A mystic and an administrator

Florence Nightingale, by Mark Bostridge

No eminent Victorian has shaped our daily lives in more ways than Florence Nightingale. Her influence continued far beyond her 20 months of bloodsoaked toil in Scutari and the Crimea. Her vision of a public health-care system was the foundation of the National Health Service. Disassociating nursing from religious vocation and charity work, she initiated the systematic training of hospital nurses. We are rightly shocked when poor hospital hygiene causes preventable disease; it was Nightingale who taught us to be shocked. She reformed army conditions, overturning Wellington’s dictum that British private soldiers were ‘the scum of the earth enlisted for drink’. She unshackled young women from the tyranny of dutiful daughterhood, attacking ‘the conventional life … which fritters away all that is spiritual in women’.

Nightingale is also one of the best documented figures of a well-documented era. Her 90 years span the golden age of letter-writing, between the invention of the penny post and the telephone; because her family revered the written word, and because of her fame, people kept tens of thousands of her letters. She wrote books on nursing, India, hospital and army reform, religion, papers on all manner of health issues, diaries, housekeeping records, ‘private notes’. Her activities were widely reported in the press; her many friends and relations corresponded endlessly to each other about her. The archives diligently plundered by Mark Bostridge are unimaginably vast.

As Bostridge says, the problem is knowing when to stop. He shows admirable restraint. Books about Nightingale are legion, but his is the first serious full-length biography since Cecil Woodham-Smith’s in 1950. Bostridge doesn’t have an axe to grind. He doesn’t want to prove that Nightingale was a racist or a lesbian or an atrocious nurse; he doesn’t blame her for not understanding infection before germs had been discovered.