GRAND Magazine - Spring 2020 - 22

cover story
During her first years of
working entirely from home,
Nightingale's productivity was
extraordinary. As well as writing
Notes on Nursing, she produced
an influential 900-page report on
the medical failings during the
Crimean War, and a book on hospital design.
This was in addition to setting up the Nightingale Training
School for nurses at St Thomas'
Hospital in London in 1860, and a midwifery
training programme at King's College Hospital
in 1861, plus advising on the design of a

Nightingale and her student nurses at Nightingale Home
22 GRAND

SPRING 2020

number of new hospitals.
Later in the 1860s, Nightingale
proposed a reform of workhouse
infirmaries to make them high
quality taxpayer-funded hospitals; and also worked on sanitary
and social reforms in India. All of
this she accomplished without
leaving her house (though government ministers sometimes
came to her home for meetings).
Having said this, it is worth
remembering that Nightingale's was a privileged form of self-isolation. Her father's fortune, derived from Derbyshire mining interests,
meant she had no money
worries.
She lived in a nice house
in London with various assistants and servants to help,
shop and cook for her, and
had no children to look after.
Her entire waking time could
be devoted to reading and
writing.
So while this is an appropriate time to recall and celebrate the huge contribution

Nightingale made to modern nursing and
public health care, we shouldn't feel too bad if
we don't quite live up to her high standards of
isolated productivity.
Richard Bates is a Postdoctoral Research
Fellow at the Department of History,
University of Nottingham.
He works on the project 'Florence
Nightingale Comes Home for 2020'
(www.florencenightingale.org) at the
University of Nottingham, headed by
Professor Paul Crawford and Dr Anna
Greenwood, funded by the Arts and
Humanities Research Council.
View the full list

According to Brigit Katz, a writer for https://
www.smithsonianmag.com/, "In 1854, Florence
Nightingale arrived at a military hospital in Scutari,
near Constantinople, to tend British soldiers
wounded during the Crimean War. Appalled by
the conditions-rodents and vermin running rampant, patients lying in their own filth, a woeful lack
of basic medical supplies-she quickly set about
implementing reforms. Nightingale was a tireless nurse; at night, she would wander the darkened rooms of the hospital, checking on patients
by lamplight. Her admirers took to calling her the
"Lady with the Lamp."
The image of Nightingale ministering to the sick,
her trusty light in hand, became iconic in her native
Continued on next page

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GRAND Magazine - Spring 2020

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