Phase 1: Florence Nightingale

For the first archival work day in the Lilly Library, I got the opportunity to work with Florence Nightingale (Classical Works in History of Medicine and Surgery). The book I chose to look at was entitled “Introduction to Female Nursing into Military Hospitals.” I did not have the opportunity to view and grasp information on the entire book, yet I did get an overview of a few important points to discuss in the 1st chapter or so.

Florence Nightingale is best remembered for her work as a nurse during the Crimean War and her contribution towards the reform of the sanitary conditions in military field hospitals. During the mid-nineteenth century nursing was not considered a suitable profession for a well-educated woman. Nurses during this time were lacking in training and they also had the reputation of being coarse, ignorant women, given to promiscuity and drunkenness. Back then there were conditions which resulted in soldiers lying on bare floors surrounded by vermin and unhygienic procedures being performed. Diseases such as cholera and typhus were prevalent in the hospitals. Consequently, the injured soldiers were 7 times more likely to die from a disease in the hospital, than on the battlefield. Nightingale collected data and organized a record keeping system; this information was then used as a tool to improve city and military hospitals. Nightingale's studied mathematics a bit and this knowledge of mathematics became beneficial when she used her collected data to calculate the mortality rate in the hospital. These calculations showed that an improvement of the sanitary methods employed would result in a decrease in the number of deaths. By February 1855 the mortality rate had dropped from 60% to 42.7%. Through the establishment of a fresh water supply as well as using her own funds to buy fruit, vegetables and standard hospital equipment, the mortality rate in the spring had dropped further to 2.2%.
She wanted to reform hospital nursing as a whole, as she stated in the opening paragraph of her book “the main object I conceive to improve hospitals, by improving hospitals-nursing; and to do this by improving or contributing towards the improvements of the class of hospitals nurses, whether nurses or head nurses.” She proposes doing this not by founding a religious order; but by training, systemizing and morally improving things, etc. Her opening paragraph constructs and introduces her audience to the notion of what she wanted to do and how she wanted it to be done. She felt that the main goal of the hospital was to take care of the sick, which she also feels may or may not be desirable to incorporate into work. One distinctive element that I noticed was the way her book was constructed. She outlined each chapter with a number for each paragraph and a heading for every single page, such as: 1. Definite Objects: road to them to be found out,
2. Presumed Main Object, 3. Presumed intentions, each outlining how she feels throughout the entire book.

In the same chapter she introduces the idea that “there are many women of the middle class who would become valuable acquisitions to the work, but whose circumstances would compel them to find their maintenance it.” Then she goes on to state “in truth the only lady in a hospital should be chief of the woman, whether called matron or superintendent.”

As I previously stated I got to read only the 1st chapter of the book which only gave me a sense of what her overall argument was but these quotes did arise questions in my head. What tone was she using with these quotes? Was this sarcasm, or does she really feel this way? Nevertheless, I found this book and her topics to be quite interesting so I will find out more during future archival work days!