Nightingale got out of bed and reentered the world. From her bed, she produced over 2 hundred books, pamphlets, and reports, and over twelve thousand letters, mostly related in one way or another to her work. The death rate in the hospital fell by two thirds.Īfter the war, Nightingale returned to England, became an invalid and remained bed-ridden well into her sixties. With a large amount of private money, she purchased badly needed supplies. Nightingale promptly set her nurses to work cleaning up the place and tending to the sick and wounded. Nightingale organized a group of thirty-eight nurses to serve in the military hospital in Scutari. In 1853, her father gave her 5 hundred pounds a year, making her financially independent. On her return, she accepted her first post as superintendent of an Establishment for Gentlewomen During Illness, on Harley Street in London. 3Īt last, after 9 years of struggle, Florence's parents reluctantly allowed her to leave home for training at the Institution for Deaconesses at Kaiserwerth in Germany. 2 (p63) The essay begins with a cry of anguish for “suffering, sad, ‘female humanity!’” It goes on to present the life of the middle- and upper-class Victorian woman as a chronicle of waste and frustration, as a death in life. My God what will become of me?” 2 (p58) Through the writing of the angry essay, Cassandra, in 1852, despair was transformed into rebellion. Getting increasingly desperate, Florence wrote, “My present life is suicide. “It was as if I had said I wanted to be a kitchen-maid,” she wrote. She told her parents that she wanted to be a nurse. She refused to be a subordinate to a husband she was bored with the trivial lives that upper class women led she had her destiny to fulfill. She wanted a higher calling she wanted to work to use her intellect, her skills, her moral passion and to make a difference in the world. Above all, young ladies were to prepare for making a “good” marriage with a man of high class and status.īut Florence was different. FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE WAS born of wealthy parents who expected her to do all the things young ladies of her class did: to spend much of her time in the drawing room entertaining her sister or her friends to take occasional rides in carriages, to visit others to appear at parties and dinners and to be occupied with embroidery, playing the piano, and painting-but these activities were meant to be “charming” and not taken too seriously.
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