The Lady with the Lamp

Last autumn we visited the Nightingale Museum, just off of Westminster Bridge , at the back of St Thomas' Hospital.  We learnt a lot about Florence Nightingale, who was born 200 years ago this year, and we also saw the Spanish Flu Pandemic exhibition of 1918/19- little knowing that in just a few months, a hundred years on, the world would be going through it all over once again.

Florence Nightingale believed her 'calling' to nursing was from God but her parents disagreed.  This simply wasn't a profession for respectable ladies from middle class families.  After turning down a number of marriage proposals Nightingale ended up making her mark in the Crimean War bringing hospitals up to better hygiene standards.  Her way of nursing eventually became the international 'benchmark' despite the discouragements heaped upon her by British generals who ridiculed her as an 'interfering bird'.

Once back home Nightingale feel ill, and remained basically bed ridden, from the fever she had encountered overseas.  Undeterred she used this time to collate health statistics that proved the need for change.  She developed something called the 'coxcombe' - a more intricate variation of the pie chart.  I suspect she would have been very much at home with the current Downing Street briefings and their 'slides'!

This remarkable (and I sometimes sense 'difficult'!) woman has been honoured this year in that the emergency centres created to cope with Covid19 have been called 'Nightingale Hospitals'.  I'm just as impressed that she turned her efforts, due to her own bad health, to statistics once she was forced to give up 'nursing'.  An example of someone who simply didn't give up and in the current circumstances she is surely an inspiration to us all.