42. Happy Birthday Flo

Key words/phrases: Florence Nightingale, Westminster Abbey, Crimean War, Nightingale Foundation scholar, Bournemouth University School of Nursing, Nightingale’s religious convictions, Church of England, Unitarianism, Joseph Priestley scientist, Leeds, Pennsylvania USA, Sister Mary Clare Moore, Lutheran deaconesses of Kaiserwerth Germany, Fort Pitt near Chatham & Rochester, Army Medical School.

No. 42

Florence Nightingale, the great social reformer and pioneer nurse was born on 12 May 1820, something that is remembered with a memorial service that is held in Westminster Abbey each year.

This year the commemoration service is to be held at 6.15pm on Wednesday 9 May 2007 when “the procession and passing of the lamp” ceremony will take place once again.

The lamp - a replica of the type that Nightingale carried during her work with wounded soldiers during the Crimean War - is taken from the Nurses' Chapel in the Abbey and is carried by a Florence Nightingale Foundation scholar. It is handed from one nurse to another and finally to the Dean of the Abbey who places it on the High Altar. This signifies the passing of knowledge from one nurse to another.

Each year the lamp is escorted up the aisle by a procession of student nurses and this year it is going to be escorted by representatives from the School of Nursing of Bournemouth University.

This annual ceremony reflects Florence’s religious convictions and her commitment to caring for the sick. However one thing that I had never thought about in any great detail until recently was : What exactly were the religious underpinnings to her 60 years of service ?

The religious influences that she was exposed to were varied; in fact hers was both a politically and theologically incorrect background.

A politically correct Victorian would have embraced the monarchy, the British Empire and the class structure and the associated theological correctness would have meant supporting the tenets of the Church of England and the Thirty-Nine Articles of faith.

In fact Florence’s roots lay in Unitarianism. This was a new development in Florence’s time and was something that grew out of the activities of Joseph Priestley, an influential scientist, who rejected Christianity’s supernatural claims of Christ’s Divinity and the his Atonement for human sin in favour of a religion based on reason.

Priestley (who was born near Leeds and who died in Pennsylvania, USA) believed that each of us should work for social and religious reform, being guided by God’s Spirit. Many Victorians agreed with Priestley’s ideas and Nightingale was one of the many who accepted this viewpoint and who began to work out this philosophy in their lives.

Later on Florence developed these ideas into a kind of theology of her own in a book entitled: "Suggestions for Thought". In this she declared that the solution to ill-health lay in obeying God’s laws and in working in harmony with God for the betterment of mankind. Thus her ideas were based upon a “deeds not creeds” approach that those of the Unitarian’s persuasion believed would reform mankind.

However she also examined some of the many other religious traditions of her time and it could never be argued that she was exclusively Unitarian.

Florence’s mother Fanny was raised as a Unitarian but later decided that there were social advantages to be had from “being Church of England” and so she had the Nightingale sisters tutored in the tenets of the Anglican faith. The Nightingale family perhaps also felt obliged to associate with the Church of England when some property that her father inherited brought with it certain parochial duties.

Florence however couldn’t accept the Anglican Church’s endorsement of class distinctions and she rejected their overall theology.

Her father supervised and took the major responsibility for his daughters’ education which included classical and modern languages, history and philosophy and when she was 20, at Florence’s insistence, he also arranged for her to be tutored in mathematics.

All of these, plus other influences, inculcated Florence with a strong sense of public duty, an independence of thought, a fierce intellectual honesty and a radical and unconventional religious mysticism which went on to underpin her endeavours. Sadly though her background also left her with an unforgiving attitude towards her own faults and to those of others.

A further religious influence upon her was her friendship with the Sister Mary Clare Moore, the founding superior of the Irish Roman Catholic Sisters of Mercy in Bermondsey, London. In addition we also know that she was profoundly impressed by the practices and commitment of the Lutheran deaconesses that she observed in their hospital in Kaiserwerth, Germany in 1846.

She had what she regarded as four calls from God between 1837- 1861, the first being when she was 16 yrs old, and she recorded many of her prayers and conversations with God in her writings.

As a result of this call from God Florence felt driven into social action and service to those in need. Her spiritual vision and her professional identity were seamlessly combined. As she once put it: "My work is my must".

Finally, did Florence Nightingale ever have anything to do with Joyce Green Hospital or its predecessors ? The short answer is no.

As far as we know the nearest that she got to providing a service in this area was at Fort Pitt, built between 1805-1819 on the high ground of the boundary between Chatham and Rochester. It became a hospital for invalid soldiers in 1828 and an asylum was added in 1849. Miss Nightingale started the first Army Medical School there in 1860 but the hospital was closed in the 1920s and the site converted into a girl’s school.