Florence Nightingale Biography: Birthday, Early Life, Career, Personal Life, Death

Florence Nightingale Biography: Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), also known as “The Lady With the Lamp,” was a British nurse, social reformist, and statistician who is widely regarded as the founder of modern nursing. Her experiences as a nurse during the Crimean War shaped her perspectives on sanitation. In 1860, she founded St. Thomas’ Hospital and the Nightingale School of Nursing.

Florence Nightingale Biography

Early Years

Florence Nightingale was born on 12 May 1820 in the Villa Colombaia in Florence, Tuscany, to an affluent and well-connected British family. William Edward Nightingale and Frances “Fanny” Nightingale (née Smith) were her parents. Mary, the mother of William, was the niece of Peter Nightingale and assumed his surname and coat of arms. William Smith, an abolitionist and Unitarian, was Fanny’s father. Florence and her elder sister Parthenope studied history, mathematics, Italian, classical literature, and philosophy due to their father’s progressive views on women’s education.

In 1838, her father brought the family on a tour of Europe, where Florence met Mary Clarke, an English-born Parisian hostess with whom she bonded. Clarke was an engaging hostess who had little regard for British upper-class women. The only exceptions she made were for the Nightingale family and Florence. Clarke demonstrated that women can be equal to males, something Florence’s mother did not teach her. While at Embley Park, Nightingale had the first of what she believed to be a series of divine summons, which inspired her to devote her life to the service of others.

In her youth, she respected her family’s opposition to her becoming a nurse, and only in 1844 did she announce her intention to enter the profession. In spite of opposition from her family and the restrictive social code for affluent young English women, she strove to educate herself in the art and science of nursing.

Career

The Nightingale Fund was established on November 29, 1855 in Crimea to honour Nightingale for her service during the conflict. The Duke of Cambridge was chairman while Sidney Herbert served as honorary secretary. On 9 July 1860, Nightingale used £45,000 to establish the first nursing school, the Nightingale Training School, at St. Thomas’ Hospital. On May 16, 1865, the first trained Nightingale nurses began employment at the Liverpool Workhouse Infirmary. Notes on Nursing (1859) was the foundation of the curriculum at the Nightingale School and other nursing institutions.

The remainder of Nightingale’s life was devoted promoting and organising the nursing profession. In the introduction to the 1974 edition, Joan Quixley of the Nightingale School of Nursing stated that the book was the first of its kind and was written by the founder of modern nursing. Mark Bostridge has demonstrated that one of Nightingale’s most notable accomplishments was the introduction of trained nurses into the British workhouse system in the 1860s. This meant that sick paupers were no longer cared for by other able-bodied paupers, but rather by nursing staff with appropriate training. In his 1842–1843 novel Martin Chuzzlewit, Charles Dickens satirised the standard of care by depicting Sarah Gamp as incompetent, negligent, inebriated, and corrupt.

When Florence Nightingale returned from Crimea, where hospitals were sites of last resort with straw floors to absorb blood, she revolutionised nursing. Her work inspired nurses during the American Civil War, and her concepts inspired the United States Sanitary Commission’s volunteer force. Nightingale advocated for autonomous nursing leadership, and her new style of matron possessed complete authority and discipline over their nursing staff. The infamous ‘Guy’s Hospital dispute’ of 1879-1880 between matron Margaret Burt and hospital medical staff illustrated how physicians sometimes felt their authority was being challenged by these new Nightingale-style matrons.

Personal Life

Despite the fact that much of Nightingale’s work enhanced the lives of women worldwide, she believed that women craved sympathy and were less capable than men. She criticised early women’s rights activists for decrying an alleged absence of career opportunities for women while lucrative medical positions, supervised by Florence Nightingale and others, remained unfilled indefinitely. She favoured the friendship of powerful men, insisting that they had done more than women to help her achieve her goals, writing, “I have never found a woman whose life has been altered in any way by me or my opinions.” Florence frequently referred to herself in masculine terms, such as “a man of action” and “a man of business.”

However, she had a number of significant and enduring female friendships. She maintained a lengthy correspondence with the Irish nun Sister Mary Clare Moore, with whom she had collaborated in Crimea.[64] Mary Clarke, an Englishwoman she met in Paris in 1837 and remained in contact with throughout her life, was her closest confidante.

Some Nightingale scholars believe she remained celibate throughout her entire existence, possibly because she felt a religious calling to her career.

Death

Florence Nightingale’s burial is located in the churchyard of St. Margaret’s Church in East Wellow, Hampshire.
Florence Nightingale passed away peacefully in her sleep on August 13, 1910, at the age of 90, in her chamber at 10 South Street, Mayfair, London. Her relatives declined the offer of burial in Westminster Abbey, and she is interred in the churchyard of St Margaret’s Church in East Wellow, Hampshire, near Embley Park, with a memorial bearing only her initials and birth and death dates. She left behind an extensive corpus of work, including several hundred previously unpublished notes. Francis William Sargant created a memorial to Florence Nightingale in Carrara marble in 1913 and set it in the cloister of the Basilica di Santa Croce in Florence, Italy.