florence nightingale by cecil woodham smith

The Nightingale Training School for Nurses was established at Saint Thomas's Hospital in London in 1860. She retired to her home, where prominent politicians came to consult with her. She wrote a lengthy report on army health helped launch royal commissions on Britain's army in England and India analyzed her Crimean medical statistics wrote Notes on Hospitals (1859) and Notes on Nursing (1860), and declared herself an invalid.

After sixteen months Nightingale returned a heroine but refused to start a nursing school with the Nightingale Fund established in her honor, focusing instead on reform of the army and its medical services. The following year Lord Sidney Herbert, the secretary of war, sent her to the Crimea to care for wounded British soldiers. Leaving home in 1853, Nightingale became superintendent of a home for destitute governesses. After receiving another call to serve England's poor, she began a theological treatise, Suggestions for Thought to the Searchers after Truth among the Artizans of England (1852). Nightingale channeled her rage into Cassandra (1852), an autobiographical fiction about powerless Victorian women that foreshadowed later feminist arguments. She visited a Protestant deaconess order serving the poor in Kaiserswerth, Germany, in 18, but further plans were sabotaged by her family. While in Egypt at age thirty, Nightingale received a second call to serve the poor and made a private vow to God.

She visited convents, observed their work, and adopted their spiritual exercises even though her religious ideas prevented her from joining a Catholic religious order. Trips to Europe exposed her to emerging political, religious, and social thought. Encountering family resistance, she bided her time, studying hospital reports and documents on social reform. At age seventeen she received a call to serve God. The young Nightingale disdained her privileged life, preferring to help the village poor. Although Florence Nightingale was raised in the Church of England, her Cambridge-educated father instilled in her his Unitarian heritage while tutoring her in many languages, history, science, and philosophy. Nightingale was born on May 12, 1820, the second daughter of William and Frances Nightingale, members of the upper class from Derbyshire, England. Nursing researchers, sociologists, and scholars of religion, who are now examining Nightingale's voluminous but previously unpublished ideological and religious writings, are discovering the truth of these words. NIGHTINGALE, FLORENCE (1820 –1910), is remembered as a nurse, yet she wrote in her seventies that, when planning her future as a young woman, her one idea was not to organize a hospital but to organize a religion.

Florence nightingale by cecil woodham smith