The Lady with the Lamp

The corridors of the hospital were said to stretch for miles. At night they were dark and cold, lined on both sides with soldiers lying on thin mattresses, many of them too ill to sleep.

Late in the evening, a slim woman walked slowly between them, carrying a small lamp. She stopped to check a bandage, to speak a few quiet words, to write down a message for someone's mother. The soldiers came to watch for her light.

Her name was Florence Nightingale, and before she came, almost nobody had looked after these men at night at all.

A different calling

Florence was born on 12 May 1820 in Florence, Italy, and named after the city. Her parents were wealthy English people who travelled a great deal. She and her sister grew up in large country houses, and were taught languages, history, philosophy and mathematics by their father.

Florence loved mathematics. She was clever, restless and serious. As a teenager, she came to believe that God was calling her to do some important work, though at first she did not know what it was.

Slowly she realised that she wanted to be a nurse.

Her family was horrified. In those days, hospitals were grim places, and nursing was not considered respectable work for a woman of her class. Her mother and sister were deeply upset. For years, Florence felt trapped.

She refused offers of marriage and kept studying in secret, reading reports on hospitals and public health. At last, in 1850 and 1851, she went to train at a Christian nursing institution at Kaiserswerth in Germany. In 1853 she became superintendent of a small hospital for women in London.

Scutari

In 1854, Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire went to war with Russia, in what became known as the Crimean War. Newspaper reports soon reached London describing the terrible conditions of wounded British soldiers.

The government asked Florence to lead a group of nurses to the main British army hospital at Scutari, across the water from Constantinople, in what is now Istanbul. She set off with thirty-eight nurses and arrived in November 1854.

What they found was appalling. The hospital was a huge old barracks built over broken sewers. There were rats and fleas. There were not enough beds, blankets, clean shirts, soap or proper food. Far more soldiers were dying from diseases such as cholera, typhus and dysentery than from their wounds.

At first, some of the army doctors did not want the nurses there at all.

Order out of chaos

Florence did not argue. She simply began working, and organising.

She used money raised in Britain to buy supplies. She set up a laundry, so that the men had clean clothes and sheets. She arranged proper kitchens and better food. She made sure the wards were cleaned and the sick were washed. She wrote endless letters, and kept careful records of everything.

And at night, she walked the wards with her lamp.

In March 1855, the government sent a Sanitary Commission to the hospital. Its workers flushed out the sewers, cleared away rubbish and improved the fresh air in the wards. After that, the death rate at Scutari fell dramatically.

Back in Britain, newspapers wrote about the woman who walked the wards at night. In 1857, the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a poem about her, and the name stuck: the Lady with the Lamp.

The lady with the numbers

Florence came home in 1856, exhausted and ill. She had caught a fever during the war, and for much of the rest of her life she was unwell and often stayed in bed.

But she did not stop working. If anything, she worked harder.

She had seen that most of the soldiers' deaths were caused by dirt, crowding and bad drains, and could have been prevented. To prove it, she turned to her old love, mathematics. She gathered the army's figures and drew them as clear, colourful diagrams, divided like slices of a circle, so that busy politicians could see at a glance how many men had died of disease that need not have. It was one of the earliest uses of diagrams to persuade people to change public policy.

In 1858 she became the first woman elected a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. Her work helped bring in better sanitation for the army, and later for hospitals and cities.

The school that changed nursing

In 1859 she published Notes on Nursing, a short, practical book about fresh air, light, cleanliness, quiet and good food for the sick. It was written for ordinary families caring for someone at home, and it sold widely.

In 1860, with money raised in her honour, she founded the Nightingale Training School for nurses at St Thomas' Hospital in London. Its nurses were properly trained and went on to train others, in Britain and around the world. Nursing slowly became a respected profession.

In 1907 she became the first woman to receive the Order of Merit, one of Britain's highest honours. She died on 13 August 1910, at the age of ninety.

Today, International Nurses Day is celebrated every year on 12 May, her birthday. Her lamp is still a symbol of nursing, and of the quiet care that keeps watch through the night.

Want to read more?

Mark Bostridge's Florence Nightingale: The Woman and Her Legend is a full, balanced modern biography. Her own Notes on Nursing is short, clear and still worth reading today.