Acknowledgement

First and foremost I would like to thank Mrs. Corona Maitland Grant for giving me this
research venture has it as not only assisted me in identifying two of the greatest nurse
pioneers of the 18th and 19th century Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole but it has also
broaden my knowledge base about their impact on the human race , helping me to better
understand there achievements and struggles right throughout their lives and the legacy
they have left behind portrayed in monuments .
I would also like to extend my gratitude to the librarians of the Port Antonio parish
library who worked assiduously to aid me on my challenge of tracking down relevant and
reliable information sources thus allowing my research to take its factual form with its
credibility intact.

Introduction

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This project was undertaken by the researcher to show the achievements, obstacles and
struggles faced by both Mary Seacole and Florence Nightingale along their life journey
cementing their places among the pioneers of nursing. In an effort to show these segments
the researcher had to utilize several research tactics that would dissect each individual
life. This was done by looking on the early life, mid-life, latter life and after death portions
of each person life.
Mary Jane Seacole a Jamaican born woman of Scottish and Creole descent who had set
up a "British Hotel" behind the lines during the Crimean war and provided succour for
wounded service men on the battlefield. She was the recipient of the Jamaican Order of
Merit award and voted the greatest black Briton. She acquired knowledge of herbal
medicine in the Caribbean. When the Crimean War broke out, she applied to the War
Office to assist but was refused. She travelled independently and set up her hotel and
assisted battlefield wounded. After her death, today she is celebrated as a woman who
successfully combatted racial prejudice.
Florence Nightingale was a celebrated English social reformer and statistician, and the
founder of modern nursing. She came to prominence while serving as a manager of nurses
trained by her during the Crimean war, where she organized the tending to wounded
soldiers. She gave nursing a highly favorable reputation and became an icon of Victorian
culture, especially in the persona of "The Lady with the Lamp" making rounds of wounded
soldiers at night. Her contributions and achievements in professionalizing nursing roles for
women and laid the foundation of professional nursing with the establishment of her
nursing school in London, the first secular nursing school in the world.

Early life, 180525

Mary Seacole was born Mary Jane Grant in Kingston, Jamaica, the
daughter of a Scottish soldier in the British Army and a free
Jamaican woman. Seacole's mother was a "doctress", a healer who
used traditional Caribbean and African herbal remedies. She ran
Blundell Hall, a boarding house at 7 East Street, considered one of
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the best hotels in all Kingston. Here Seacole acquired her nursing skills. Her autobiography
says her early experiments in medicine were based on what she learned from her mother
while ministering to a doll, then progressing to pets, before helping her mother treat
humans.
Seacole was proud of her Scottish ancestry and called herself a Creole, a term that was
commonly used in a racially neutral sense or to refer to the children of white settlers. In her
autobiography, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole, she records her bloodline
thus: "I am a Creole, and have good Scots blood coursing through my veins. My father was
a soldier of an old Scottish family.
The West Indies were an outpost of the British Empire in the late 18th century, and in the
1790s one-third of Britain's foreign trade was with the British West Indies. Britain's
economic interests were protected by a massive military presence, with 69 line infantry
regiments serving there between 1793 to 1801, and another 24 between 1803 to 1815.
Seacole spent some years in the household of an elderly woman, whom she called her
"kind patroness", before returning to her mother. She was treated as a member of her
patroness's family and received a good education. As the educated daughter of a Scottish
officer and a free black woman with a respectable business, Seacole would have held a
high position in Jamaican society.
In about 1821, Seacole visited London, stayed for a year, and visited relatives, the
merchant Henrique family. Although London had a number of black people, she records
that a companion, a West Indian with skin darker than her own "dusky" shades, was
taunted by children. Seacole herself was "only a little brown", nearly white according to
Ramdin. She returned to London approximately a year later, bringing a "large stock of West
Indian pickles and preserves for sale". Her later travels would be as an "unprotected"
woman, without a chaperone or sponsoran unusual practice. Seacole returned to
Jamaica in 1825.

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In the Caribbean, 182651

After returning to Jamaica, Seacole nursed her
"old indulgent patroness" through an
illness, finally returning to the family home at
Blundell Hall after the death of her patroness a
few years later. Seacole then worked alongside
her mother, occasionally being called to assist at
the British Army hospital at Up-Park Camp. Dure
Caribbean, visiting the British colony of New
Providence in The Bahamas, the Spanish colony of Cuba, and the new republic of Haiti.
Seacole records these travels, but omits mention of significant current events, such as
the Christmas Rebellion in Jamaica of 1831, the partial abolition of slavery in 1834, and the
full abolition of slavery in 1838.

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She married Edwin Horatio Hamilton Seacole in Kingston on 10 November 1836. Her
marriage, from betrothal to widowhood, is described in just nine lines at the conclusion of
the first chapter of her autobiography.
Edwin was a merchant and seems to have had a poor constitution. The newly married
couple moved to Black River and opened a provisions store which failed to prosper. They
returned to Blundell Hall in the early 1840s.
During 1843 and 1844, Seacole suffered a series of personal disasters. She and her family
lost much of the boarding house in a fire in Kingston on 29 August 1843. Blundell Hall
burned down, and was replaced by New Blundell Hall, which was described as "better
than before". Then her husband died in October 1844, followed by her mother. After a
period of grief, in which Seacole says she did not stir for days, she composed herself,
"turned a bold front to fortune", and assumed the management of her mother's hotel. She
put her rapid recovery down to her hot Creole blood, blunting the "sharp edge of [her]
grief" sooner than Europeans who she thought "nurse their woe secretly in their
hearts". She absorbed herself into work, declining many offers of marriage. She later
became widely known and respected, particularly among the European military visitors to
Jamaica who often stayed at Blundell Hall. She treated patients in the cholera epidemic of
1850, which killed some 32,000 Jamaicans.
Seacole attributed the outbreak to infection brought on a steamer from New Orleans,
Louisiana, demonstrating knowledge of contagion theory. This first-hand experience
would benefit her during the next five years.

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In Central America, 185154 A

In 1851, Seacole travelled to Cruces to visit her brother.
Shortly after her arrival, the town was struck by cholera,
a disease which had reached Panama in 1849. Seacole
was on hand to treat the first victim, who survived, which
established Seacole's reputation and brought her a
succession of patients as the infection spread. The rich
paid, but she treated the poor for free. Many, both rich and poor, succumbed. She
eschewed opium, preferring mustard rubs and poultices, the laxative calomel (mercuric
chloride), sugars of lead (lead(II) acetate), and rehydration with water boiled with
cinnamon. While her preparations had moderate success, she faced little competition, the
only other treatments coming from a "timid little dentist", who was an inexperienced
doctor sent by the Panamanian government, and the Roman Catholic Church.
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The epidemic raged through the population. Seacole later expressed exasperation at their
feeble resistance, claiming they "bowed down before the plague in slavish despair". She
performed an autopsy on an orphan child for whom she had cared, which gave her
"decidedly useful" new knowledge. Towards the end of the epidemic, Seacole herself
sickened but survived. Cholera was to return again: Ulysses S. Grant passed through
Cruces in July, 1852, on military duty; a hundred and twenty men, a third of his party, died
of the disease there or shortly afterwards en route to Panama City.
Seeing a business opportunity, Seacole opened the British Hotel, which was a restaurant
rather than an hotel. In Gorgona, Seacole briefly ran a woman-only hotel. In late 1852, she
travelled home to Jamaica. The journey was delayed and difficult when she encountered
racial discrimination while trying to book passage on an American ship. She was forced to
wait for a later British boat. In 1853, soon after arriving home, Seacole was asked by the
Jamaican medical authorities to minister to victims of a severe outbreak of yellow fever.
She found that she could do little, because the epidemic was so severe.

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Crimean War, 185456

The Crimean War lasted from October 1853 until 1 April 1856 and was fought between
the Russian Empire and an alliance of the United Kingdom, France, the Kingdom of
Sardinia, and the Ottoman Empire. The majority of the conflict took place on the Crimean
peninsula in the Black Sea and Turkey.
Many thousands of troops from all the countries involved were drafted to the area, and
disease broke out almost immediately. Hundreds perished, mostly from cholera.
In Britain, a trenchant letter in The Times on 14 October triggered Sidney
Herbert, Secretary of State for War, to approach Florence Nightingale to form a
detachment of nurses to be sent to the hospital to save lives. Interviews were quickly held,
suitable candidates selected, and Nightingale left for Turkey on 21 October.
Seacole finally resolved to travel to Crimea using her own resources and to open the British
Hotel. Business cards were printed and sent ahead to announce her intention to open an
establishment, to be called the "British Hotel", near Balaclava, which would be "a messtable and comfortable quarters for sick and convalescent officers". Shortly afterwards, her
Caribbean acquaintance, Thomas Day, arrived unexpectedly in London, and the two
formed a partnership. They assembled a stock of supplies, and Seacole embarked on the
Dutch screw-steamer Hollander on 27 January 1855 on its maiden voyage,
to Constantinople. The ship called at Malta, where Seacole encountered a doctor who had
recently left Scutari. He wrote her a letter of in The hotel was built from the salvaged
driftwood, packing cases, iron sheets, and salvaged architectural items such as glass-doors
and window-frames, from the village of Kamara, using hired local labour. The new British
Hotel opened in March 1855. An early visitor was Alexis Soyer, a noted French chef who
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had travelled to Crimea to help improve the diet of British soldiers. He records meeting
Seacole in his 1857 work A Culinary Campaign and describes Seacole as "an old dame of a
jovial appearance, but a few shades darker than the white lily"troduction to Nightingale.
Despite constant thefts, particularly of livestock, Seacole's establishment prospered.
Chapter XIV of Wonderful Adventures describes the meals and supplies provided to
officers. They were closed at 8 pm daily and on Sundays. Seacole did some of the cooking
herself: "Whenever I had a few leisure moments, I used to wash my hands, roll up my
sleeves, and roll out pastry." When called to "dispense medications," she did so. Soyer was
a frequent visitor, and praised Seacole's offerings, noting that she offered him champagne
on his first visit. The Special Correspondent of The Times newspaper wrote approvingly of
her work: "...Mrs. Seacole...doctors and cures all manner of men with extraordinary
success. She is always in attendance near the battle-field to aid the wounded, and has
earned many a poor fellows blessings.
On one occasion, attending wounded troops under fire, she dislocated her right thumb, an
injury which never healed entirely.
In a dispatch written on 14 September 1855,William Howard Russell, special
correspondent of The Times, wrote that she was a "warm and successful physician, who
doctors and cures all manner of men with extraordinary success.
Seacole was joined by a 14-year-old girl, Sarah, also known as Sally. Soyer described her as
"the Egyptian beauty, Mrs. Seacole's daughter Sarah", with blue eyes and dark hair.

Peace talks began in Paris in early 1856, and

friendly relations opened between the Allies and
the Russians, with a lively trade across the River
Tchernaya. The Treaty of Paris was signed on 30
March 1856, after which the soldiers left Crimea.
Seacole was in a difficult financial position, her
business was full of unsalable provisions, new
goods were arriving daily, and creditors were
demanding payment. She attempted to sell as
much as possible before the soldiers left, but she
was forced to auction many expensive goods for lower-than-expected prices to the
Russians who were returning to their homes. The evacuation of the Allied armies was
formally completed at Balaclava on 9 July 1856, with Seacole "... conspicuous in the
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foreground ... dressed in a plaid riding-habit ...". Seacole was one of the last to leave
Crimea, returning to England "poorer than [she] left it.

She was kind and generous. She made friends of her customers, army and navy officers,
who came to her rescue with a fund when she was declared bankrupt. She deserves much
credit for rising to the occasion, but her tea and lemonade did not save lives, pioneer
nursing or advance health care."

Back in London, 185660

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After the end of the war, Seacole returned to England destitute

and in poor health.
She arrived in August 1856, and considered setting up shop with
Day in Aldershot, Hampshire, but nothing materialised. She
attended a celebratory dinner for 2,000 soldiers at Royal Surrey
Gardens in Kennington on 25 August 1856, at which Nightingale
was chief guest of honour.
The Bankruptcy Court in Basinghall Street declared her bankrupt on 7 November
1856. Robinson speculates that Seacole's business problems may have been caused in
part by her partner, Day, who dabbled in horse trading and may have set up as an
unofficial bank, cashing debts.
At about this time, Seacole began to wear military medals. These are mentioned in an
account of her appearance in the bankruptcy court in November 1856. A bust by George
Kelly, based on an original by Count Gleichen from around 1871, depicts her wearing four
medals, three of which have been identified as the British Crimea Medal, the
French Lgion d'honneur and the Turkish Order of the Medjidie medal.
Further fund-raising kept Seacole in the public eye. In May 1857 she wanted to travel to
India, to minister to the wounded of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, but she was dissuaded
by both the new Secretary of War, Lord Panmure, and her financial troubles.
A 200-page autobiographical account of her travels was published in July 1857 by James
Blackwood as Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, the first
autobiography written by a black woman in Britain.

Later life, 186081

Seacole had joined the Roman Catholic Church circa 1860, and
returned to a Jamaica changed in her absence as Jamaica faced
economic downturn.
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However, by 1867 she was again running short of money, and the Seacole fund was
resurrected in London, with illustrious new patrons, including the Prince of Wales, the
Duke of Edinburgh, the Duke of Cambridge, and many other senior military officers. The
fund burgeoned, and Seacole was able to buy land on Duke Street in Kingston, near New
Blundell Hall, where she built a bungalow as her new home, plus a larger property to rent
out.
In London, Seacole joined the periphery of the royal circle. Prince Victor of HohenloheLangenburg (a nephew of Queen Victoria; as a young Lieutenant he had been one of
Seacole's customers in Crimea) carved a marble bust of her in 1871 that was exhibited at
the Royal Academy summer exhibition in 1872.
Seacole died in 1881 at her home in Paddington, London, the cause of death was noted as
"apoplexy". She left an estate valued at over 2,500. After some specific legacies, many of
exactly 19 guineas, the main beneficiary of her will was her sister, Louisa. Lord Rokeby,
Colonel Hussey Fane Keane, and Count Gleichen (three trustees of her Fund) were each
left 50; Count Gleichen also received a diamond ring, said to have been given to Seacoles
late husband by Lord Nelson. A short obituary was published in The Times on 21 May
1881. She was buried in St. Mary's Roman Catholic Cemetery, Harrow Road, Kensal Green,
London.

Recognition
While well-known at the end of her life, Seacole rapidly
faded from public memory. Her work in Crimea was
overshadowed by Florence Nightingale's for many years.
However, in recent years there has been a resurgence of
interest in her and efforts to properly acknowledge her
achievements. Seacole has become a symbol of racial
attitudes and social injustices in Britain during that
period. She was quoted as an example of "hidden" black
history in Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, like Olaudah Equiano: "See, here is Mary
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Seacole, who did as much in the Crimea as another magic-lamping lady, but, being dark,
could scarce be seen for the flame of Florence's candle.
She has been better remembered in the Caribbean, where she was posthumously awarded
the Jamaican Order of Merit in 1991. The headquarters of the Jamaican General Trained
Nurses' Association was christened "Mary Seacole House" in 1954, followed quickly by the
naming of a hall of residence of the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica. A ward
at Kingston Public Hospital was also named in her memory. Her grave was rediscovered in
1973; a service of reconsecration was held on 20 November 1973, and her impressive
gravestone was also restored by the British Commonwealth Nurses' War Memorial
Fund and the Lignum Vitae Club. The centenary of her death was celebrated with a
memorial service on 14 May 1981. An English Heritage blue plaque was erected by the
Greater London Council at her residence in 157 George Street, Westminster, on 9 March
1985, but it was removed in 1998 before the site was redeveloped. A "green plaque" was
unveiled at 147 George Street, in Westminster, on 11 October 2005. However, anotherblue
plaque has since been positioned at another residence, in 14 Soho Square, where she lived
in 1857.
British buildings and organisations now commemorate her by name. A Seacole
Lane existed in London near the bottom of Fleet Street until the area was redeveloped in
the 1980s. One of the first was the Mary Seacole Centre for Nursing Practice at Thames
Valley University, which created the NHS Specialist Library for Ethnicity and Health, a
web-based collection of research-based evidence and good practice information relating
to the health needs of minority ethnic groups, and other resources relevant to multicultural health care. There is another Mary Seacole Research Centre, this one at De
Montfort University in Leicester, and a problem-based learning room at St George's,
University of London is named after her. Brunel University in West London houses its
School of Health Sciences and Social Care in the Mary Seacole Building. New buildings at
the University of Salford and Birmingham City University bear her name, as does part of
the new headquarters of the Home Office at 2 Marsham Street. There is a Mary Seacole
ward in the Douglas Bader Centre in Roehampton.
A campaign to erect a statue of Seacole in London was launched on 24 November 2003,
chaired by Clive Soley, Baron Soley. The design of the sculpture, which is planned to be
erected in the grounds of St. Thomas' Hospital, was announced on 18 June 2009. There is
significant opposition to the siting of the statue. There is a feature film being made of her
life by Seacole Pictures. A short animation about Mary Seacole was adapted from a book
entitled Mother Seacole, published in 2005 as part of the bicentenary

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celebrations. Seacole is featured in BBC/CBBC's Horrible Histories, where she is

portrayed by Dominique Moore.
Controversies
ASeacole's recognition has provoked a reaction. It has been argued that she has been
promoted at the expense of Florence Nightingale, and in an attempt to promote
multiculturalism. Professor Lynn McDonald has written that "...support for Seacole has
been used to attack Nightingale's reputation as a pioneer in public health and
nursing.'' There is opposition to the proposed siting of a statue of Mary Seacole at St
Thomas' Hospital on the grounds that she had no connection with this institution, whereas
Florence Nightingale did. Dr Sean Lang has stated that she "does not qualify as a
mainstream figure in the history of nursing".
Seacole's name appears in an appendix to the Key Stage 2 National Curriculum, as an
example of a significant Victorian historical figure. There is no requirement that teachers
include Seacole in their lessons. At the end of 2012 it was reported that Mary Seacole was
to be removed from the National Curriculum. Opposing this, Greg Jenner, historical
consultant to Horrible Histories, has stated that while her medical achievements have
been exaggerated, removing Seacole from the curriculum would be a mistake.

In January 2013 Operation Black Vote launched a petition to request Education Secretary
Michael Gove to drop neither here nor Oloudah Equiano from the National
Curriculum Rev. Jesse Jackson and others wrote a letter to The Times protesting against
the mooted removal of Mary Seacole from the National Curriculum. This was declared
successful on 8 February 2013, after approximately 35,000 signatures forced Michael Gove
to concede

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Early life
Florence Nightingale was born on 12 May 1820 into a rich,
upper-class, well-connected British family at the Villa
Colombaia, in Florence, Italy, and was named after the city of
her birth. Florence's older sister Frances Parthenope had
similarly been named after her place of birth, Parthenopolis, a
Greek settlement now part of the city of Naples. When Florence
was 1, the family moved back to England in 1821, with
Nightingale being brought up in the family's homes at Embley
and Lea Hurst.
Her parents were William Edward Nightingale, born William Edward Shore (17941874)
and Frances ("Fanny") Nightingale ne Smith (17891880). William's mother Mary ne
Evans was the niece of one Peter Nightingale, under the terms of whose will William
inherited his estate at Lea Hurst in Derbyshire, and assumed the name and arms of
Nightingale. Fanny's father (Florence's maternal grandfather) was the abolitionist and
Unitarian William Smith. Nightingale was educated mainly by her father.
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In 1838, her father took the family on a tour in Europe where he was introduced to the
English born Parisian hostess Mary Clarke who was known as "Clarkey". Florence bonded
with this woman. She recorded that "Clarkey" was a stimulating hostess who did not care
for her appearance but although her idea might not always agree with her guests but "she
was incapable of boring anyone." Her behaviour was said to be exasperating and eccentric
and she had no respect for upper class British women who she regarded generally as
inconsequential. She said that if given the choice between being a woman or a galley slave
then she would choose the freedom of the galley's. She generally rejected female company
and spent her time with male intellectuals.
Nightingale underwent the first of several experiences that she believed were calls from
God in February 1837 while at Embley Park, prompting a strong desire to devote her life to
the service of others. In her youth she was respectful of her family's opposition to her
working as a nurse, only announcing her decision to enter the field in 1844.
s a young woman, Nightingale was attractive, slender and graceful. While her demeanor
was often severe, she could be very charming and her smile was radiant. Her most
persistent suitor was the politician and poet Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Baron
Houghton, but after a nine-year courtship she rejected him, convinced that marriage
would interfere with her ability to follow her calling to nursing.

In Rome in 1847, she met Sidney Herbert, a politician who had been Secretary at War
(18451846). Herbert was on his honeymoon; he and Nightingale became lifelong close
friends. Herbert would be Secretary of War again during the Crimean War; he and his wife
were instrumental in facilitating Nightingale's nursing work in the Crimea. She became a
key adviser to him in his political career, though she was accused by some of having
hastened Herbert's death from Bright's Disease in 1861 because of the pressure her
programme of reform placed on him.

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On 22 August 1853, Nightingale took the post of superintendent at the Institute for the
Care of Sick Gentlewomen in Upper Harley Street, London, a position she held until
October 1854. Her father had given her an annual income of 500 (roughly
40,000/US$65,000 in present terms), which allowed her to live comfortably and to pursue
her career.

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Crimean War
Florence Nightingale's most famous contribution came during the
Crimean War, which became her central focus when reports got
back to Britain about the horrific conditions for the wounded. On
21 October 1854, she and the staff of 38 women volunteer nurses
that she trained, including her aunt Mai Smith, and fifteen Catholic
nuns (mobilised by Henry Edward Manning) were sent (under the
authorisation of Sidney Herbert) to theOttoman Empire. Nightingale was assisted in Paris
by her friend Mary Mohl. They were deployed about 295 nautical miles (546 km; 339 mi)
across the Black Sea from Balaklava in the Crimea, where the main British camp was
based.
Nightingale arrived early in November 1854 at Selimiye Barracks in Scutari (modern-day
skdar in Istanbul). Her team found that poor care for wounded soldiers was being
delivered by overworked medical staff in the face of official indifference. Medicines were in
short supply, hygiene was being neglected, and mass infections were common, many of
them fatal. There was no equipment to process food for the patients.
Stephen Paget in the Dictionary of National Biography asserted that Nightingale reduced
the death rate from 42% to 2%, either by making improvements in hygiene herself, or by
calling for the Sanitary Commission. During her first winter at Scutari, 4,077 soldiers died
there. Ten times more soldiers died from illnesses such as typhus, typhoid, cholera and
dysentery than from battle wounds. With overcrowding, defective sewers and lack of
ventilation, the Sanitary Commission had to be sent out by the British government to
Scutari in March 1855, almost six months after Florence Nightingale had arrived. The
commission flushed out the sewers and improved ventilation. Death rates were sharply
reduced, but she never claimed credit for helping to reduce the death rate. In 2001 and
2008 the BBC released documentaries that were critical of Nightingale's performance in
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the Crimean War, as were some follow-up articles published in The Guardian and the
Sunday Times. Nightingale scholar Lynn McDonald has dismissed these criticisms as
"often preposterous", arguing they are not supported by the primary sources.
Nightingale still believed that the death rates were due to poor nutrition, lack of supplies,
stale air and overworking of the soldiers. After she returned to Britain and began collecting
evidence before the Royal Commission on the Health of the Army, she came to believe that
most of the soldiers at the hospital were killed by poor living conditions. This experience
influenced her later career, when she advocated sanitary living conditions as of great
importance.

The Lady with the Lamp

During the Crimean war, Florence Nightingale gained the
nickname "The Lady with the Lamp" from a phrase in a report in
The Times:

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She is a 'ministering angel' without any exaggeration in these hospitals, and as her slender
form glides quietly along each corridor, every poor fellow's face softens with gratitude at
the sight of her. When all the medical officers have retired for the night and silence and
darkness have settled down upon those miles of prostrate sick, she may be observed
alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds.

Later career
In the Crimea on 29 November 1855, the Nightingale Fund
was established for the training of nurses during a public
meeting to recognise Nightingale for her work in the war.
There was an outpouring of generous donations. Sidney
Herbert served as honorary secretary of the fund and the
Duke of Cambridge was chairman. Nightingale was
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considered a pioneer in the concept of medical tourism as well, based on her 1856 letters
describing spas in the Ottoman Empire. She detailed the health conditions, physical
descriptions, dietary information, and other vital details of patients whom she directed
there. The treatment there was significantly less expensive than in Switzerland.
Nightingale had 45,000 at her disposal from the Nightingale Fund to set up the
Nightingale Training School at St. Thomas' Hospital on 9 July 1860. The first trained
Nightingale nurses began work on 16 May 1865 at the Liverpool Workhouse Infirmary. Now
called the Florence Nightingale School of Nursing and Midwifery, the school is part of
King's College London. She also campaigned and raised funds for the Royal
Buckinghamshire Hospital in Aylesbury near her sister's home, Claydon House.
Nightingale wrote Notes on Nursing (1859). Notes on Nursing also sold well to the general
reading public and is considered a classic introduction to nursing. Nightingale spent the
rest of her life promoting and organising the nursing profession. In the introduction to the
1974 edition, Joan Quixley of the Nightingale School of Nursing wrote: "The book was the
first of its kind ever to be written.
Though Nightingale is sometimes said to have denied the theory of infection for her entire
life, a recent biography disagrees, saying that she was simply opposed to a precursor of
germ theory known as "contagionism". This theory held that diseases could only be
transmitted by touch. Before the experiments of the mid-1860s by Pasteur and Lister,
hardly anyone took germ theory seriously; even afterwards, many medical practitioners
were unconvinced. Bostridge points out that in the early 1880s Nightingale wrote an article
for a textbook in which she advocated strict precautions designed, she said, to kill germs.
In the 1870s, Nightingale mentored Linda Richards, "America's first trained nurse", and
enabled her to return to the USA with adequate training and knowledge to establish highquality nursing schools.
By 1882, several Nightingale nurses had become matrons at several leading hospitals,
including, in London (St Mary's Hospital, Westminster Hospital, St Marylebone Workhouse
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Infirmary and the Hospital for Incurables at Putney) and throughout Britain (Royal Victoria
Hospital, Netley; Edinburgh Royal Infirmary; Cumberland Infirmary and Liverpool Royal
Infirmary), as well as at Sydney Hospital in New South Wales, Australia.
In 1883, Nightingale was awarded the Royal Red Cross by Queen Victoria. In 1904, she was
appointed a Lady of Grace of the Order of St John (LGStJ). In 1907, she became the first
woman to be awarded the Order of Merit. In the following year she was given the Honorary
Freedom of the City of London. Her birthday is now celebrated as InternationalCFS
Awareness Day.
From 1857 onwards, Nightingale was intermittently bedridden and suffered from
depression. A recent biography cites brucellosis and associated spondylitis as the cause.
Most authorities today accept that Nightingale suffered from a particularly extreme form of
brucellosis, the effects of which only began to lift in the early 1880s. Despite her
symptoms, she remained phenomenally productive in social reform.
She wrote very little during that period due to blindness and declining mental abilities,
though she still retained an interest in current affairs.

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Death
On 13 August 1910, at the age of 90, she died peacefully in her
sleep in her room at 10 South Street, Mayfair, London. The
offer of burial in Westminster Abbey was declined by her
relatives and she is buried in the graveyard at St. Margaret
Church in East Wellow, Hampshire. She left a large body of
work, including several hundred notes which were previously
unpublished. A memorial monument to Nightingale was
created in Carrara marble by Francis William Sargant in 1913
and placed in the cloister of Santa Croce Church in Florence.

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Legacy and memory

The first official nurses' training programme, the
Nightingale School for Nurses, opened in 1860. The
mission of the school was to train nurses to work in
hospitals, to work with the poor and to teach. This
intended that students cared for people in their homes, an
appreciation that is still advancing in reputation and
professional opportunity for nurses today.
Florence Nightingale's lasting contribution has been her role in founding the modern
nursing profession. She set an example of compassion, commitment to patient care and
diligent and thoughtful hospital administration. In addition to the continued operation of
the Florence Nightingale School of Nursing and Midwifery at King's College London, The
Nightingale Building in the School of Nursing and Midwifery at the University of
Southampton is also named after her. International Nurses Day is celebrated on her
birthday each year.
The Florence Nightingale Declaration Campaign, established by nursing leaders
throughout the world through the Nightingale Initiative for Global Health (NIGH), aims to
build a global grassroots movement to achieve two United Nations Resolutions for
adoption by the UN General Assembly of 2008. They will declare: The International Year of
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the Nurse2010 (the centennial of Nightingale's death); The UN Decade for a Healthy
World2011 to 2020 (the bicentennial of Nightingale's birth). NIGH also works to rekindle
awareness about the important issues highlighted by Florence Nightingale, such as
preventive medicine and holistic health. So far, the Florence Nightingale Declaration has
been signed by over 18,500 signatories from 86 countries.
During the Vietnam War, Nightingale inspired many US Army nurses, sparking a renewal of
interest in her life and work. Her admirers include Country Joe of Country Joe and the Fish,
who has assembled an extensive website in her honour.
The Agostino Gemelli Medical School in Rome, the first university-based hospital in Italy
and one of its most respected medical centres, honoured Nightingale's contribution to the
nursing profession by giving the name "Bedside Florence" to a wireless computer system it
developed to assist nursing.
In 1912 the International Committee of the Red Cross instituted the Florence Nightingale
Medal, awarded every two years to nurses or nursing aides for outstanding service.

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Contributions
Indeed, Nightingale is described as "a true pioneer in
the graphical representation of statistics", and is
credited with developing a form of the pie chart now
known as the polar area diagram, or occasionally the
Nightingale rose diagram, equivalent to a modern
circular histogram, to illustrate seasonal sources of
patient mortality in the military field hospital she managed. Nightingale called a
compilation of such diagrams a "coxcomb", but later that term would frequently be used
for the individual diagrams. She made extensive use of coxcombs to present reports on the
nature and magnitude of the conditions of medical care in the Crimean War to Members of
Parliament and civil servants who would have been unlikely to read or understand
traditional statistical reports. In 1859, Nightingale was elected the first female member of
the Royal Statistical Society. She later became an honorary member of the American
Statistical Association.

Literature and the women's movement

While better known for her contributions in the nursing and mathematical fields,
Nightingale is also an important link in the study of English feminism. During 1850 and
1852, she was struggling with her self-definition and the expectations of an upper-class
marriage from her family. As she sorted out her thoughts, she wrote Suggestions for
Thought to Searchers after Religious Truth. This was an 829-page, three-volume work,
which Nightingale had printed privately in 1860, but which until recently was never
published in its entirety. An effort to correct this was made with a 2008 publication by
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Wilfrid Laurier University, as volume 11 of a 16 volume project, the Collected Works of

Florence Nightingale. The best known of these essays, called Cassandra, was previously
published by Ray Strachey in 1928. Strachey included it in The Cause, a history of the
women's movement. Apparently, the writing served its original purpose of sorting out
thoughts; Nightingale left soon after to train at the Institute for deaconesses at
Kaiserswerth.

Theology
Despite being named as a Unitarian in several older sources, Nightingale's own rare
references to conventional Unitarianism are mildly negative. She remained in the Church
of England throughout her life, albeit with unorthodox views. Influenced from an early age
by the Wesleyan tradition, Nightingale felt that genuine religion should manifest in active
care and love for others. She wrote a work of theology: Suggestions for Thought, her own
theodicy, which develops her heterodox ideas. Nightingale questioned the goodness of a
God who would condemn souls to hell, and was a believer in universal reconciliation the
concept that even those who die without being saved will eventually make it to Heaven.
She would sometimes comfort those in her care with this view. For example, a dying young
prostitute being tended by Nightingale was concerned she was going to hell and said to her
'Pray God, that you may never be in the despair I am in at this time'. The nurse replied
"Oh, my girl, are you not now more merciful than the God you think you are going to? Yet
the real God is far more merciful than any human creature ever was or can ever imagine.
Despite her intense personal devotion to Christ, Nightingale believed for much of her life
that the pagan and eastern religions had also contained genuine revelation. She was a
strong opponent of discrimination both against Christians of different denominations, and
against those of non-Christian religions. Nightingale believed religion helped provide
people with the fortitude for arduous good work, and would ensure the nurses in her care
attended religious services. However she was often critical of organized religion. She
disliked the role the 19th century Church of England would sometimes play in worsening
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the oppression of the poor. Nightingale argued that secular hospitals usually provided
better care than their religious counterparts.

References
1. "Florence Nightingale 2nd rendition, 1890 greetings to the dear old comrades
of Balaclava". Internet Archive. Retrieved 13 February 2014.
2. Strachey, Lytton: Eminent Victorians, Chatto and Windus, London, 1918

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3. Kristine Swenson (2005). Medical Women and Victorian Fiction. University of

Missouri Press. p. 15. ISBN 978-0-8262-6431-2.
4. Florence Nightingale's birthplace with photo of commemorative plaque
5. ^ c Florence Nightingale and Gerard Vallee (Editor) (2003). "passim, see esp
Introduction". Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions. Wilfrid
Laurier University Press. ISBN 0889204136.
6. ^ Jump up to:a b c d Florence Nightingale and Lynn McDonald (Editor) (2010). "An
introduction to Vol 14". Florence Nightingale: The Crimean War. Wilfrid Laurier
University Press.ISBN 0889204691.
7. Natasha McEnroe, "Beyond the Rivalry: Florence Nightingale and Mary
Seacole", History Today, 3 September 2012.
8. Lynn McDonald, "Comment is free: Statue of 'nurse' Mary Seacole will do
Florence Nightingale a disservice", The Guardian, 8 June 2012.
9. "Michael Gove dumps Mary Seacole", OBV, 2 January 2013.
10. Robinson, p. 10.
11. ^

Scotland on Sunday, 16 May 2010, p. 10.

12. j Seacole, Chapter 1.

13. Robinson, p. 22.
14. Robinson, p. 24.
15. Salih, Sara (2005). Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many
Lands. Penguin Books. p. 256. ISBN 0-19-506672-3.

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