Thank God for Nurses!

The recently maligned (by DJT) World Health Organization has designated 2020 as “Year of the Nurse,” marking 200 years since the birth of Florence Nightingale (FN). This post is my third this year about an outstanding woman born in 1820, the other two being Susan B. Anthony and Fanny Crosby.  

Learning about FN

In preparation for writing this article, I read Florence Nightingale the Angel of the Crimea, first published in 1909. The author of that old book is Laura E. Richards, whose mother was Julia Ward Howe.

Julia, who is best known for writing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,’ was born less than a year before FN and died just over two months after FN died 110 years ago in August 1910—and the two women knew each other to some degree. I was unable to find out whether Laura (1850~1943) also knew Florence personally.

According to Laura, it was her father, Samuel G. Howe, who in 1843 encouraged Florence to enter nursing at a time when, except for the Catholic Sisters of Charity, nurses in England “were for the most part coarse and ignorant women, often cruel, often intemperate” (p. 35).

Laura’s book, said to be “a story for young people,” was certainly a hagiographical account of Nightingale, but I much enjoyed reading it. Nearly three-fourths of the book is about FN’s meritorious work during the Crimean War (1854~56). 

The Influence of FN

Florence felt God’s call to service of others in 1837 when she was 17 years old, and then she became a nursing student in 1844. After several years of courtship, in 1849 she declined a marriage proposal. Four years later she became the superintendent of the Institution for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen in London.

In the spring of 1854, Britain and France joined Turkey in opposition to Russia in what became known as the Crimean War. In the fall of that year, Florence went with a party of 38 nurses to work in a hospital in Scutari, Turkey, where thousands of injured soldiers were being cared for—and where a large percentage of them were dying.

When Florence and the other nurses arrived in Scutari, they were not welcomed. According to Richards, “the military authorities did not want female nurses,” because as mentioned earlier, nurses at that time were “often drunken, generally unfeeling, and always ignorant” (p. 52).

But Florence began to implement significant changes. One of the patients there when she arrived wrote, “Everything changed for the better.”

According to an essay about Florence’s legacy, because of her work in Scutari and her subsequent teaching, FN “will forever be linked with modern nursing—and rightly so.”

The same essay says that three areas of contemporary medicine were “deeply influenced by her.” Those three were hospital infection control, hospital epidemiology, and hospice medicine.

Following in the Footsteps of FN

After retiring as a teacher/administrator in Japan and moving to the Kansas City area in 2005, I had the privilege of teaching a required theology course at Rockhurst University from 2006 to 2015. My classes in sixteen of those seventeen semesters were in the evening, and a majority of my students were in the nursing program.

With few exceptions, those nursing students were serious, hard-working students, and I wonder now how they are faring as practicing nurses during the current pandemic. I am quite confident that many of my former students are a part of the dedicated core of nurses ministering to covid-19 patients across the country.

I hope they all are all right, but some might not be. According to a recent report by the National Nursing Associations (see the reference in this article), at least 90,000 healthcare workers have been infected with covid-19 and more than 260 nurses have died.

The nursing students I taught (and all dedicated nurses) are following in the footsteps of Florence Nightingale, and I write this to honor them (and all nurses) this week, which is National Nurses Week. This special week begins each year on May 6 and ends on May 12, FN’s birthday.

Thank God for Florence Nightingale, and thank God for nurses!