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by Rick
Hamlin
How many historic
figures made positive impacts because they answered God’s call?
Perhaps a call they’d
heard during a mysterious experience such as having a vision or dream or
hearing a voice?
We might never know
for sure.
But Florence
Nightingale (1820–1910), also known as the mother of modern nursing, was
definitely one of them.
Her revolutionary
practices saved countless lives and paved the way for other women to pursue
medicine.
And it might not have
happened had Florence not heeded God’s call.
Florence came from a
well-off English family, with a learned dilettante of a father and a socially
ambitious mother.
No one had to work
for a living. They were free to read, to ride, to entertain and to travel.
From the start,
Florence’s native intelligence shone.
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.”
Florence was an
empathetic caretaker from a young age, nursing the ill back to health,
beginning with four-legged creatures.
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.
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.
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.
Even 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.
Was it a penchant for
cleanliness or a mystical prescience? However, you look at it, Florence
Nightingale was ahead of her time.
It’s easy to read
stories like these about her life and think, Of course, she’s going to
become a nurse.
It was destiny. What
else would she have done? There’s account after account of her dashing off to
care for some ailing relative or injured creature.
Yet the circumstances
into which she was born made it highly unlikely.
It was considered
unseemly for a woman of her stature to work — let alone in such a disreputable
profession as nursing.
According 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.
She might very well
have done so — if not for God’s intervention.
On February 7, 1837,
before she was to be presented to society as a debutante, Florence heard God speak to
her.
The day that changed
the course of her life has been marked in history.
The key word that she
heard that day from God was service. She knew she was called to serve.
Florence was
conflicted. 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.
An opportunity for
service would open, she would be eager to follow it — after all, wasn’t it
God’s will? — only to face fierce opposition from her mother, provoking
dreadful scenes.
It became easier to
avoid disappointing her mother and instead just say no to all of the suitors
who came calling instead.
By all accounts — and
early photos — Florence was beautiful, charming and quick.
Men did come,
flirting, pursuing and even boldly asking, “Will you marry me?”
No, she said.
Adamantly, no. Her heart was already claimed by God’s call to service.
Over the years,
however, socializing in Victorian society paid off.
She made some
important friendships. Among her dearest friends was Sidney Herbert, a bright,
passionate politician.
He was Secretary at
War in 1854, when England was caught in the Crimean War.
The British were
fighting the Russian Army on the Crimean peninsula, and a shocking number of
soldiers were dying in barrack hospitals. Perhaps Florence could help.
By then, in that era,
she would have been considered an old maid, 34 years of age and unmarried.
Still, God had been
insistent in his call, once telling her during a trip to Egypt to “do
good for him alone without the reputation.”
Perhaps for want of
people to nurse, she’d rescued other animals, including an owl she named Athena
and kept in her pocket.
She even took it to
Germany, leaving Athena with her sister Parthe while Florence studied nursing
there. She had pursued her calling against all odds.
In 1853, she’d been
given charge of what we would think of as a private clinic.
At Herbert’s request,
she gathered a coterie of other nurses and went to Turkey, where the injured
soldiers had been transported.
There her reputation
was burnished. She became famous as the Lady With the Lamp, going from bed to
bed, nursing the wounded soldiers into the late hours.
She discovered the
soldiers had been dying in droves from preventable ailments.
Linens had gone
unchanged, meals unserved. Chamber pots overflowed, and the hospital was
filthy, resembling more a putrid charnel house than a place of healing.
Florence immediately
created a basic standard of care.
Using some of her own
funds, she bought supplies, established practices of sanitation and dealt with
a military bureaucracy that opposed her at every turn, hoping she’d go away.
Along the way,
Florence continued to be touched by mystical experiences.
In Turkey during the
war, she had a vision of her beloved pet owl, who’d died shortly before she
left England.
She was walking home
from the hospital one night “when Athena came along the cliff quite to my
feet, rose upon her tiptoes, bowed several times, made her long melancholy cry
and fled away.”
Far from home and up
against incredible odds, Florence found the vision was a great comfort to her.
It was a reassurance that she was still on her God-given path.
Florence stayed in
Turkey through the end of the war, remaining until the last wounded man left.
Then, avoiding any
furor, she made her way secretly back to England, as though to reaffirm that
what she had done was for God alone.
Upon her return,
Florence plummeted into depression and nearly died.
She was
understandably exhausted from undertaking such a long stretch of 18- to 20-hour
days.
She was also
suffering from a mysterious illness that historians have only recently
diagnosed as severe chronic brucellosis, which comes from drinking infected
goat or sheep’s milk.
The water in Turkey
would have been undrinkable, and Florence wouldn’t have turned to beer, wine or
spirits as most of the other doctors and nurses did.
(Drunkenness was a
serious issue for some of them.)
For the next 52
years, she lived in England as a recluse, but her work was far from over.
In fact, you could
say that her greatest impact came during this time.
She spent her days
haranguing the powers that be with letters and tracts, prompting them to set new standards of medical care that we have come
to expect as normal: clean beds, clean sheets, clean rooms and caring nurses.
Florence died at the age of 90, after saving countless lives
and changing the world for the better.
She’d done what she’d
been meant to do. She’d heard God’s call — and answered it.
Rick
Hamlin
is the executive editor of Guideposts magazine, where he has
worked for more than twenty-five years. His spiritual memoir, Finding God
on the A Train, was a Book of the Month Club alternate selection and a
selection of One Spirit Book Club. He has published three novels, most
recently Reading Between the Lines, as well as The Tournament of
Roses. A native of Pasadena, California, Rick and his wife, Carol Wallace, live
in New York City. Visit him online at RickHamlin.com.
Guideposts is a nonprofit
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possible with hope, faith, and prayer
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https://www.guideposts.org/inspiration/miracles/gods-grace/how-florence-nightingale-changed-the-world
Teresa of Avila
Here I Am, Lord
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