“Nightingales: The Extraordinary Upbringing and Curious Life of Miss Florence Nightingale”, by Gillian Gill

 

Random House, 592 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0345451880

For a time, Florence Nightingale was the most famous woman in the world. While nowadays we know her as some kind of secular saint and the inexhaustible advocate for solder’s well-being, the reality is (naturally) quite more complicated, as we learn in Nightingales: The Extraordinary Upbringing and Curious Life of Miss Florence Nightingale by Gillian Gill. In an utterly beguiling narrative that reads like the best Victorian fiction, Gill tells the story of this richly complex woman and her adoring, wealthy and cultivated father, a mother whose conventional façade concealed a surprisingly unfettered intelligence and a sister whose life took such a different course one can only wonder that two so different women were really sisters.

By kinship or friendship, Florence found herself connected to the cream of Victorian England’s intellectual aristocracy, and though the Nightingales moved in a world of ease and privilege, they themselves came from solidly middle-class stock with deep traditions of hard work, natural curiosity and moral clarity – so it should have come as no surprise to William Edward and Fanny Nightingale when Florence showed an early passion for helping others (combined with a precocious bent for power). From childhood on, Florence showed a penchant for getting her way by hook or by crook, and we read as one person after another find themselves quite unable to stop her from getting what she wanted, a talent that would come in handy in adult life.

Nobody in the Nightingale family had ever considered nursing as a viable profession, but upon turning seventeen – when young ladies of her social class and standing were expected to be seeking a husband – Florence believed that God himself had revealed her life’s vocation. By the time she turned twenty-eight she had already rejected two eligible suitors and lost none of her resolve; leading hospitals, rather than nursing, was her true aim, and she never lost sight of that goal. With the outbreak of the Crimean War, her opportunity to do just that landed in her lap and, using those aforementioned connections and contacts, saw her desires transformed into reality at last and seized her place in history.

Gill manages to study Florence’s life in full, as well as her family and ancestors who influenced her and shaped her to become the woman she was. It is the tale of the development of nursing and medical care (and the lack thereof at the time; nursing was an amateur hobby at best when Nightingale came upon the scene). She experienced first-hand the poor condition of the soldiers in the field and saw the difference that could be made through sanitation and cleanliness. She had many pitfalls and obstacles to overcome but, through diplomacy and hands-on example, she indeed overcame them. And all during the Victorian Era, when a woman’s place in the world was seen as best served as wife and mother and little else.

Cold, passionate and unswervingly committed to her vocation, Florence Nightingale was one of the most significant reformers in the history of medicine. Gill does honor to her subject while providing a vivid and compellingly readable account of the family whose loyal support was crucial to her achievement. While it’s hard to like Florence Nightingale, it’s impossible not to admire her.