The Legacy of Florence Nightingale

It is 100 years since the death of Florence Nightingale and a few days before writing this editorial I visited London and showed my youngest daughter St Thomas’ Hospital, London where, incidentally, my oldest daughter was born – 25 years ago. St Thomas’ Hospital is famous as the place where Florence Nightingale established her first school of nursing in 1860 and it now also houses a very fine museum devoted to her life and work. Much has changed since Florence Nightingale saw the fruition of her plans to educate middle class ladies in the art and science of nursing, implementing a great deal of what she had learned in the Crimean war in the previous decade. Many nurses are now men and we have no idea how Florence would have reacted to that. Nursing, in most countries of the world, is now a registered profession; Florence did nothing to promote this aspect of our work, which was mostly left, in Britain, to others such as Ethel Bedford-Fenwick. Education of nurses has now largely moved out of hospital schools of nursing to universities and, again, there is no evidence that this is something she would have approved of.

Category: Volume 49, N 2
Hits: 520 Hits
Created Date: 15-06-2010
Authors: Roger Watson