NCM 11

FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE
May 12, 1820 – August 13, 1910
Born in Florence, Italy

Founder of modern nursing

(BARRITT,1973) - studied music; grammar; composition; modern languages ETC.
1851(GERMANY) - first acquaintance with Kaiserswerth, a Protestant religious community
1852(IRELAND) - touring hospitals and keeping notes

DURING CRIMEAN WAR

I stand at the altar of those murdered men and while I live, I fight their
cause.
— NIGHTINGALE, CITED IN WOODHAM-SMITH
(1951, P. 182)
In watching disease, both in private homes and public hospitals, the thing which strikes
the experienced observer most forcefully is this, that the symptoms or the sufferings
generally considered to be inevitable and incident to the disease are very often not
symptoms of the disease at all, but of the want of fresh air, or light, or of warmth, or of
quiet, or of cleanliness, or of punctuality and care in the administration of diet, of each or
of all of these.
—FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE, NOTES ON NURSING
(1860/1969, p. 8)

DURING 18TH CENTURY

PARADIGM IN HEALING ART

- “empirics” or “experience,” trial and error

DURING 19TH CENTURY

- Gross anatomy was well known
- Chemistry was introduced
- Vaccination against small pox existed
- stablished drugs in the pharmacopoeia
- leprosy and the bubonic plague, had almost disappeared

DURING MID 19TH CENTURY

 - contagionism- proposed that diseases were communicable, spread via commerce
and population migration
- quarantine- proposed strategy, aiming at shutting down commerce and trade to keep
disease away from non-infected areas
- anticontagionism- proposed that disease resulted from local environmental sources
and arose out of “miasmas"

Feminist Context of Nightingale’s Caring

- What It Is and What It Is Not (1859/1969) was written not as a

manual to teach nurses to nurse but rather to help all women to learn
how to nurse.
- Hygiene — was the central element in health care, without which
medicine and surgery would be ineffective
- Nightingale effectively accomplished a genderization of the division of
labor in health care: male physicians and female nurses.
Madeline Leininger
- Nightingale never defined human care or caring in Nightingale’s Notes on
Nursing, she goes onto wonder if Nightingale considered
“Components of care such as comfort, support, nurturance, and many
other care constructs and characteristics and how they would
influence the reparative process.”

Nightingale’s philosophy, now recognized as theory

ENVIRONMENT
- physical components: warmth, light, nutrition, medicine, stimulation, room
temperature, and activity
- psychological component: avoiding chattering hopes and advices and providing
variety

HEALTH
- “Health is not only to be well, but to be able to use well every power we have”
- Believed in prevention and health promotion in addition to nursing patients
healing from illness to health

PERSON
 - person as comprising physical, intellectual, emotional, social, and
spiritual components

NURSING
- nursing is a spiritual calling
- Nurses were to assist nature that was healing the patient.
- nursing as the “science of environmental management”

DURING 20TH CENTURY

- Nightingale was not a theorist. She was a consummate politician and

health care reformer and we need these nurses now. Smith & Parker,
2015)
- Nursing is an art. (Florence Nightingale, cited in Donahue,1985, p.
469)
- An exemplar of practice personifying Nightingale’s approach and
practice would be a larger-than-life nurse hero or heroine
championing current health-care reform by designing health-care
systems that are truly responsive to the needs of the populace and
that extend cross-culturally and globally.

Nursing Ways of Knowing

CARPER (1978) IDENTIFIED FOUR PATTERNS OF KNOWLEDGE

- empirical knowledge (the science)
- esthetic knowledge (the art),
- personal knowing (an ability to understand one’s relationship to another
for whom one has assumed certain responsibilities, as in the nurse patient
relationship
- ethical knowing (understanding what constitutes good actions)