Florence Nightingale

halfway along pal mal in London stands the statue of one of the most famous Victorians in the world Florence Nightingale is revered as the nurse who went to the Crimea to care for the common soldier the lady with the lamp but her reputation disguises an unpalatable truth more soldiers died in her hospital at Scutari than in any other during the Crimean War sick soldier was more than twice as likely to die if he was sent to florence Nightingale's hospital in Scutari than if he were kept in a regimental hospital tent at the front what she did had very little practical effect indeed the death rate from from diseases in the hospital actually increased Nightingale ran Scutari with tyrannical zeal driven more by ambition and compassion Shire had power or wood scheme to get it and certainly with ruthlessly try to keep it she had to be a very different sort of woman and indeed was a very different sort of worn to the gentle floating lady of the lamb in many ways she has some similarities to a woman like Margaret Thatcher she had a streak of Steel going through about that she was very determined as she grew up France thought of herself as different she began to dream of a different life away from her and in these dreams she thought of herself as a part because she wanted things that other girls didn't want there's the famous quote of poor missus Nightingale saying to somebody we are a breed of of ducks who have hatched a wild swarm Florence Nightingale was born in Florence in 1820 her parents spent the first three years of their marriage in Italy and decided to name her after the city of her birth her sister who was a year older was called parthenope II after the Greek for Naples the nightingales were cultured cosmopolitan and extremely rich Florence's father had inherited his wealth and the family owned two large houses one in Derbyshire and one in Hampshire they were also very well-connected they were friends with Thackeray and Tennyson em bleed air Estate in Hampshire was next door to broad lands home of the Parma stones she knew a lot of politicians and she will send you a lot of writers so this was a woman who from girlhood knew everybody there was to know in the important literary and political circles as the cultivated family who encouraged them encouraged the daughters to to think her father was a liberal humanitarian who fought very hard for the reform of Parliament his wife Fanny was a great beauty and she had had ambitions to be a political hostess her background too was a liberal one there's a great strain in her background of reform progressive liberalism radicalism and I think that flow inherited much of this it didn't just come from sort of the ether it was very much a part of her family background Florence was extremely well educated her father taught a French Italian history Latin and Greek she even learnt maths she was clever but she was also rebellious because she had been given the education of a man she expected got into the world and be given the opportunities for other man and of course that was where the struggle began because her parents having over educated her didn't want to do that she was different to Parthi different to a lot of her female cousins who all seemed very happy and secure in their lives France wasn't happy she was an unhappy child she was an unhappy woman the morning is spent sitting round the table in the drawing room looking at prints and reading little books everyone reads aloud from their own book or newspaper and every five minutes something is said the afternoon is past in the taking of little drives when night comes women suffer physically the accumulation of nervous energy which had nothing to do all day and makes them feel every night when they go to bed as if they're going mad you can see her writing it of the pin stabbing the paper almost with her rage and frustration at the fact that women aren't doing war and that they aren't allowed to do mourn that they can't be independent that they're tied to this image of the angel of the house why cannot a woman follow abstractions like a man has she less imagination less intellect less self devotion less religion than a man I think not and yet she's never produced one single great work of art or science or literature the Virgin Mary remains the only expression of female feeling on several occasions when she was in her 20s and 30s she wanted to kill herself and she also began to conceive herself as being a monster because she wanted things that other girls didn't want and the way in the end that she justified her ambitions was by looking at it in religious terms God wanted her to have this career she had been called to God's service throughout her life she believed that she heard God's voice it took a number of years before she realized what this service could be and during this period she had breakdowns she was unable to sleep she starved herself she didn't eat properly her menstrual cycle and therefore interrupted and she had guilt about being a woman who wasn't really a woman in the full physical sense but Florence could also be surprisingly exuberant she was graceful and good-looking she loved parties and she loved attention and it wasn't just men that she found interesting she was very attracted to her cousin Mary Ann Nicholson Mary Ann was more conventionally beautiful in Victorian terms had a string of suitors flow very early on rate how her most passionate love was for Mary Ann we look at that as being a sexual reference I don't think it was I think passionate friendships were the mainstay of Victorian girls lives oh I think she was definitely attracted to women and you have to remember in the 19th century that there was not a clear-cut division in desire and that it was acceptable within certain limits to be warmly attached to other women not to Wormley it was a boundary until you'd stepped over it you weren't quite sure where it was I think there must have been some kind of intimacy that made Mary Ann uncomfortable later in life because all the letters are missing or destroyed we don't know what happened to those letters there was one man that Florence did take seriously Richard Moncton Milnes the most eligible bachelor in London hello my dad my walls I believe yes I think she was sexually attracted to Mountain Mills he was a cultivated sophisticated man he was a philanthropist he had a lot of interests in common with her he was a man of letters he was a good translator of Greek he wrote he was an art collector he was a gentleman he was probably bisexual he certainly had a lot of friends who could have gone either way hello my dear I want to talk to you it's important and very odd will you come out on the phone he was looked upon as a very promising young man just the sort of man that Fanny and William Nightingale would have welcomed as a future son-in-law he proposed three times Flo didn't turn him down she kept delaying or saying that she would wait Madame Israel I have you know feeling for me it was a knee after the third proposal that she wrote that said she couldn't marry him love you dearly but I cannot marry you and and I have told you why but she also wrote in her in private needs what torment it was and how she wasn't sure that she'd done the right thing my god what is to become of me in my 31st year I can see nothing desirable but death and yet do I wish to marry him but voluntarily to put it out of my power ever to seize the chance of forming a true and rich life would seem to me like suicide and yet my present life is suicide I have to say it's probably just as well she didn't marry Mountain Mills because it materialized later that he had a rather large collection of erotica he was in fact one of the earliest collectors in Britain of the works of the Marquis de Sade so I don't know what France would have made of that Florence's parents were furious that after a seven-year courtship their daughter had rejected mocked and Milne's her mother Fanny had been banking on a big society wedding worse was to come when Florence then announced that she wanted to become a nurse Shelby shall we ladies retired of the drawing-room planning's horrified a daughter going into a public hospital unaccompanied unchaperoned which girls of Florence's background had to be to preserve their pure celibate nature this would all be thrown overboard she would be amongst disreputable people people of low morals people whose personal hygiene zuv the lay standard who had drunk with male doctors all around her may Lord male peep male just male in general Fanny couldn't coupe she thought this was the most terrible idea and she absolutely refused to give permission to flow to follow this up oh is that me flow dear Florence's sister parthenope II was even more distraught they had been close as children but now Florence's wayward behavior began to undermine her oh how can you how can you make us so unhappy do you think I want to pour a mud she's gone to bed in tears I know I make you all it has to be said that all the Nightingale women were good at using hysterical outbursts to get their own way but in the case of paths NEP and Florence the ructions between them caused such havoc in the household that eventually in 1852 parthenope II had a nervous breakdown because she believed her sister was was isolating herself from from her and this breakdown caused mr. nightingale to decide that really the family would have to be split up and the Florence would have to be allowed to go and satisfy her nursing ambitions at 32 with an income of 500 pounds a-year Florence was finally free she had already received some nursing training in Germany now she was off to Paris to see how hospitals were run but it had been in Rome that she'd met the man who would dramatically alter the course of her life the reformist MP sydney herbert sydney harbour was a man who was said to have all the cards in his favour he had good looks he had riches he was well educated but his fatal problem was that he always fell under the thrall of domineering women and in Florence he met the ultimate domineering bossy ruthless woman in 1854 the Crimean War broke out Sydney Herbert by now the minister at war was about to cast nightingale in a role that would finally satisfy her sense of purpose Russia had invaded the Balkans Britain joined France and Turkey to stop their expansion the charge of the Light Brigade was only one of the disasters about to befall the British army then it was a mad brain trick but it was no fault of mine go against her no no you have done enough today the British who hadn't really fought a major war since Wellington's time some forty years earlier went to the Crimea think it was going to be a short sharp campaign they didn't take with them hospitals they didn't take with them ambulances they didn't take them enough for doctors and they didn't even have nursing sisters so with the results that send when cholera struck this caused a tremendous disaster to the British Army none of this would have mattered were it not for the invention of the war reporter in particular William Howard Russell of The Times whose graphic accounts of army incompetence began to appear on breakfast tables around the country it is with feelings of surprise and anger that the public will learn that no sufficient preparations have been made for the proper care of the wounded what will be said when it is known that there is not even linen to make bandages not only a surgeon's knot to be had but there are no dressers or nurses to carry out the surgeons directions the country was outraged the government had to act Sidney Herbert wants to stop the bad news on the front pages of the newspapers and he writes to Florence Nightingale and says would you take a small expedition of nurses out to investigate conditions in the army hospitals there have never been women nurses in military hospitals unless they were wives of soldiers or prostitutes or people picked up to work on the spot it's her moment and she seizes that moment on the 21st of October Florence Nightingale and a band of 38 nurses set sail for Constantinople their mission to care for the thousands of wounded soldiers who were being shipped from the Crimea 300 miles across the Black Sea to the Scutari barrack hospital she was rather apprehensive because she was relatively inexperienced she'd never run anything on that scale she'd certainly never been in a war zone before and she believed that she was representing the women of Britain and that if she failed women would not have another opportunity fourth of November 1854 onboard the vectors we reached Constantinople this morning we've not yet heard what the military hospital have done for us nor received our orders just starting for Scutari we are to be housed in the hospital this very afternoon everybody very kind the first wounded I believe to be placed under our care they're landing them now the barracks which had been borrowed from the Turks was a massive gloomy building perched on a cliff overlooking the city it was supposed to be a flagship hospital to the soldiers it was more like a death camp mm sick and injured men lay along four miles of corridor their mattresses were 18 inches apart and arranged in two rows with barely enough space to walk between them what she found in Constantinople was little short of nightmarish the sick had all been herded into the old cavalry barracks at Scutari there wasn't enough running water disease was rampant cholera dysentery diarrhea disease vermin mice rats patients without beds without bedding without any method of keeping the patients personally clean deaths from frostbite scurvy pneumonia the suicide because there were suicides amongst the soldiers a small number remember that the importance of Hygiene was quite unknown at that time germs weren't known bacteria weren't known it wasn't appreciated that bacteria cause disease and so nobody took any notice people didn't wash their hands they their sanitation was very poor Florence and her nurses were shown to the North West Tower of the barracks their rooms were infested with rats the rotting corpse of a Russian officer lay on the floor to greet them the medical authorities there were not pleased to see her they hadn't been warned than she was coming with these nurses they had no experience of using female nurses and they told her that they were unable to give her nurses any instructions about what to do in the wards they were virtually ostracized but she realized that if she pushed too hard she would antagonize matters even more so she instructed her nurses to do nothing until they were asked by the medical officers to actually carry out nursing duties it was a clever strategy within days thousands of casualties from the Battle of Inkerman arrived at the hospital and the waiting game was over suddenly Scutari was overwhelmed with badly wounded men from the battlefront men suffering not just from rifle shots but also from sword slashes the kind of open wounds which left sepsis in very quickly the doctors card cave and that's when she can start actually working and cleaning up as much as they could making bandages and covering men with blankets nightingale was very concerned with the personal cleanliness of soldiers and the personal cleanliness of the lower orders in general I think she concentrated primarily upon the person who reflecting there the common idea that cleanliness was next to godliness but washing soldiers and rolling bandages could not disguise the fact that Scutari was in chaos and the men in charge incompetent food was scarce yet thousands of cabbages were dumped into the sea because the paperwork was incorrect scurvy was rife but lime juice was withheld because no one would authorize its distribution what they had at Scutari was an outdated army bureaucracy that couldn't cope with the demands being made on it in terms of supplies medical supplies and just ordinary supplies Florence believed she should take control she constantly fought against the commissariat department to get more food and better supplies cheating whenever necessary she broke open a storeroom once because the commissariat said that the stores in it couldn't be issued and she encouraged her nurses in fact to subvert the strict dietary regulations she was trying to organize things and that was what she excelled that she wasn't actually a very good nurse her sister said she was a terrible nurse whenever party was ill and flu had to nurse that she was awful but she organized everything 21st of December barrack hospital Scutari dear mr. Herbert this morning I forged in the purveyors storm a cruise I make almost daily as the only way of getting things no mops no plates no Forks no spoons no scissors for cutting the men's hair which is literally alive she has the ear of the secretary at war so she's like a spy and she is a spy she every night after everybody else has gone to bed she writes a long letter back to Herbert describing in detail and naming names of who is incompetent and telling him to get rid of these people so of course they don't trust him she's a spy the military and Medical Command were also threatened by what they perceived as nightingales lack of of feminine sensibility one of the things that France Nightingale did that tended to irritate many of the surgeons was that she insisted on being present at operations it appears that she was interested in them technically you can tell this because she wrote home letters giving quite detailed descriptions which her family I may say found to be revolting which they cut out when they copied the letters for circulation to their friends in all our corridors I think we have not an average of three limbs per man one poor fellow exhausted with hemorrhage had his leg amputated as a last hope and dies 10 minutes after the surgeons have left him the surgeons pass on to the next an excision of the shoulder joint beautifully performed and going well ball Lord just in the head of the joint and fractures starred or round one doctor complained his superiors that she had changed dressing on a wounded man while his private parts were exposed and I think this just shows how unfamiliar they were with the concept of female nursing at the time and how they resented this unfamiliar concept it was imperative for Nightingale that her nurse's behavior did not give the medics further excuse to undermine her she was determined that they would uphold her strict moral regime if you have women at night walking the wards for a few shillings the women could very easily offer sexual services everyone in the Army is quite sure that the nurses are going to end up in bed with a soldier they don't want those nurses and any scandal gives them cause to get rid of the nurses dear mrs. Hobart I am so sorry to be obliged to tell you that Thompson and Anderson to the Presbyterian nurses went out drinking with an orderly on Saturday night Anderson was brought back dead drunk but Thompson I believed to be the most hardened defender this was such a catastrophe that there was nothing to be done but to pack them off to England directly she's unhappy about sex she's unhappy about drink but she's most unhappy about is insubordination she wants them to obey her on all occasions there were criticisms of Nightingale during the war in fact she almost bought a libel case against one nurse who came back to England and started spreading gossip and malicious stories about her but they were to some extent justified Florence could only lead she wasn't interested in delegating in a way she was the archetypal military person she believed in hierarchy and order in command she had been brought up to command to manage as most well-educated upper-class women were of her period Nightingale was single-minded in her desire to run the hospital when Sydney Herbert sent a new party of nurses to Scutari which included a group of Irish nuns led by mother Mary Bridgman Florence saw not an ally but a rival there both of them used to getting their own way there both of them are competing in a very difficult male world Florence could have formed a coalition with Bridgman and given the numbers pouring in after Inkerman Battle of balaclava they needed every nurse they could get she didn't do that she didn't want to share power and I don't think she could conceive of a coalition she either had power or would scheme to get it and certainly with ruthlessly try to keep it Nightingale had Bridgman and her nuns banished from the hospital many of her rejects went off to the front and turned out to be extremely good nurses they were bitter about nightingales treatment of them but Florence did endear herself to the troops for the first time in military history they had a champion someone who could see them as more than just cannon fodder she was dedicated to the common soldier I think that's one of the most moving things in the whole story is that night after night she would sit out with soldiers who were dying she also wrote hundreds of letters of condolences home to their parents to their mother saying your boy is dead but he died peacefully and in comfort which actually was quite often not the whole truth dear mrs. hunt I grieve to be obliged to inform you that your son died in this hospital on Sunday last his complaint was chronic dysentery he sank gradually from weakness without much suffering everything was done was possible to keep up his strength he spoke much of his mother and he may have the satisfaction of knowing that he had the most constant and careful care the chaplain and myself saw him every day the soldiers wrote glowingly of her in their own letters home and soon Nightingale was famous throughout Britain one of the main reasons why the legend made such an impact was that the men involved in the Crimean will have been such a total washout there was no Nelson there was no Wellington instead there was this figure who became a kind of maternal goddess to the soldiers of course she wasn't a terminal at all but that kind of image of her suited popular feeling at the time at first the Times newspaper mistakenly referred to Florence as mrs. Nightingale when the public discovered that the matron of Scutari was in fact a graceful young lady it only added to her mystique ironically it was Florence's mother and sister originally so opposed to her nursing who took charge of publicity and the nightingale PR campaign benefited from a new photographic technique what you do get in the mid 1850s is this new process of making small cheap photographs of celebrities which were known as carte de visits they could produce really quite cheaply on a camera plate you could go six eight or ten of them print them off and sell them cheaply the images themselves are very straightforward they don't tell you very much about Florence they're not sort of heavy-duty iconic images it's the sheer number of them their availability on them which is a measure of her fame and celebrity the publicity generated by her meant that all the women of Britain were sitting knitting socks and mufflers and children were being brought up to do things for the poor soldiers of the east and indeed Queen Victoria herself asked everyone to pray and to do their bit so there's a huge national resource being harnessed as a result of the Lady of the lamp but despite her sanctification at home and some improvements at the barracks death was everywhere during nightingales first winter at Scutari between November 1854 and March 1855 4077 soldiers died ten times more from illnesses such as typhus typhoid dysentery and cholera than from battle wounds Nightingale blamed the officials were not sending supplies and the military commanders for sending men to Scutari in a wretched condition the worst month was January two months after Florence Nightingale arrived when of the six soldiers who came into florence Nightingale's hospital Scutari in that month half never came out again if I take a particular regiment as an example the Grenadier Guards in the seven-month period covering the first winter they sent 300 patients to the hospital the statistic seemed to show that none of them came back you would be better off in the regimental hospital tent at the front than you would be being sent to Scutari at home there was an emergency debate in Parliament over the treatment of the soldiers the government fell and Sydney Herbert was forced to resign as minister at war Lord Palmerston the new Prime Minister was convinced that inadequate building sanitation had something to do with the high death rate Palmerston had been in the previous government and he was a known convinced public health enthusiast the very first thing he did was to send out a sanitary commission of civilian public health experts to clean up the hospitals and the camps when they arrived at Scutari in March 1855 the commissioners discovered that the hospital had been built on a contaminated cess pit the sick and wounded were wading through and drinking their own sewage the overcrowded wards were airless and full of rats they immediately cleaned out the vermin and reduced the overcrowding they bored holes in the ceiling to improve ventilation and arranged for the sewers to be flushed out they're concerned with environmental improvements whereas Nightingale had been concerned almost solely with personal cleanliness and this is the big difference and this is why the sanitary commission are successful in reducing disease whereas nightingales measures had no impact whatsoever and indeed actually were comforted by an increase in sickness no one can adequately explain why it never occurred to nightingale that sanitation may have been a problem after all she moved in the kind of circles which were familiar with new thinking on public health it was only later that she would come to realize the significance of the commissioner's work at that time Nightingale appeared to be far more concerned with extending her power base than the work of the commissioners she set off for the Crimea in an attempt to take charge of the nursing operations in the frontline hospitals within days she was stricken with a severe fever nobody quite knows what this illness comprised they cut her hair off which is normal to do with the woman has fever if she might have had typhus she might simply have had exhaustion now it's believed she probably caught a rather less common disease called brucellosis and brucellosis is another infectious disease very uncommon in this country but not uncommon in some of those countries in hot climates and that's probably what she had the Crimean War ended in the spring of 1856 Nightingale waited for the final soldier to be discharged from Scutari before she began her journey home she arrived at the local railway station near her parents house in Derbyshire unannounced I think it's very difficult when Florence came back from the Crimea what was she coming back to all that lay before her was the role of a dutiful daughter back to Emily back to Li Hurst back to living with mum and puffy the one thing she knew and I think was certain about was that she was not going to be sucked back into that life she had changed from endlessly as a result of her time in the Crimea but Scutari while her parents were happy to flaunt their daughter's celebrity nightingales shunned the attention she was now consumed with anger about the war she was indignant at the injustice that had been done to the common soldier in the Scutari these were some of the bravest soldiers that England had ever known they'd one extraordinary victories against the Russians during the war and they'd been allowed to perish she thought because of the negligence of the senior frontline army officers Nightingale put pressure on the government to set up a Royal Commission on the health of the army and in 1857 the Commission began taking evidence she prepared her report convinced it would expose the incompetence of the military command during that time she focused on the data that had come back from the Crimea and she analyzed it in cooperation with some of the best scientific brains in England at the time and quite an extraordinary thing happened she changed her mind entirely on what had caused the deaths of those men in hospital she decided that it was the hospitals themselves the state of the hospitals themselves that was responsible for those men's deaths they had been very sick when they came to the hospital but if the hospitals had been hygienic they could easily have recovered nearly all of them in fact the statistics showed that the death toll at nightingales hospital had been higher than at any other including those at the front until sanitation improved all that one can say for our exciting I was doing was helping soldiers to die a more comfortable happier circumstances and that's a very shocking fact the people who've been brought up on the legend that she went out there and made everything perfectly all right when France Nightingale discovered that she had been wrong about the cause of the patient's death in her hospital she was determined to lay the blame for this scandal at somebody's door she stopped blaming the army she stopped blaming the doctors and she started to blame the government and she started particularly to blame her former friend an ex cabinet minister Sydney Herbert who had been responsible for selecting Hospital locations the fact is it's in black and white that she wrote to her but blaming him for the whole catastrophe did she blame herself as Sydney Herbert's troubleshooter it's difficult to know what goes on in in a person's mind but it is noticeable that her pride at having done what she'd done which she expressed in various ways when she first came back from the war evaporated and from then on she never speaks with any degree of pride of anything that she did during the Crimean War three months after presenting her report to the Commission Florence Nightingale had a nervous breakdown she took to her bed for the next 11 years she became a recluse in the sense that she didn't enter into normal social activity she didn't go out she didn't go to other people's houses she was confined to South Street which was her house in London she didn't go to end Lee or Lee Hurst her dealings with her family and friends were filtered the bustle of visitors irritated her so people tend to call at her house and wait in the downstairs room and send up their instructions by writing and then she would write a note and send them down and business would be done in that way there definitely was a physical route to her illness after all she'd almost died in 1855 and she almost died in 1857 but also she was quite clever because she used her illness to her own ends if she didn't want to see somebody especially her mother and her sister then she would claim to be ill nightingale devoted her bedridden years to the cause of public sanitation she seemed unable to forgive herself for failing to make the obvious link between the sanitary conditions at Scutari and the death rate there with phenomenal energy she spearheaded a mass of radical and often controversial reforms army welfare work has reformed the training of nurses she even advised on the design of hospitals such as San Thomas's in London and for most of this she used Sidney Herbert as her frontman she was virtually a cabinet minister in all but name there were certain areas of government action that could not be carried out without running the proposals past miss Nightingale in at least one famous occasion she had power of appointment to the cabinet and she objected to a candidate that was chosen by Lord Palmerston the Prime Minister and approved by the Queen she said no he's not the right man here's my candidate and her candidate was put in his place she was as controlling as ever everything had to be done according to her rules doubts and frailty would not be tolerated you only have to look at her treatment of Sidney Herbert as he was dying quite clearly dying in 1861 she was pushing him on and on and on he said he had headaches he had weakness he couldn't get out of bed she didn't care this was a man who'd been a close friend of hers for for 15 years who had launched her career but she she pushed him to the limits of his endurance and finally he died as her friends in Parliament began to lose power nightingales political influence started to wane shiri established links with her family spending more time with her mother and visiting her sister paths n opee she was now in her sixties and had lost her radical edge when nurses around the country demanded professional registration she campaigned against them she even doubted the cause of women's suffrage and suffered she was ambivalent she realized that in public she had to be seen more or less to support it because that was what advanced women were doing privately she thought that women were rather silly and wouldn't make much difference in fact she didn't have much of an opinion of women and in the end she puts her signature to the great petition against women's suffrage in the late 1880s she identified with men in fact throughout her career you can see her reacting very strongly against women she really disliked women she said I am brutally indifferent to the rights and wrongs of my sex and it's true that throughout her life she relied much more on men was much more interested in men thought of herself as a man and had really almost total contempt for the rest of the female race Istanbul is redolent with memories of Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War mrs. Thatcher made a pilgrimage to the British military cemetery here people who had an idea who had a dedication who knew what she wanted to do and wasn't going to be put off by any generals or anyone else in later life she was able to develop friendships with women and once again you see the same kind of intense affection for young women which had predominated in her earlier years I mean there are some rather excruciating letters but that she sent two young nurses dear baby goddess dear pearl it was an extraordinary softening of a woman who had been quite hard and metallic in her maturity at the age of 87 Florence was presented with the order of merit the first woman in history to receive the honor she was now officially confirmed as one of the truly legendary Victorians what Forrest nightingale should be famous for now is for her provision of political leadership for the public health movement in the 50 years after the Crimean her embarrassingly anti-establishment views have been hidden up to now behind this sentimental picture of the wartime nurse in 1918 didn't stretch he wrote his famous debunking attack on Victorians in which he described the real miss Nightingale as being more interesting than the legendary one but also less agreeable and I think there's a lot of truth in that this is the only recording of florence Nightingale's voice made by edison in 1897 in her will she says I do not want a funeral in Westminster Abbey I don't want to be buried in Westminster Abbey I don't want anything special done for me I want the plain is simplest funeral and I want enlisted men to carry my coffin and to be buried at the family plot and this is what happens she has a funeral in which maybe less than 50 people come to and she's buried in the simplest Victorian monument that just says FN 1820 1910 it's very moving very very simple ending to this remarkable life you

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Keywords: Florence Nightingale (Author), Nursing history, Crimean War (Event), Medicine through time, Victorian era, Women's history, Selimiye Barracks (Structure), Scutari Hospital

Id: hBVX5s43_Ks

Length: 48min 39sec (2919 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 09 2013