at Scutari was responsible. During her first winter at Scutari, 4,077 soldiers died there, ten times more from illnesses such as typhus, typhoid, cholera and dysentery, than from battle wounds. Conditions at the hospital were fatal to the men that Nightingale was trying to nurse: they were packed like sardines into an unventilated building on top of defective sewers.

As Hugh Small, author of a recent study of Florence Nightingale in the Crimea, has written, this pioneering woman was effectively presiding over 'a death camp'. A sanitary commission, sent out by Palmerston's government in March 1855, almost six months after Nightingale's arrival at Scutari, flushed out the sewers and improved the ventilation, thereby dramatically reducing the mortality rate. However, Nightingale herself continued to attribute responsibility for the high number of deaths to inadequate nutrition and supplies, and to the army's sending of men across the Black Sea to Scutari when they were already half-dead from exposure.

It was only on her return to Britain, when she began collecting evidence to present before the Royal Commission on the Health of the Army, that Nightingale changed her mind, reaching the painful conclusion that most of the soldiers at her hospital had been killed by bad sanitation, due to her ignorance. She had helped them to die in cleaner surroundings and greater comfort, but she had not saved their lives."

I am updating this section of the article to include this information, and I hope that this is enough justification to. I think that the article should talk more about her true achievements, her pioneering work in hospital design, which shocks me to find it is not mentioned.

Ed 20:03, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Lesbian?

I'm suspicious of the claims in the trivia section that Nightingale is long thought to be lesbian. The provided references for the various related quotes does not look reliable. It is from one website, and even the author(s) seems to think it is speculative and even notes some quotes are out of context. Better references would be to actual work by Nightingale biographers and historians. --C S (Talk) 09:59, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

I also am suspicious. The one source says

This quote appears in a publication of the National Museum and Archive of Lesbian and Gay History, without a context. If you know the source of this quote, probably from Florence's extensive correspondence, I would love to hear from you. I'm sure she's not talking about sexual passions, but I'd be interested to know the context of this passage.

(Quoting this paragrah is believed to consitute Fair use).
I am adding {{OR}} to the Triva section. There may be a more approperate template, however, I am not finding one right now (something about creditable primary sources). --Midnightcomm 04:13, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
The only creditable information I can find is that the ideas of her being a lesbian was put forth by The Private Life of Florence Nightingale by Richard Gordon, ISBN 1842325124. The book is described as fiction.[2] --Midnightcomm 05:06, 26 June 2006 (UTC)


I must say I am somewhat surprised at the idea that Florence Nightingale could possibly have been a lesbian. There seems to me every reason to disbelieve that idea. Firstly, there is not a shred of evidence to support the idea that I have seen. Secondly it would have been extremely unlikely for her to pursue such relationships in the religious and social context she was living in. Thirdly, she nearly married but turned down her suitors in favour of pursuing her chosen carear. To somehow construe that as evidence of being homosexual seems like wishful thinking.

"The Extraordinary Upbringing and Curious Life of Miss Florence Nightingale" By Gillian Gill, ISBN: 0345451880, has this to say:

"History, as opposed to imaginative literature, is based on evidence, and no one has produced any evidence that Florence Nightingale ever engaged in sexual relations with women. This I assume to be the standard working definition of a lesbian."—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 194.217.90.59 (talk • contribs) .

I'm going to remove the statements about her being a lesbian in the Triva section. --Midnightcomm 20:03, 3 July 2006 (UTC)


nndb lists here as asexual —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Charlie yusi (talk • contribs).

[edit] medical care for poor

"Nightingale wasn't particularly concerned with the appalling conditions of medical care for the legions of the poor and indigent. In December 1844, in response to a pauper's death in a workhouse infirmary in London that became a public scandal, she became the leading advocate for improved medical care in the infirmaries and immediately engaged the support of Charles Villiers, then president of the Poor Law Board. This led to her active role in the reform of the Poor Laws, extending far beyond the provision of medical care."

Should this be "was", or was she originally not concerned with the care for the poor and indigent, but became concerned after this matter?
24.16.251.40 05:05, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Florence Nightingale (re. recent edits)

She DID actually have a pet owl called Athena!

The animal is stuffed and viewable at her house in Holloway (I've seen it!)

But whether it merits mention here I doubt.

[edit] Trojans/Virius

While viewing the Times Obit on F. Nightingale my virus checker flashed a message that a trojan/virus was active. I thought that you should know this and maybe someone that is familiar with there things could clean that link up. Cheers Patrick Laffey

[edit] Ethnicity?

On the page Anglo-Indians it has her listed in "Notable people of mixed British and Indian ethnicity" and I somehow doubt it...Does anybody know about her ancestry? Someone was having fun with the list because I've seen at least two others who may not be of Anglo-Indian ancestry...? C.Kent87 18:10, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Hospital in France

Hi, I'm doing Nightingale in Bahasa Indonesia, did anyone here know the name of hospital that she once worked/ train in France? I know that she has a training in Germany for 4 months, it is also claimed that she worked in France before the crimean war, any name? date perhaps? anyone? Thank you Serenity id 02:33, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

I just can translate you what the German article is saying: 1851 she intended a 3 month nursing education in Kaiserwerth (today part of Düsseldorf). After her stay in Kaiserwerth she moved to Paris where she studied the nursing methods of the "Barmherzigen Schwestern", translated to Merciful sisters which must be a religious order. Here is some more information form http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Florence_Nightingale: At that time England was sadly behind-hand in matters of nursing and sanitation, and Miss Nightingale, who desired to obtain the best possible teaching for herself, went through a course of training in the Institute of Protestant Deaconesses at Kaiserswerth. She remained there six months, learning every detail of hospital management with a thoroughness rarely equalled. Miss Nightingale neglected nothing that could make her proficient in her self-chosen task. From Kaiserswerth she went to Paris, where she studied the system of nursing and management in the hospitals under the charge of the sisters of St Vincent de Paul. Cattleyard 09:26, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
Hah! Thank you. So this is correct. FYI I have her biography book that also stated this Paris (St Vincent de Paul - the name however different) -- the problem is the same biography book says she was born in England, not Italy, so I wasn't sure about its accuracy. Now that you confirmed it, I can put it happily in Bahasa Indonesia version. Thank you cattleyard! Serenity id 13:32, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

Sadly, some of what Nightingale was supposed to have acheived is myth. Nightingale rarely laid a finger on a patient, and it could be questioned weather she was a nurse at all. Whilst her volunteer nurses during the war where practicing on the wounded soldiers, Nightingale actually spent most of her time in a office drawing up statistics. And if you speak to many nurses today, myself included, we resent the hype that surrounds her and are annoyed by how little recognition the nurses who did the practical work actually got. Peter 81.151.13.85 17:51, 18 July 2007 (UTC)


[edit] Possible link to Florence Nightingale items on “Himetop – The History of medicine topographical database”

I suggest that somebody, interested in this page, could insert an external link to the following page describing, with pictures, some Florence Nightingale’s memories: http://himetop.wikidot.com/florence-nightingale


I don’t do it myself because I’m also an Administrator of this site (Himetop) and it could be a violation of the Wikipedia Conflict of Interest policy. Thanks for your attention.

Luca Borghi (talk) 17:38, 23 March 2008 (UTC)