A Century or So of Florence Nightingale

FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE, a young woman dedicating her life to upgrade a practically non-existent nursing profession in or about 1850, and being the first female to organize nursing care for dying British soldiers in the Crimea in 1855, returned to England, and briefly caught the ear of thirty-eight year old QUEEN VICTORIA, still alert and before she lapsed into non-response at the death of her husband Prince Albert in 1861.

The Queen joined the nurse (popularly called the Lamp Carrier) and the two petitioned the country of England for building the perfect hospital for wounded soldiers.

Eventually, with much wangling, the site was chosen at Netley, Hampshire, six miles from Southhampton, and on the joint waterfront of the Southhampton Water and the River Hamble.

The hospital built there was an unbelievable realization for the times…it had hundreds of acres of surrounding greenage, and its front was directly on the water, with a large pier for receiving hospital ships.

Made of grainte stone, it was long and three storied, with a one-hundred-foot tower rising in its middle. Its length was approximately a quarter-mile, and inside, three levels of wards, each containing 34 beds, faced through glass doors the corridor, with its glass windows toward the Southhampton Water.

Pull-it-up your self elevators, and wide steps led one from the basement all the way to the third floor. Grouped about the stairs and elevator were six operating rooms, with anterooms for equipment.

The clock tower extended itself above this central part over a chapel, and access to the top of the tower was gained by a rope ladder in the room leading to the chapel…that has a part in our story.

FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE was not pleased with the architecture of the hospital, but flung herself into the business of getting the doctors and the nurses (the first ones of the type) to realize what cleanliness ,etc. meant, as this was the birth-time of realization of germs and the evils of filth.

FLORENCE, carrying her small candle-lit lamp, visited the wards full of wounded Crimean soldiers and the wounded that had returned from the sorties in India, and sweated out the training of nurses in cleanliness and the acceptance of cleanliness by doctors (who RESISTED females in the profession).

When Florence Nightingale made her final midnight walk through the wards and died in the late 1800’s, a modicum of acceptance of nurses by doctors and the public had been accomplished.