Florence Nightingale 1820 - 1910
Florence Nightingale’s 1820 - 1910 Notes on Nursing was first published in England in 1859 and in America in 1860, and she says:
“Homeopathy has introduced one essential amelioration in the practice of physic by amateur females; for its rules are excellent, its physicking comparatively harmless–the “globule” is the one grain of folly which appears to be necessary to make any good thing acceptable. Let then women, if they will give medicine, give homeopathic medicine. It won’t do any harm.”
Florence Nightingale was the niece of Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, a lover of John Chapman, an orthodox doctor who converted to homeopathy, and proprietor of the Westminster Review.
Nightingale continued believing the death rates were due to poor nutrition and supplies and overworking of the soldiers. It was not until after she returned to Britain and began collecting evidence before the Royal Commission on the Health of the Army, that she came to believe that most of the soldiers at the hospital were killed by poor living conditions. This experience would influence her later career, when she advocated sanitary living conditions as of great importance. Consequently, she reduced deaths in the Army during peacetime and turned attention to the sanitary design of hospitals.
Nightingale was impressed by the Islamic attitudes to caring for the sick with clean air, music, calm environments and kindness:
she would write of spas in Turkey detailing the health conditions, physical descriptions, dietary information, and other vitally important details of patients whom she directed there.
Nightingale was committed to holistic and natural healing:
Nightingale espoused a very holistic orientation in nursing. It was her belief that nursing should put the patient in the best possible condition for nature to restore or preserve health, to prevent or cure disease or injury. In other words, nurses should create environments in which healing can happen.
The revolution in nursing, moral disclipline and medical cleanliness swept Europe, and water cures and homeopathy were very popular, a reaction against the orthodox treatments and practices on offer at the time. Nightingale consulted homeopath James Manby Gully and she also had homeopathic nurses with her in the Crimea, and she mentored Linda Richards, an American nurse who trained at the Brooklyn Homeopathic School.
Florence Nightingale lived at a time when allopathy and homeopathy were competing for dominance in medical care. Nightingale’s philosophy of health and healing was more similar to the holistic philosophy of homeopathy than to the mechanistic philosophy of allopathy.
Nightingale was a correspondent and admirer of homeopathic supporter Sir John Forbes:
and exchanged copies of each other’s books with expressions of mutual respect and admiration.
While better known for her contributions in the medical and mathematical fields, Nightingale is also an important link in the study of English feminism. During 1850 and 1852, she was struggling with her self-definition and the expectations of an upper-class marriage from her family. As she sorted out her thoughts, she wrote Suggestions for Thought to Searchers after Religious Truth. The three-volume book has never been printed in its entirety, but a section, called Cassandra, was published by Ray Strachey in 1928. Strachey included it in The Cause, a history of the women’s movement. Apparently, the writing served the original purpose of sorting out thoughts…
Cassandra protests the over-feminization of women into near helplessness, such as Nightingale saw in her mother and older sister’s lethargic lifestyle, despite their education. She rejected their life of thoughtless comfort for the world of social service. The work also reflects her fear of her ideas being ineffective, as were Cassandra’s. Cassandra is a virgin-priestess of Apollo who receives a divinely-inspired prophecy, but her prophetic warnings go unheeded. Elaine Showalter called Nightingale’s writing “a major text of English feminism, a link between Wollstonecraft and Virginia Woolf.”
Sue :: Nov.22.2007 :: European History :: No Comments »