FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE: The Woman and her Legend
By Mark Bostridge
Penguin, Viking, 656pp, £25
Review by FIONA ATHERTONWHEN THE CRIMEAN WAR ENDED and Florence Nightingale returned home, the British public couldn't get enou
gh of her. They wanted to celebrate the angel who had tended to Britain's soldiers thousands of miles from home, accompanied by her lamp. She, however, didn't – though what she referred to as "all that ministering angel nonsense" remains what she is famous for.
In the first full-length biography of Nightingale in over 50 years, Mark Bostridge investigates whether this image of her is accurate. When the then prime minister, Sidney Herbert, asked her to travel to Scutari in the Crimea to help the sick and injured, Nightingale obliged, and unknowingly became what Bostridge describes as an "agent … of accountability", representing the "conscience of the nation" as no individual ever had.
Never before had there been "that intense feeling of interest in the sufferings of the army", brought about by the introduction of foreign correspondents, who brought the horrors of war daily to the breakfast tables of middle England. On arrival at Scutari, where troops were dying of illness far more often than of their injuries, Nightingale unwittingly became a symbol for Britain's new-found concern for its army.
It would be easy, in a biography detailing a conflict fought so many years ago, to allow the awfulness of the Crimea to slip by in reams of figures. To his credit, Bostridge allows no such thing to happen. Instead, his assiduous use of sources allows the impact of Nightingale's descriptions of losses at her Scutari hospital to remain considerable: "The mortality is frightful", she writes, "30 in the last 24 hours…One day last week it was 40 ... We bury every 24 hours."
Faith played a huge part in Nightingale's life. She experienced a calling to – as she rather grandly put it, do "the office of love on earth" – and dedicated her life to fulfilling the task that her God had set. Like most aspects of her personality, though, her faith was a practical one; as a girl, she even conducted experiments to see if her calls to God were actually being answered.
According to Bostridge, this obsession with detail and analysis is key to the Florence Nightingale behind the legend. She was, in fact, a reformer, who used her passion for statistics and organisation to improve levels of hygiene in hospitals in the Crimea, the UK and later in India, and who sought to professionalise the often raucous, drunk nursing staff typical of the early 19th century. Although her Notes on Nursing advocate the requirement for a nurse to be able to engage with "someone else's feelings", there were nurses like Mary Seacole – often referred to as "the black Nightingale" – practising at the time, who had practical nursing experience far in excess of Nightingale's, but who rarely make it into the history books.
According to her sister, Nightingale did not care "for individuals … but for the whole race as being God's creatures". She was working for the greater good, and her treatment of individuals sometimes suffered as a result. "I am disappointed in you," she pointedly told a gravely ill Sidney Herbert, the prime minister who had lent her so much support. But the convincing picture Bostridge builds is of the ultimate utilitarian, who valued personal relationships only while they served some practical purpose. Nightingale seemed to mellow somewhat in later years, shaken by the deaths of so many close to her, and left largely alone. Ironically, she used the metaphor of the lamp long before anybody else, when she imagined herself, during dark times, as a traveller "carrying a lantern, which shed just enough light for her to find a path along which to walk".
As seems always to be the case with the Nightingale story, things are never quite as they seem. Even the lamp itself, immortalised in so many engravings, is, Bostridge discovers, a misrepresentation. The lamp of legend is a "Grecian, or ceremonial lamp", more aesthetically pleasing than the "Arab pattern lamp" that would actually have accompanied Nightingale on her rounds. When her statue was unveiled on London's Pall Mall early in 1915, it was done so with a suitable lack of commotion. It too sported the Grecian lamp that so fitted the romance of legend.
Bostridge's biography is necessarily lengthy (Nightingale lived to 90, despite her incessant ill-health), and occasionally becomes too involved in what is, to the non-expert, the minutiae of healthcare reform. But where he succeeds is in creating a rounded portrait of a woman who has previously been cast as either sinner or saint, but rarely as a human being who, despite her achievements and self-sacrifice, had very human failings too. Ultimately, the romance of legend is replaced with the gritty reality of a woman battling to achieve the near-impossible.
Nightingale dreamt that by the year 2000, hospitals would be abolished, along with the risks they inherently bring. In 2008, with British troops abroad still starved of supplies, and hospital super-bugs rarely out of the headlines, a little of Nightingale's lamp light – Grecian or Arab – is certainly required to light the way forward.
The full article contains 894 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
