If this were indeed God’s calling, wasn’t she also called to obey her father and mother? She found herself caught in one of those guilt-inducing struggles that give a bad name to the Victorian era, torturing herself miserably at times.
She knew she was called to serve.įlorence was conflicted. The key word that she heard that day from God was service. The day that changed the course of her life has been marked in history. On February 7, 1837, before she was to be presented to society as a debutante, Florence heard God speak to her. She might very well have done so-if not for God’s intervention.
It was considered unseemly for a woman of her stature to work-let alone in such a disreputable profession as nursing.Īccording to the mores of Victorian England, Florence would forgo a career, marry a suitable husband, settle in a country house somewhere and produce a large batch of children. Yet the circumstances into which she was born made it highly unlikely. What else would she have done? There’s account after account of her dashing off to care for some ailing relative or injured creature. It’s easy to read stories like these about her life and think, Of course, she’s going to become a nurse. Was it a penchant for cleanliness or a mystical prescience? However you look at it, Florence Nightingale was ahead of her time. Had Florence not offered to heal the dog’s injury with a warm compress and a bandage, the dog’s owner, a shepherd, would have had no choice but to put down the poor animal-it would’ve been a drain on his meager income.Įven back then, she boiled the water before using it to soak the bandage, ridding it of germs-decades before anyone knew what germs were or how they spread. Florence sprang into action once again when a sheepdog named Cap was attacked by ruffians and injured so badly it couldn’t put weight on its leg. When a nest of newborn mice was discovered in a mattress, 12-year-old Florence came to the rescue, feeding them with drops of milk and keeping them warm by the fire. She read voraciously, learned several foreign languages and had a good head for numbers, noting as early as age seven what dose of a certain popular medicine people should take: “16 grains for an old woman, 11 for a young woman and 7 for a child.”įlorence was an empathetic caretaker from a young age, nursing the ill back to health, beginning with four-legged creatures.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE EFFECT FREE
They were free to read, to ride, to entertain and to travel.įrom the start, Florence’s native intelligence shone. And it might not have happened had Florence not heeded God’s call.įlorence came from a well-off English family, with a learned dilettante of a father and a socially ambitious mother.
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