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Nightingale as a Nursing Celebrity
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Medicine Through Time – Nightingale and the Development of British Nursing, 1820-1910
In this course, Dr Richard Bates (University of Nottingham) explores the impact of Florence Nightingale in reforming nineteenth century British nursing. In the first module, we consider Nightingale as a nursing celebrity, looking at her legacy and the origin of her popular identity; the lady with the lamp. In the second module, we look more broadly at healthcare in early 19th century Britain, before in the third module looking at the state of nursing in Britain before Nightingale. In the fourth module, we think about Nightingale’s background and how her ideas about nursing developed, focusing in particular upon the impact of the early women’s movement and her time on the Continent. In the fifth and final module, we then turn to look at Nightingale’s legacy, in the form of the Nightingale School and the development of nurse training after 1860.
Nightingale as a Nursing Celebrity
In this module, we look at Florence Nightingale as a nursing celebrity, focusing in particular on: (i) the impact that Nightingale’s legacy has on our ability to assess her contribution to the development of nursing; (ii) the role that Nightingale played at Scutari hospital during the Crimean War (1853-56); (iii) the heroic image of Nightingale that emerged in the press during the aftermath of the Crimean War; (iv) the modern legacy of Nightingale in British nursing; and (v) the extent to which Nightingale’s legacy accurately represents her contribution to British nursing.
Hi, My name is Dr Richard Bates, and I teach history at the University of Nottingham.
00:00:05Today,
00:00:09I'm going to be talking about 19th century
00:00:10nursing and the influence and impact of Florence
00:00:12Nightingale in reforming and transforming nursing in Britain
00:00:15over the course of the 19th century.
00:00:18So Florence Nightingale is, by some distance the most famous nurse in history.
00:00:20She is the only nurse that most people in Britain could probably name
00:00:24and the only figure who would really merit the title of nursing celebrity,
00:00:28at least in British history.
00:00:32And that's a status that she held in her own lifetime and has maintained ever since.
00:00:34In British culture,
00:00:38her name seems quite often to appear somewhere up there with those
00:00:39of William Shakespeare or Winston Churchill on lists of Greatest ever.
00:00:43Britain's and Nightingale would have, I think,
00:00:47a pretty strong claim to being the most famous woman in British history.
00:00:50Certainly if you exclude members of the royal family.
00:00:53But the strength of that reputation can actually
00:00:56make it quite difficult to assess night ago
00:00:59to be clear as to what her contribution to nursing and nursing reform actually was.
00:01:01So you may see that Nightingale is often described as the founder of modern nursing.
00:01:07If you put that term founder of modern nursing into a search engine,
00:01:13you will see that you will get the result.
00:01:17Florence Nightingale. But what does that actually mean in practise?
00:01:18And is it in fact, an accurate description?
00:01:22And these are the kinds of questions that I want us to think about over the course of
00:01:25this lecture.
00:01:29So as is well known,
00:01:30Nightingale came to prominence when she led a group of female nurses
00:01:31an initial group of 38 nurses on a special government mission to tend
00:01:35to the sick and wounded soldiers of the British army fighting against the
00:01:40Russian empire in the Crimean War between 18 54 and 18 56.
00:01:43Now that nursing Mission of Nightingales was a very striking thing at the time,
00:01:49partly because the British army in 18 54 didn't have any female nurses before that,
00:01:54but also because public opinion in the weeks leading up to it
00:01:59had become very concerned with the dire state of the health of the
00:02:02soldiers of the wounded soldiers in the British army's hospitals and the
00:02:07fact that no one seemed to be doing anything to help them.
00:02:12The Crimean War was a war that produced few heroes,
00:02:15although ultimately a victorious war for Britain,
00:02:18ending in the capture of the Russian naval base in Sevastopol,
00:02:20in Crimea by the British and the French allies.
00:02:23It wasn't a particularly glorious or memorable conflict rather ill,
00:02:25too often exposed.
00:02:29The quite shambolic nature of the British army's
00:02:31organisation and hierarchy epitomised maybe in the miscommunication
00:02:33that led to the deaths of British cavalry in the charge of the light brigade.
00:02:37So in that context,
00:02:41Nightingale caught the imagination of the British
00:02:43press and public by doing something heroic
00:02:45to the extent that her name became
00:02:48indelibly associated with the profession of nursing.
00:02:49From then on, in the midst of that general chaos of the war,
00:02:52Nightingale appeared as a point of light in the darkness,
00:02:55the image of her bringing her lamp,
00:02:58her nursing care to the sick and wounded soldiers.
00:03:00So nightingale,
00:03:02someone who was completely unknown previously was suddenly
00:03:03transformed into a major public figure and in
00:03:06colour into Britain's leading authority on nursing.
00:03:09One slight irony of that, maybe is that while Nightingale became famous as a nurse,
00:03:13it would really be more accurate to describe her work
00:03:17in the Crimean War as that of a hospital manager.
00:03:19So she actually spent most of her time dealing
00:03:22with the organisation and administration of the army's hospitals,
00:03:25supervising her nursing team and only a relatively
00:03:28small amount of time on individual nursing care.
00:03:31Although Nightingale did take a close
00:03:33interest in individual soldiers and patients,
00:03:35but for the public both at the time and ever since,
00:03:38Nightingale was known as a nurse and the nurse, really so in this lecture,
00:03:41then I want to explore a little bit
00:03:46the relationship of Nightingale to nursing in Britain.
00:03:47I'm not going to talk anymore, actually about the Crimean War episode,
00:03:50but rather about the role that night and girl played or sometimes didn't play,
00:03:53actually, in the reform of nursing in 19th century Britain.
00:03:57So we have this idea then of Nightingale has a nursing celebrity,
00:04:02and I emphasise that not only because I
00:04:05think Nightingale forms quite an interesting case study in
00:04:08the history of celebrity and the processes by
00:04:10which people become celebrities are quite interesting,
00:04:13I think,
00:04:15but also because the thing with celebrities is that
00:04:16they are great at drawing attention to causes.
00:04:18But sometimes the pull of their personal magnetism is
00:04:20so great that it can actually have a bit
00:04:24of a distorting effect and obscure the more complicated
00:04:25realities of the issue that they're associated with.
00:04:28Nightingale was such a big star in nursing terms
00:04:31that when we're thinking about the history of nursing,
00:04:34it's easy, maybe too easy to focus on her at the expense of other things
00:04:36that were going on.
00:04:41Nightingale's name and legacy remained very
00:04:42important in contemporary British nursing,
00:04:44for example,
00:04:46through the actions of the nursing charity the Florence Nightingale Foundation,
00:04:47which holds an annual Florence Nightingale
00:04:50commemorative service in Westminster Abbey,
00:04:52featuring a lamp being handed out ceremonially from one
00:04:54to another.
00:04:57So I'm not suggesting that night and girl didn't have a significant impact.
00:04:58She certainly did.
00:05:01She was a forceful personality who captured the public imagination
00:05:02and acted as a strong and consistent voice for reform.
00:05:06The celebrity and respect that she gained from the Crimean War
00:05:10put her in a very strong position to influence public policy,
00:05:12whether concerning nursing or other related issues
00:05:15such as public health and hospital design
00:05:18and, perhaps most famously, a charitable fund raised during the Crimean War,
00:05:20provided Nightingale with the money to set up the
00:05:24Nightingale Training School for nurses at ST Thomas's Hospital,
00:05:27which opened in 18 60 which I'll talk about a bit later.
00:05:30But it's important when thinking about Nightingale to
00:05:33bear in mind that she was only one
00:05:35part of a much broader process of transforming
00:05:38nursing over the course of the 19th century,
00:05:43and that many structural changes occurred in nursing in hospital health care
00:05:46that would very likely have taken place without her had she never existed
00:05:51as the celebrity nurse Nightingale, setting example for others to aspire to.
00:05:55Her experience certainly inspired many women to want to become nurses themselves.
00:05:59But as we're going to see the bigger changes that can get ascribed,
00:06:04maybe to Nightingale personally,
00:06:08such as the fact that nursing became a more skilled and
00:06:10more socially respectable occupation over the course of the 19th century.
00:06:13Those changes really had other broader causes.
00:06:18Okay, so that's a bit of a brief introduction.
00:06:22I'll come back to talk more about Nightingale herself in a bit more detail later on,
00:06:24but in the next part of the lecture,
00:06:28I want to spend some time thinking about those
00:06:30broader structural changes in nursing and health care,
00:06:33so that we can more easily see where Nightingale fits
00:06:35into the bigger picture.
00:06:38
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Bates, R. (2022, October 03). Medicine Through Time – Nightingale and the Development of British Nursing, 1820-1910 - Nightingale as a Nursing Celebrity [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/medicine-through-time-nightingale-and-the-development-of-british-nursing-1820-1910/nursing-before-nightingale
MLA style
Bates, R. "Medicine Through Time – Nightingale and the Development of British Nursing, 1820-1910 – Nightingale as a Nursing Celebrity." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 03 Oct 2022, https://massolit.io/courses/medicine-through-time-nightingale-and-the-development-of-british-nursing-1820-1910/nursing-before-nightingale