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"I have a moral, an active nature which requires satisfaction and that I would not find in his life." -- this is how she explained her rejection of a suitor's proposal for marriage.
 

 

 
Florence Nightingale is known as the champion of modern nursing. But in her lifetime she was both more than and less than a nurse. While nursing was the focus of her life, out of the 90 years that she lived, she was an active nurse for only three years, and even then she worked as a volunteer and refused to accept a salary. During her last 50 years, Nightingale continued to advocate the cause of nursing, but she did so with her pen at home where she secluded herself. To the very end she herself did not consider nursing a profession but a mission, and she thus expressed her opinion of women who aspired to be doctors: "They have tried to be men, and they have succeeded only in being third-rate men."

These conflicting ideas came from Florence Nightingale's upbringing. Hers was an affluent and well-connected English family, her first name referring to Florence, Italy, where she was born. Her father, a member of the British Academy, educated his children himself, teaching them Latin, Greek, German, Italian, French, English grammar, philosophy, and history, and Florence, out of her own interest, studied mathematics, which later would enable her to become a pioneering statistician.

It was when she was 17-years old, in 1837, that Nightingale believed that she heard God's voice, telling her she was meant for a mission. It would be quite a few years before she determined the mission was for her to be a nurse and care for the sick, but in the meantime she declined repeated proposals for marriage. And once she set her mind on nursing, her family could not stop her, even though back then nursing was considered largely for women of questionable background and character. Nightingale studied in Germany, worked for one year back in London, and went to Turkey in 1854 after the Crimean War broke out. She served as the head of the British barrack hospital there, introduced a series of reforms and reorganizations, and successfully reduced the mortal rate at the hospital from a horrible 42% to 2.2%. She did not allow any female nurse to stay in the wards after 8 pm, but she herself made the rounds every night, tending to the sick and wounded, hence the fond nickname "the lady with the lamp."

By the time the Crimean War ended in 1856, Nightingale had become a national hero. But she returned home to a secluded life, rarely showing herself in public. Some say she suffered from neurotic illness, while others believe she kept a low profile intentionally so as not to be bothered by fame and publicity. In any event, she was highly active intellectually in her seclusion, and through her writings contributed a great deal to the improvement of healthcare.

Even then, however, Nightingale refused to believe in many scientific discoveries and theories, reluctant even to look under a microscope.

 

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