Florence nightingale summary biography leonardo

Doll Hospital
In 1827, in the nursery of an English country house, two sisters place a dozen dolls in neat hospital rows. The girls administer kitchen medicines, apply poultices, wrap their patients’ bisque necks with strips of flannel. As the sisters grow beyond the confines of the nursery, the younger will be the one to care for the sick villagers on her father’s estate, the one most eager to nurse servants and family members who fall ill, keeping a careful ledger of their ailments. Near the end of a life of near-superhuman achievement, Florence Nightingale will say there was no part of her life she could look back on without pain, nor a time since earliest childhood, when she had not longed to be a nurse.

Green Stick
In the spring of 1833, on their father’s estate one hundred and fifty miles south of Moscow, Nikolai Tolstoy, eldest of five siblings, solemnly initiates his younger brothers and sister into the “Ant Brotherhood.” The Brotherhood’s scepter, he tells them, is a green stick he has buried near the edge of a ravine. Carved into its wood are magic words to vanquish evil, teach love and in a coming golden age, bring everlasting peace.

The Meeting That Never Was
On November 4, 1854, thirty-four-year-old Florence Nightingale arrives in the Crimea.

Superintendent of thirty-eight nurses, her mission is to care for wounded British soldiers at Scutari’s Barrack Hospital in Istanbul.

That same month, Count Leo Tolstoy, a twenty-six-year-old junior officer of the Imperial Russian Army’s artillery brigade, arrives at Sevastopol’s Russian naval base. He will serve throughout an eleven-month siege as British, French, Ottoman and Italian armies seek to put an end to Russia’s expansionist ambitions.

Tolstoy and Nightingale, with three hundred miles of

"I stand at the altar of murdered men and while I live I will fight their cause." — Florence Nightingale

The memory of Florence Nightingale still ripples throughout Europe and North America. Documents about her life remain and uphold her legacy; in many ways, she has become something of a mythological figure. Even in life, there was merchandise relating to her, but it’s taken on a new life in books, valentines, and even colouring pages. She’s remembered as a no-nonsense feminist icon, a tender motherly figure, the founding of modern-day nursing, and even the hero of nursery rhymes. Less discussed in the possibility that she was a lesbian and/or asexual.

It must be noted that Florence Nightingale came from a wealthy family, and lived with all of the obligations and privileges associated. Born in Florence, Italy in 1820, her parents not only believed women should be educated in the same manner as men, but they had the fortune to make it happen. Nightingale and her sisters had tutors from whom they learned languages, mathematics, religion, and many other topics that would prove useful in her later career.

She fell in love with learning from a young age and took to mathematics quickly. She had a particular skill and devotion to statistics that would follow her throughout her life. She later tutored children in mathematics and used her skills heavily in her nursing career.

While she was afforded much more freedom than many women, her mother was a firm believer in social climbing. As such, Nightingale took part in many social gatherings, often called severe and “awkward” by her contemporaries. She gravitated more to intellectual discussions where she was able to shine rather than social niceties she felt stifled by.

Along with the parties, she was expected not only to be courted but also wed. While she was ambivalent about courtship, she firmly denied marriage. Nightingale, a deeply religious woman, revealed that G-d had called her to serve as a nurse. Though a ca

Florence Nightingale: Faith and Work

Keynote Address by Lynn McDonald, PhD
Department of Sociology and Anthropology University of Guelph
for the 7th Annual Conference Canadian Association for Parish Nursing Ministry, Toronto May 27 2005

Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) was born in Florence, Italy (hence the name) of British parents. She was raised in England but returned to Italy for significant trips in her late teens (1838) and as a young woman (1847-48) for a winter in Rome.

She was baptized in the Church of England in Florence and, with her family, attended Church of England services when at home in Hampshire. Her father was patron of the living, in effect the employer of the local vicar. Two grandfathers and one grandmother were Unitarians, but the Nightingale’s parents were married in the Church of England and both they and Nightingale remained in it, although Nightingale strongly disagreed with its social, and sometimes its theological, conservatism. Nightingale’s paternal grandmother (the only grandparent she knew well) was fiercely low-church evangelical. When living at the family house, Lea Hurst, in Derbyshire, the family attended dissenting chapels, mainly Methodist.

Certainly a Methodist strain can be seen in Nightingale’s faith—she was very fond of John Wesley, as can be seen by references to him in a sermon and in correspondence. Lutheran influences, too, can be seen from her stay at the Deaconess Institution at Kaiserswerth-am-Rhein, near Düsseldorf, 1850 and 1851.

Nightingale’s faith was shaped importantly by reading the books of an American Congregational minister and educator, Jacob Abbott, notably his The Corner-stone, or, a Familiar Illustration of the Principles of Christian Truth, 1834, which she later described to a friend as ‘the book that converted me,’ in 1836. The letter, published in Lynn McDonald, ed., Collected Works of Florence Nightingale, Women (8:), has not been noticed by