Nightingale as a Nursing Celebrity

Hi, My name is Dr Richard Bates, and I teach history at the University of Nottingham.

Today,

I'm going to be talking about 19th century

nursing and the influence and impact of Florence

Nightingale in reforming and transforming nursing in Britain

over the course of the 19th century.

So Florence Nightingale is, by some distance the most famous nurse in history.

She is the only nurse that most people in Britain could probably name

and the only figure who would really merit the title of nursing celebrity,

at least in British history.

And that's a status that she held in her own lifetime and has maintained ever since.

In British culture,

her name seems quite often to appear somewhere up there with those

of William Shakespeare or Winston Churchill on lists of Greatest ever.

Britain's and Nightingale would have, I think,

a pretty strong claim to being the most famous woman in British history.

Certainly if you exclude members of the royal family.

But the strength of that reputation can actually

make it quite difficult to assess night ago

to be clear as to what her contribution to nursing and nursing reform actually was.

So you may see that Nightingale is often described as the founder of modern nursing.

If you put that term founder of modern nursing into a search engine,

you will see that you will get the result.

Florence Nightingale. But what does that actually mean in practise?

And is it in fact, an accurate description?

And these are the kinds of questions that I want us to think about over the course of

this lecture.

So as is well known,

Nightingale came to prominence when she led a group of female nurses

an initial group of 38 nurses on a special government mission to tend

to the sick and wounded soldiers of the British army fighting against the

Russian empire in the Crimean War between 18 54 and 18 56.

Now that nursing Mission of Nightingales was a very striking thing at the time,

partly because the British army in 18 54 didn't have any female nurses before that,

but also because public opinion in the weeks leading up to it

had become very concerned with the dire state of the health of the

soldiers of the wounded soldiers in the British army's hospitals and the

fact that no one seemed to be doing anything to help them.

The Crimean War was a war that produced few heroes,

although ultimately a victorious war for Britain,

ending in the capture of the Russian naval base in Sevastopol,

in Crimea by the British and the French allies.

It wasn't a particularly glorious or memorable conflict rather ill,

too often exposed.

The quite shambolic nature of the British army's

organisation and hierarchy epitomised maybe in the miscommunication

that led to the deaths of British cavalry in the charge of the light brigade.

So in that context,

Nightingale caught the imagination of the British

press and public by doing something heroic

to the extent that her name became

indelibly associated with the profession of nursing.

From then on, in the midst of that general chaos of the war,

Nightingale appeared as a point of light in the darkness,

the image of her bringing her lamp,

her nursing care to the sick and wounded soldiers.

So nightingale,

someone who was completely unknown previously was suddenly

transformed into a major public figure and in

colour into Britain's leading authority on nursing.

One slight irony of that, maybe is that while Nightingale became famous as a nurse,

it would really be more accurate to describe her work

in the Crimean War as that of a hospital manager.

So she actually spent most of her time dealing

with the organisation and administration of the army's hospitals,

supervising her nursing team and only a relatively

small amount of time on individual nursing care.

Although Nightingale did take a close

interest in individual soldiers and patients,

but for the public both at the time and ever since,

Nightingale was known as a nurse and the nurse, really so in this lecture,

then I want to explore a little bit

the relationship of Nightingale to nursing in Britain.

I'm not going to talk anymore, actually about the Crimean War episode,

but rather about the role that night and girl played or sometimes didn't play,

actually, in the reform of nursing in 19th century Britain.

So we have this idea then of Nightingale has a nursing celebrity,

and I emphasise that not only because I

think Nightingale forms quite an interesting case study in

the history of celebrity and the processes by

which people become celebrities are quite interesting,

I think,

but also because the thing with celebrities is that

they are great at drawing attention to causes.

But sometimes the pull of their personal magnetism is

so great that it can actually have a bit

of a distorting effect and obscure the more complicated

realities of the issue that they're associated with.

Nightingale was such a big star in nursing terms

that when we're thinking about the history of nursing,

it's easy, maybe too easy to focus on her at the expense of other things

that were going on.

Nightingale's name and legacy remained very

important in contemporary British nursing,

for example,

through the actions of the nursing charity the Florence Nightingale Foundation,

which holds an annual Florence Nightingale

commemorative service in Westminster Abbey,

featuring a lamp being handed out ceremonially from one

to another.

So I'm not suggesting that night and girl didn't have a significant impact.

She certainly did.

She was a forceful personality who captured the public imagination

and acted as a strong and consistent voice for reform.

The celebrity and respect that she gained from the Crimean War

put her in a very strong position to influence public policy,

whether concerning nursing or other related issues

such as public health and hospital design

and, perhaps most famously, a charitable fund raised during the Crimean War,

provided Nightingale with the money to set up the

Nightingale Training School for nurses at ST Thomas's Hospital,

which opened in 18 60 which I'll talk about a bit later.

But it's important when thinking about Nightingale to

bear in mind that she was only one

part of a much broader process of transforming

nursing over the course of the 19th century,

and that many structural changes occurred in nursing in hospital health care

that would very likely have taken place without her had she never existed

as the celebrity nurse Nightingale, setting example for others to aspire to.

Her experience certainly inspired many women to want to become nurses themselves.

But as we're going to see the bigger changes that can get ascribed,

maybe to Nightingale personally,

such as the fact that nursing became a more skilled and

more socially respectable occupation over the course of the 19th century.

Those changes really had other broader causes.

Okay, so that's a bit of a brief introduction.

I'll come back to talk more about Nightingale herself in a bit more detail later on,

but in the next part of the lecture,

I want to spend some time thinking about those

broader structural changes in nursing and health care,

so that we can more easily see where Nightingale fits

into the bigger picture.