{"id":16669,"date":"2012-08-28T08:31:04","date_gmt":"2012-08-28T12:31:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=16669"},"modified":"2018-01-15T13:50:03","modified_gmt":"2018-01-15T18:50:03","slug":"rehabilitating-florence-nightingales-reputation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/08\/28\/rehabilitating-florence-nightingales-reputation\/","title":{"rendered":"Rehabilitating Florence Nightingale’s reputation"},"content":{"rendered":"

History Today<\/em><\/a> has a defence of the much-maligned Florence Nightingale:<\/p>\n

Jamaican-born Mary Seacole (1805-81), voted top of the list of the 2004 \u2018100 Great Black Britons\u2019 poll, is now slated to replace Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) as the true \u2018heroine\u2019 of the Crimean War. She is to be honoured as no less than the \u2018Pioneer Nurse\u2019 with a massive statue to be erected at St Thomas\u2019 Hospital in London. This in spite of the strong links between Nightingale and the hospital, her base for over 40 years. It was there she established the first secular school for nurses in 1860 with funds raised in her name for her work in the Crimean War during the conflict of 1854-56. The Nightingale School operated for over a century from the hospital, whose redesign in the 1860s Nightingale also influenced.<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

The campaign promoting Seacole over Nightingale builds on 30 years of books, articles and films denigrating the latter. While she always had detractors, the serious assault on Nightingale\u2019s reputation can be dated to 1982, with the publication of the Australian historian F.B. Smith\u2019s Florence Nightingale: Reputation and Power<\/em> (Croom Helm, 1982). The next major hit came in 1998 with Florence Nightingale: Avenging Angel<\/em> (Constable, 1998) by a retired management consultant Hugh Small, which argues that Nightingale was actually responsible for the high death rates of the Crimean War and had a nervous breakdown as a result when she supposedly recognised this. Neither claim is supported by any serious documentation. Social media goes even further: see Facebook<\/em> \u2018Florence Nightingale was a Murdering Bitch\u2019, later renamed \u2018Florence Nightingale: The World\u2019s Worst Nurse\u2019, where she is described as a \u2018deluded power hungry bitch\u2019, who \u2018looks like an uptight bitch\u2019, so that \u2018the day she died\u2019 was \u2018the best thing that ever happened to the field of nursing\u2019.<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

The French were the instigators of the Crimean War, sent more troops and were better prepared than the British. Their death rates were lower in the first year. But the British government learned from the commissions it sent out and made enormous changes. British death rates fell dramatically, from 23 per cent in the first winter to 2.5 per cent in the second — no greater than deaths among soldiers in peacetime barracks in London, as Nightingale proudly showed in a chart. In contrast, the French (lower) 11 per cent death rate in the first winter, rose to 20 per cent in the second winter. Since the French were late in publishing their statistics, neither Nightingale nor the royal commission could use them for comparison. However French doctors themselves credited the British reforms for their superior performance. Once they were properly cleansed and functioning Nightingale was proud of the Crimean hospitals. In her own charts she separated the two periods, before and after the sanitary and supply commissions, to emphasise the crucial role they played in reducing mortality.<\/p>\n

Her analysis of what went wrong was widely accepted and led to major changes to health care in the British Army. The \u2018Nightingale Fund\u2019 raised in her honour for that work paid for the training school at St Thomas\u2019, which led to raising nursing to the level of a profession throughout much of the world. Her experience of the war, and her reputation and research as a result of it, grounded all the social and public health work she did for the rest of her life. Her vision for health reform included bold statements, such as the belief that the poor should receive as good quality hospital care as private patients and warnings as to the dangers of hospital acquired infections. Nightingale, in short, is no mere historical figure. Her lamp should not be retired but shone brightly onto the hospital and health care problems of today.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

History Today has a defence of the much-maligned Florence Nightingale: Jamaican-born Mary Seacole (1805-81), voted top of the list of the 2004 \u2018100 Great Black Britons\u2019 poll, is now slated to replace Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) as the true \u2018heroine\u2019 of the Crimean War. She is to be honoured as no less than the \u2018Pioneer Nurse\u2019 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,66,7,5,1119],"tags":[31,958,735,243,249],"class_list":["post-16669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-health-science","category-history","category-military","category-russia","tag-army","tag-crimea","tag-jamaica","tag-medicine","tag-turkey"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4kR","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16669"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16669\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25196,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16669\/revisions\/25196"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}