Florence Nightingale The Ohio Anglican.blog

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Florence Nightingale The Ohio Anglican.blog
The commemoration of Florence Nightingale is controversial. On the one
hand, she doubted or question many of the central articles of the
Creed. On the other hand, she believed in God and devoted her life to
His service as she understood it.


She was born in Florence on 12 May 1820 of upper-class English parents
travelling through Italy, and named for her native city. ("Florence"
was not an accepted first name at the time. Her sister was born in
Naples and named "Parthenope," the Greek name for that city.) Florence
was reared a Unitarian, but later joined the Church of England.

In her diary, an entry shortly before her seventeenth birthday reads:
"On February 7th, 1837, God spoke to me and called me to his service."
She did not know what the service would be, and therefore decided that
she must remain single, so as to have no encumbrances and be ready for
anything. With this in mind, she rejected a proposal of marriage from
a young man whom she dearly loved. She suffered from "trances" or
"dreaming" spells, in which she would lose consciousness for several
minutes or longer, and be unaware when she recovered that time had
passed. (Could this be a form of petit mal epilepsy? No biographer of
hers that I have read uses the word.) She found the knowledge that she
was subject to such spells terrifying, and feared that they meant that
she was unworthy of her calling, particularly since she did not hear
the voice of God again for many years. In the spring of 1844 she came
to believe that her calling was to nurse the sick. In 1850 her family
sent her on a tour of Egypt for her health. Some extracts from her
diary follow:


March 7. God called me in the morning and asked me would I do good
for Him, for Him alone without the reputation.
March 9. During half an hour I had by myself in my cabin, settled
the question with God.
April 1. Not able to go out but wished God to have it all His own
way. I like Him to do exactly as He likes without even telling me the
reason.
May 12. Today I am thirty—the age Christ began his mission. Now no
more childish things. No more love. No more marriage. Now Lord let me
think only of Thy Will, what Thou willest me to do. Oh Lord Thy Will,
Thy Will.
June 10. The Lord spoke to me; he said, Give five minutes every
hour to the thought of Me. Coudst thou but love Me as Lizzie loves her
husband, how happy wouldst thou be." But Lizzie does not give five
minutes every hour to the thought of her husband, she thinks of him
every minute, spontaneously.



Florence decided that she must train to be a nurse. Her family was
horrified. In her day, nursing was done mostly by disabled army
veterans or by women with no other means of support. It was common for
nurses of either sex to be drunk on the job most of the time, and they
had no training at all. It was common practice never to wash or change
the sheets on a bed, not even when a patient died and his bed was
given to a new patient. Florence was told to go to Kaiserswerth,
Germany, to learn and train with the Lutheran order of Deaconesses who
were running a hospital there. Back in England again, she used the
influence of Sidney Herbert, a family friend and Member of Parliament,
to be appointed supervisor of a sanatorium in London. Under her able
guidance, it turned from a chamber of horrors into a model hospital.
The innovations introduced by Miss Nightingale were, for their day,
little short of revolutionary. She demanded, and got, a system of
dumbwaiters that enabled food to be sent directly to every floor, so
that nurses did not exhaust themselves carrying trays up numerous
flights of stairs. She also invented and had installed a system of
call bells by which a patient could ring from his bed and the bell
would sound in the corridor, with a valve attached to the bell which
opened when the bell rang, and remained open so that the nurse could
see who had rung. "Without a system of this kind," she wrote, "a nurse
is converted to a pair of legs."

While working in the poorer districts of London, Miss Nightingale
encountered a Roman Catholic priest, Henry Edward Manning (later
Cardinal Manning), who was working among the poor of London. She was
impressed by the assistance he gave to many who had nowhere else to
turn, and they became friends for life. She was greatly attracted by
Roman Catholicism, but rejected much of its theology, and so
reluctantly decided against joining it.

Then war broke out in the Crimea (in Russia, on the north edge of the
Black Sea), and Sir Sidney Herbert, now Secretary of War, obtained
permission for Florence to lead a group of 38 nurses there. Of these,
10 were Roman Catholic nuns, 14 were Anglican nuns, and the remaining
14 were "of no particular religion, unless one counts the worship of
Bacchus." They found conditions appalling. Blankets were rotting in
warehouses while the men did without, because no one had issued the
proper forms for their distribution. The lavatories in the hospitals
had no running water, and the latrines were tubs to be emptied by
hand. But no one emptied them, since official regulations did not
specify which department was responsible for doing so. The result was
that the hospital had a foul stench that could be smelled for some
distance outside its walls. Far more men were dying in hospitals of
infection than of wounds. The chief concern of many of the Army
doctors was that the nurses might usurp some of their authority.
Florence gradually managed to win the doctors and other authorities
over, and to reform hospital procedures, with spectacular results.
Once the medical situation had ceased to be an acute problem, she
turned her attention to other aspects of the soldiers' welfare. For
example, most of them squandered all their pay on drink. She noted
that there was no trustworthy way for them to send money home to their
families, and she set up facilities for them to do so. First, she
undertook to send money home herself for any soldier in the hospital
that wanted it sent, and the soldiers brought in about 1000 pounds a
month. She asked the authorities to set up an official service to do
this, and they refused. By appealing to Queen Victoria herself, she
overcame opposition to the idea, and the men sent home 71,000 pounds
sterling in less than six months. She established with her own money a
reading-room with tables for writing letters, and the men used it
enthusiastically. She imported four schoolmasters to give lectures,
and the halls were filled to overflowing. All this was done despite
opposition from officers who said, "The men are hopeless brutes. You
cannot expect anything from them."

At night, she would often patrol the wards, carrying a dim lamp, to
make sure that all was well and no one was in need of help. She became
famous as "the Lady with the Lamp."

In April 1856 the war was over, and by mid-July the hospital was
emptied and her work in Crimea over. She returned to England a
national hero, with a great welcome prepared for her; but she slipped
into the country unnoticed and went to a convent that had supplied
some of her nurses. There, she spent the day in prayer before coming
out to face the public and beginning to lobby Parliament for suitable
legislation. She wrote pamphlet after pamphlet, pointing out by pie
charts, for example, that the major cause of deaths in the Army was
not wounds caused by enemy action but disease caused by lack of proper
sanitation. She is perhaps the first person to use pie charts and
similar graphic devices to convey statistical information. She
obtained the formation of an Army Medical Staff Corps and a Sanitary
Commission to oversee military health conditions.

Throughout these efforts, she relied on the help of Sidney Herbert,
insisting that he must work hard and long to get the legislation she
needed through Parliament. When he protested that she was asking too
much, she would not listen. His health broke, and he died in August
1861. Florence prayed God to raise him from the dead, explaining that
she needed him for the job. When God failed to comply, her faith was
badly shaken. She wrote a book called, Suggestions for Thought: An
Address to the Artisans of England, in which she explained that God
was less of a Person and more of a Cosmic Force than is generally
supposed by Christians. (But note that she was working on this book
before Sir Sidney died, and one cannot call it simply a response to
his death.) Advance copies were given to a few friends, such as John
Stuart Mill, who praised it highly. However, it was never published in
her time, since Florence kept revising it—arguably, because her
beliefs on the nature of God were simply not internally consistent.
Eventually, it seems, God spoke to her again and said, "You are here
to carry out my program. I am not here to carry out yours." She wrote
in her diary, "I must remember that God is not my private secretary."

Before his death, Sir Sidney had gotten her involved in Indian
affairs. She served on the Indian Sanitary Commission. In May 1859,
she decided that there were insufficient data available in England on
conditions in the Indian Army, and she wrote to 200 military stations
there, asking for copies of all regulations and all documents relating
to the health and sanitary administration of the army. The reports
that came back filled two vans. She read them all and summarized them
for the Report of the Commission. Her conclusion was that the death
toll from disease in the Indian Army was appallingly high (69 out of
1000 annually), and that this was largely due, not to the climate, but
to lack of sanitation, and that preventive measures included
sanitation not just for army posts but for neighboring villages and,
in the long run, for all of India.

She was a friend of General Charles George Gordon, who captured the
British imagination when he and his troops were beseiged at Khartoum
in the Sudan, and finally captured and killed. After his death,
Florence wrote to a friend that suffering, disappointment, and lack of
success are the tribute which it is the soul's greatest privilege to
present to God. In Gordon's death, she wrote, we see "the triumph of
failure, the triumph of the Cross. With him, all is well."

She met the scholar Benjamin Jowett, who was translating Plato into
English. They became fast friends, and she contributed to the
translation. She also began an anthology of mystical writings, called
"Notes from Devotional Authors of the Middle Ages, Collected, Chosen,
and Freely Translated by Florence Nightingale." It was her contention
that mystical prayer is not just for monks and nuns, but should form a
part of the every-day life of ordinary persons.

Under the strain of ceaseless overwork, her own health broke, and she
was an invalid for the latter half of her life. On Christmas Day when
she was sixty-five, she wrote: "Today, O Lord, let me dedicate this
crumbling old woman to thee. Behold the handmaid of the Lord. I was
thy handmaid as a girl. Since then, I have backslid." She wrote a
manual called "Notes for Nurses," and a set of instructions for the
matron in charge of training nurses, emphasizing the importance for a
nurse of a schedule of daily prayer. A few years before her death, she
was the first woman to receive the Order of Merit from the British
government. She died at ninety, and, by her directions, her tombstone
read simply, "F.N. 1820-1910".

Florence Nightingale died on 13 August 1910, and is commemorated on
this day on the Lutheran Calendar. The Episcopal calendar commemorates
Jeremy Taylor on 13 August, and accordingly has shifted the
commemoration of Nightingale to 18 May. I am not sure of the
significance of this date, but it is the date (or nearly) of the
opening of the Nightingale Training School for Nurses in 1860.

written by James Kiefer

http://ohioanglican.blogspot.com/2013/05/florence-nightingale.html