Florence Nightingale Quotes

I attribute my success to this:—I never gave or took an excuse.

I am of certain convinced that the greatest heroes are those who do their duty in the daily grind of domestic affairs whilst the world whirls as a maddening dreidel.

Rather, ten times, die in the surf, heralding the way to a new world, than stand idly on the shore.

You ask me why I do not write something.... I think one's feelings waste themselves in words, they ought all to be distilled into actions and into actions which bring results.

The very first requirement in a hospital is that it should do the sick no harm.

You have the most revolting Florence Nightingale complex,' said Mrs. Smiling. It is not that at all, and well you know it. On the whole, I dislike my fellow beings; I find them so difficult to understand. But I have a tidy mind and untidy lives irritate me. Also, they are uncivilized.

Live life when you have it. Life is a splendid gift-there is nothing small about it.

If I could give you information of my life it would be to show how a woman of very ordinary ability has been led by God in strange and unaccustomed paths to do in His service what He has done in her. And if I could tell you all, you would see how God has done all, and I nothing. I have worked hard, very hard, that is all; and I have never refused God anything.

Let whoever is in charge keep this simple question in her head (not, how can I always do this right thing myself, but) how can I provide for this right thing to be always done?

To understand God's thoughts we must study statistics, for these are the measure of his purpose.

Were there none who were discontented with what they have, the world would never reach anything better.

I can tell you're admiring my febrility. I know it's appealing, I practice at it; every woman loves an invalid. But be careful. You might do something destructive: hunger is more basic than love. Florence Nightingale was a cannibal you know.

I've been diagnosed as being bi-polar but so have Florence Nightingale and King David...which kinda leaves me in pretty dam good company...if I must say so.

So never lose an opportunity of urging a practical beginning, however small, for it is wonderful how often in such matters the mustard-seed germinates and roots itself.

Women never have a half-hour in all their lives (excepting before or after anybody is up in the house) that they can call their own, without fear of offending or of hurting someone. Why do people sit up so late, or, more rarely, get up so early? Not because the day is not long enough, but because they have 'no time in the day to themselves.' 1852

Woman has nothing but her affections,--and this makes her at once more loving and less loved.

People think me a sort of Florence Nightingale, but I have no heroic qualities. I simply don’t feel very much.

In these days before antiseptics, doctors themselves also suffered high mortality rates. Florence Nightingale, a nurse during the Crimean War (1853-1856), watched one particularly inept surgeon cut both himself and, somehow, a bystander while blundering about during an amputation. Both men contracted an infection and died, as did the patient. Nightingale commented that it was the only surgery she'd ever seen with 300 percent mortality.

A woman cannot live in the light of intellect. Society forbids it. Those conventional frivolities, which are called her 'duties', forbid it. Her 'domestic duties', high-sounding words, which, for the most part, are but bad habits (which she has not the courage to enfranchise herself from, the strength to break through), forbid it.

Unnecessary noise is the most cruel absence of care that can be inflicted on the sick or the well.

You told me this lawsuit isn’t about race. But that’s what started it. And it doesn’t matter if you can convince the jury I’m the reincarnation of Florence Nightingale—you can’t take away the fact that I am Black. The truth is, if I looked like you, this would not be happening to me.

Florence Nightingale was never called “the Lady with the Lamp,” but “the Lady with the Hammer,” an image deftly readjusted by the war reporter of the Times since it was far too coarse for the folks back home. Far from gliding about the hospital with her lamp aloft, Nightingale earned her nickname through a ferocious attack on a locked storeroom when a military commander refused to give her the medical supplies she needed.

What cruel mistakes are sometimes made by benevolent men and women in matters of business about which they can know nothing and think they know a great deal.

To her [Florence Nightingale] chiefly I owed the awakening to the fact that sanitation is the supreme goal of medicine its foundation and its crown.

I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took any excuse.

The most important pratical lesson that can be given to nurses is to teach them what to observe-how to observe-what symptoms indicate improvement-what the reverse-which are of importance-which are of none-which are the evidence of neglect-and of what kind of neglect.

It is often thought that medicine is the curative process. It is no such thing; medicine is the surgery of functions, as surgery proper is that of limbs and organs. Neither can do anything but remove obstructions; neither can cure; nature alone cures. Surgery removes the bullet out of the limb, which is an obstruction to cure, but nature heals the wound. So it is with medicine; the function of an organ becomes obstructed; medicine so far as we know, assists nature to remove the obstruction, but does nothing more. And what nursing has to do in either case, is to put the patient in the best condition for nature to act upon him.

To be "in charge" is certainly not only to carry out the proper measures yourself but to see that every one else does so too; to see that no one either willfully or ignorantly thwarts or prevents such measures. It is neither to do everything yourself nor to appoint a number of people to each duty, but to ensure that each does that duty to which he is appointed.

Inside the magic globe that Florence Nightingale carries, there are wishes and hopes and love. And all of these things are very tiny and also very bright. And there are thousands of wishes and hopes and love things, and they move around in the magic globe, and that’s what Florence uses to see by. That is how she sees soldiers who have fallen on the battlefield of life.

Little girls are the nicest things that can happen to people. They are born with a bit of angel-shine about them, and though it wears thin sometimes, there is always enough left to lasso your heart—even when they are sitting in the mud, or crying temperamental tears, or parading up the street in Mother’s best clothes. A little girl can be sweeter (and badder) oftener than anyone else in the world. She can jitter around, and stomp, and make funny noises that frazzle your nerves, yet just when you open your mouth, she stands there demure with that special look in her eyes. A girl is Innocence playing in the mud, Beauty standing on its head, and Motherhood dragging a doll by the foot. God borrows from many creatures to make a little girl. He uses the song of a bird, the squeal of a pig, the stubbornness of a mule, the antics of a monkey, the spryness of a grasshopper, the curiosity of a cat, the speed of a gazelle, the slyness of a fox, the softness of a kitten, and to top it all off He adds the mysterious mind of a woman. A little girl likes new shoes, party dresses, small animals, first grade, noisemakers, the girl next door, dolls, make-believe, dancing lessons, ice cream, kitchens, coloring books, make-up, cans of water, going visiting, tea parties, and one boy. She doesn’t care so much for visitors, boys in general, large dogs, hand-me-downs, straight chairs, vegetables, snowsuits, or staying in the front yard. She is loudest when you are thinking, the prettiest when she has provoked you, the busiest at bedtime, the quietest when you want to show her off, and the most flirtatious when she absolutely must not get the best of you again. Who else can cause you more grief, joy, irritation, satisfaction, embarrassment, and genuine delight than this combination of Eve, Salome, and Florence Nightingale. She can muss up your home, your hair, and your dignity—spend your money, your time, and your patience—and just when your temper is ready to crack, her sunshine peeks through and you’ve lost again. Yes, she is a nerve-wracking nuisance, just a noisy bundle of mischief. But when your dreams tumble down and the world is a mess—when it seems you are pretty much of a fool after all—she can make you a king when she climbs on your knee and whispers, "I love you best of all!

Lo importante no es lo que nos hace el destino, sino lo que nosotros hacemos de él.

Our choice, as Florence Nightingale put it, is between pain and paralysis. A hard one. But it’s only when we are willing to see the truth about our lives as women, however painful that truth might be, that we enter the portal of the journey.

You look extremely young," said Miss Nightingale.... "Age isn't really a matter of years, I find," returned Phemie. "I know people twice my age who will never be as old as I am now.

How many bones did he set?" I cared about it much less than they did. It's my Florence Nightingale calm, I suppose. There was a pause. "Twenty-seven," said Father. There was a question mark in that pause. "How many bones are in the hand?" Another pause. "Twenty-seven," said Eldric.

If a nurse declines to do these kinds of things for her patient, "because it is not her business," I should say that nursing was not her calling. I have seen surgical "sisters," women whose hands were worth to them two or three guineas a-week, down upon their knees scouring a room or hut, because they thought it otherwise not fit for their patients to go into. I am far from wishing nurses to scour. It is a waste of power. But I do say that these women had the true nurse-calling—the good of their sick first, and second only the consideration what it was their "place" to do—and that women who wait for the housemaid to do this, or for the charwoman to do that, when their patients are suffering, have not the making of a nurse in them.

The pivotal moment for Florence Nightingale was the realization that she was never going to be given what she knew she needed. She discovered, as she wrote in her journal, that she’d need to take it. She had to demand the life she wanted.

I must strive to see only God in my friends, and God in my cats.

The martyr sacrifices herself entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for she makes the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Her statistics were more than a study... For her, Quetelet was the hero as scientist, and the presentation copy of his Physique Sociale is annotated by her on every page. Florence Nightingale believed—and in all the actions of her life acted upon that belief—that the administrator could only be successful if he were guided by statistical knowledge. The legislator—to say nothing of the politician—too often failed for want of this knowledge.

Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves.(...) That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one's own. However, thanks to the toils of those obscure women in the past, of whom I wish we knew more, thanks, curiously enough, to two wars, the Crimean which let Florence Nightingale out of her drawing-room, and the European War which opened the doors to an average woman some sixty years later, these evils are in the way to be bettered. Otherwise you [the female students listening to the talk] would not be here tonight, and your chance of earning five hundred pounds a year, precarious as I am afraid that it still is, would be minute in the extreme. A Room of One's Own Chapter 6

I would earnestly ask my sisters to keep clear of both the jargons now current everywhere (for they are equally jargons); of the jargon, namely, about the "rights" of women, which urges women to do all that men do, including the medical and other professions, merely because men do it, and without regard to whether this is the best that women can do; and of the jargon which urges women to do nothing that men do, merely because they are women, and should be "recalled to a sense of their duty as women," and because "this is women's work," and "that is men's," and "these are things which women should not do," which is all assertion and nothing more. Surely woman should bring the best she has, whatever that is, to the work of God's world, without attending to either of these cries.

It seems a commonly received idea among men and even among women themselves that it requires nothing but a disappointment in love, the want of an object, a general disgust, or incapacity for other things, to turn a woman into a good nurse. This reminds one of the parish where a stupid old man was set to be schoolmaster because he was "past keeping the pigs.

Florence Nightingale saying, recorded on a wax tablet at the end of her life, “I hope that my voice may perpetuate the great work of my life.

I am of certain convinced that the greatest heroes are those who do their duty in the daily grind of domestic affairs whilst the world whirls as a maddening dreidel. FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE

Never lose an opportunity of urging a practical beginning, however small,” Florence Nightingale said, “for it is wonderful how often in such matters the mustard-seed germinates and roots itself.

It's both relaxing and invigorating to occasionally set aside the worries of life, seek the company of a friendly book and mingle with the great of the earth, counsel with the wise of all time, look into unlived days with prophets. Youth will delight in the heroic figures of Homer; or more modern, will thrill to the silent courage of Florence Nightingale on the battlefield...The power of Cicero's oratory may awaken new ambitions in the middle age, or the absurdity of Don Quixote riding mightily against a windmill may make your own pretentiousness seem ridiculous; if you think the world is against you, get the satisfaction of walking the streets of Athens with Diogenes, lantern in hand in broad daylight in search of an honest man...From the reading of 'good books' there comes a richness of life that can be obtained in no other way. It is not enough to read newspapers...But to become acquainted with real nobility as walks the pages of history and science and literature is to strengthen character and develop life in its finer meanings.

Fanny was upset when Crittenden criticized Florence Nightingale, the celebrated British nurse of the Crimean War, saying, “he thought it a very unwomanly thing for a gentle lady to go into a hospital of wounded men.

Mr Harrison taught him about Attila the Hun, Vlad Drakul, and the Darkness Intrinsicate in the Human Spirit. He tried to teach Warlock how to make rabble-rousing political speeches to sway the hearts and minds of multitudes. Mr Cortese taught him about Florence Nightingale10, Abraham Lincoln, and the appreciation of art. He tried to teach him about free will, self-denial, and Doing unto Others as You Would Wish Them to Do to You. They both read to the child extensively from the Book of Revelation.

You do not want the effect of your good things to be, "How wonderful for a woman!" nor would you be deterred from good things, by hearing it said, "Yes, but she ought not to have done this, because it is not suitable for a woman." But you want to do the thing that is good, whether it is "suitable for a woman" or not. It does not make a thing good, that it is remarkable that a woman should have been able to do it. Neither does it make a thing bad, which would have been good had a man done it, that it has been done by a woman. Oh, leave these jargons, and go your way straight to God's work, in simplicity and singleness of heart.

Longfellow captured the true heroism of Florence Nightingale in a poem. It wasn’t just her bravery, it wasn’t just the deprivations she endured without complaint. It was what she did for people. Honor to those whose words or deeds Thus help us in our daily needs, And by their overflow Raise us from what is low.

I can’t tell you how much I love kissing ass. Especially wealthy, cellulose-stippled ass. But I’ll smile as big as a personified yellow circle and assure the hiring manager that I was born to serve. I’ll tell him that while other kids wanted to be cops or firemen when they grew up, I wanted to be Florence Nightingale.

She suddenly realizes that Bob, the probable cancer patient, is standing in the hallway looking lost. She stops and tries to look concerned. 'Will you be okay?' As if I give a fuck. 'Yeah,' he replies forlornly. 'I'll be fine.' She gives him a quick kiss on the forehead – as sexual as Florence Nightingale on a TB ward – and rushes from the house.

Ze [Florence Nightingale] organiseerde ontelbare pacifistische congressen en de triomf van haar leven was dat ze Alfred Nobel, de uitvinder van het dynamiet, zo op het geweten werkte dat hij als compensatie voor het onheil dat hij met zijn uitvinding van het dynamiet had aangericht, de Nobelprijs voor de vrede en een beter internationaal begrip instelde.

Ignite the mind’s spark to rise the sun in you

The Victorian lady used regularly to retire for a ‘rest’ in the afternoon. She needed to do so because convention demanded that she should constantly be empathically alert to the needs of others without regard to any needs of her own. Her afternoon rest allowed her to recuperate from the social role of dutiful listener and ministering angel; a role which allowed no scope for self-expression. Even Florence Nightingale, who was far from being merely a ministering angel, found that the only way in which she could study and write was to develop a neurotic illness which released her from the burden of household duties and enabled her to retire to the solitude of the bedroom.

Women dream until they have no longer the strength to dream; those dreams against which they so struggle, so honestly, vigorously, and conscientiously, and so in vain, yet which are their life, without which they could not have lived; those dreams go at last. All their plans and visions seem vanished, and they know not where; gone and they cannot recall them. And they are left without the food either of reality or of hope.

Carolina Maria de Jesus wrote in her diary: 'Everyone has an ideal in life. Mine is to be able to read.' She is ambitious, but it is a strange ambition for a woman. She wants learning. She wants the pleasure of reading and writing. Men ask her to marry but she suspects that they will interfere with her reading and writing. They will resent the time she takes alone. They will resent the focus of her attention elsewhere. They will resent her concentration and they will resent her self-respect. They will resent her pride in herself and her pride in her unmediated relationship to a larger world of ideas, descriptions, facts. Her neighbors see her poring over books, or with pen and paper in hand, amidst the garbage and hunger of the favela. Her ideal makes her a pariah: her desire to read makes her more an outcast than if she sat in the street putting fistfuls of nails into her mouth. Where did she get her ideal? No one offered it to her. Two thirds of the world’s illiterates are women. To be fucked, to birth children, one need not know how to read. Women are for sex and reproduction, not for literature. But women have stories to tell. Women want to know. Women have questions, ideas, arguments, answers. Women have dreams of being in the world, not merely passing blood and heaving wet infants out of laboring wombs. 'Women dream,' Florence Nightingale wrote in Cassandra, 'till they have no longer the strength to dream; those dreams against which they so struggle, so honestly, vigorously, and conscientiously, and so in vain, yet which are their life, without which they could not have lived; those dreams go at last. . . . Later in life, they neither desire nor dream, neither of activity, nor of love, nor of intellect.

The rich world likes and wishes to believe that someone, somewhere, is doing something for the Third World. For this reason, it does not inquire too closely into the motives or practices of anyone who fulfills, however vicariously, this mandate. The great white hope meets the great black hole; the mission to the heathen blends with the comforting myth of Florence Nightingale. As ever, the true address of the missionary is to the self-satisfaction of the sponsor and the donor, and not to the needs of the downtrodden. Helpless infants, abandoned derelicts, lepers and the terminally ill are the raw material for demonstrations of compassion. They are in no position to complain, and their passivity and abjection is considered a sterling trait. It is time to recognize that the world’s leading exponent of this false consolation is herself a demagogue, an obscurantist and a servant of earthly powers.

(Florence) Nightingale's passion for statistics enabled her to persuade the government of the importance of a whole series of health reforms. for example, many people had argued that training nurses was a waste of time, because patients cared for by trained nurses actually had a higher mortality rate than those treated by untrained staff. Nightingale, however, pointed out that this was only because more serious cases were being sent to those wards with trained nurses. If the intention is to compare the results from two groups, then it is essential to assign patients randomly to the two groups. Sure enough, when Nightingale set up trials in which patients were randomly assigned to trained and untrained nurses, it became clear that the cohort of patients treated by trained nurses fared much better than their counterparts in wards with untrained nurses.

What are the great poetical names of the last hundred years or so? Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Landor, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Morris, Rossetti, Swinburne—we may stop there. Of these, all but Keats, Browning, Rossetti were University men, and of these three, Keats, who died young, cut off in his prime, was the only one not fairly well to do. It may seem a brutal thing to say, and it is a sad thing to say: but, as a matter of hard fact, the theory that poetical genius bloweth where it listeth, and equally in poor and rich, holds little truth. As a matter of hard fact, nine out of those twelve were University men: which means that somehow or other they procured the means to get the best education England can give. As a matter of hard fact, of the remaining three you know that Browning was well to do, and I challenge you that, if he had not been well to do, he would no more have attained to write Saul or The Ring and the Book than Ruskin would have attained to writing Modern Painters if his father had not dealt prosperously in business. Rossetti had a small private income; and, moreover, he painted. There remains but Keats; whom Atropos slew young, as she slew John Clare in a mad-house, and James Thomson by the laudanum he took to drug disappointment. These are dreadful facts, but let us face them. It is—however dishonouring to us as a nation—certain that, by some fault in our commonwealth, the poor poet has not in these days, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog’s chance. Believe me—and I have spent a great part of ten years in watching some three hundred and twenty elementary schools, we may prate of democracy, but actually, a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born.’ (cit. The Art of Writing, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch) Nobody could put the point more plainly. ‘The poor poet has not in these days, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog’s chance . . . a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born.’ That is it. Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one’s own. However, thanks to the toils of those obscure women in the past, of whom I wish we knew more, thanks, curiously enough to two wars, the Crimean which let Florence Nightingale out of her drawing-room, and the European War which opened the doors to the average woman some sixty years later, these evils are in the way to be bettered. Otherwise you would not be here tonight, and your chance of earning five hundred pounds a year, precarious as I am afraid that it still is, would be minute in the extreme.

Angels sleeps in her cell, her room which should be gay with cushions or theatre programmes or comic pottery, but isn't. The distant clocks have been chiming and ringing all night to pass the time. She lies on her stomach, to hide or protect time, one arm hanging over the edge of the bed, her head wrenched sideways. Everything about her now is unformed. Her intelligence has stopped working. She is herself and, as she flounders, flies, sinks from one dream to another, unrecognizable. What does myself look like? I mean, who am I? You are an examination result, dear. Perhaps, in time, a scholarship. Perhaps an Honors Degree. Try harder. But myself - I mean myself? Perhaps you could find yourself in the Guides, or in the New Testament somewhere. If not, we can provide various substitutes, such as Joan of Arc, Florence Nightingale, Nurse Cavell. It's really none of our business, but we do keep a few heroines handy, just in case. But how shall I deal with myself? What shall I do with myself all my life? You may look in the answer book. You must control yourself, discipline yourself, sacrifice yourself, respect yourself. If necessary you may defend yourself and able yourself, and to have confidence in yourself while effacing yourself is not entirely bad. You must never, however, love yourself or pity yourself, praise yourself or allow yourself to have either will or opinion. Never indulge yourself, never be conscious of yourself, never forget yourself and above all, never be centered in yourself. We hope this is understood? But if there is no one else to love, pity or praise? If no one else is conscious of me, remembers me, if I am no one's centre? That, dear, is what God is for. As Our Lord says, "Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings and not one of them is forgotten before God?" To forget yourself in one sense is desirable, whereas, as we have said, to forget yourself in another sense is not. Now if we rewrite those subjoined sentences, strengthening them by omission of caveats, trite quotations, indirect assertions and vulgarisms everything, we feel certain, will seem a great deal clearer; or, alternatively, more clear. She twists her head, hitting the mattress with a vague, feeble gesture. "But I'll never get there," she says, stating a proved fact. "I'll never get there." The clocks repeat themselves. She turns on her back and, still asleep, rubs her stomach with the unhappy, worried expression of a child who has eaten a sour apple.

No to marriage proposals, in which the concept of “forever,” as Florence Nightingale famously said, slid into “never.” As in never being wholly oneself; never being permitted to make up one’s own mind; never to be able to move about freely.

Immature people will not receive loving truth, no matter how gently you offer it. You can agonize over what to say, endlessly rehearse your future conversation, and then deliver your pearls of wisdom in a tone more tender than Florence Nightingale—and in the end, it won’t help. The immature want what they want, when they want it, and how they want it, even if having what they want damages you.

And now I also understand that no matter what she had said or done, it would never have been enough, since there is no comfort another person can offer you that is wholly satisfying. ‘Where shall I find God?’ Florence Nightingale once asked herself, and her answer? ‘In myself.’ In myself. In myself.

I think one's feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.” – Florence Nightingale

But Florence Nightingale was not born into such a family. She was, instead, born to a wealthy English couple who could afford a honeymoon that took several years and spanned the European continent. The honeymoon of William Edward and Frances Nightingale went on for so long that their two daughters were both born before the couple returned to their home in England. Florence was named after the Italian city where she was born. Her sister, Frances Parthenope,was similarly named in honor of her parents’ travels: Parthenopolis is an ancient Greek settlement in Naples.

Live life when you have it. Life is a splendid gift-there is nothing small about it. Florence Nightingale

When she was twenty-four, Florence indicated her interest in the nursing profession, but her parents were strongly opposed. It needs to be noted that, in the nineteenth century, nurses did not enjoy the reputation that they enjoy today. In fact, the reputation they enjoy today is largely due to the reforms brought about by Florence Nightingale. Nineteenth-century nurses fell into two categories: There were nursing nuns, who achieved a modicum of the respect due to their hard work and lives of strict sacrifice. Lay nurses, however, were another story. They were widely assumed to be alcoholics and victims, if not willing participants, of sexual harassment from patients and other medical professionals. Outside the church, nursing was the last refuge of a woman who could find no other way to earn her living. It was not, in brief, the career path that a young lady brought up in a wealthy Victorian home would consider—unless that young lady were Florence Nightingale.

The Harley Street clientele was a collection of sad women, indeed. They were governesses who were either very sick or out of work. Most of them were unwanted by their families. It is worth noting that, in Victorian England, governesses were almost invariably well-born young ladies whose families had fallen on hard times. They worked long hours for wealthy families, often put up with abusive children, and made a pittance. It was rare for a governess to save any significant amount of money. The Harley Street home was a way station for some and an end-of-life hospice for others.

Florence Nightingale’s greatest achievement was her ability to link infection to unclean environs despite the absence of the germ theory. Nightingale’s patients were also around a hundred years too early to benefit from the advent of antibiotics.

In a letter, she wrote that nursing would need to remain a profession of quiet and unthanked service, not an endeavor where employees would expect accolades or public recognition.

One hundred and fifty years ago, the respect we now have for nurses and the intense training that nurses must undergo was nothing but a seed in Florence Nightingale’s imagination. If we believe that nurses are some of the most respectable and hardworking people in our community, we owe that belief to Florence Nightingale.

England of 1840 expected its young, affluent women to be literate and culturally astute, but it provided no real occupation for women with energy and vision. Fields of endeavor that were open to energetic, ambitious men—the military, finance, law, medicine, manufacture—were effectively closed to women.

Nightingale had started to believe that, to be successful, nursing would need to be separate from the church, even though she believed that nursing was a spiritual calling.

The Crimean War earned the distinction of being the first time in British history that a medical corps was accused of negligence.

One soldier wrote home saying that he and his peers sought to kiss her shadow.

Benden daha talihsiz olanlara yardım etmeye niyetlendiğimde meteliksizdim; yani pek Florence Nightingale sayılmam.

KATHARINE HEPBURN: Ethel Merman is not going to play Florence Nightingale. Everybody has their limitations.

On my honor, I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country, to obey the Scout Law, to help other people at all times, to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight, except in instances where my morals are corrupted by unusually attractive medical bots willing me toward the Florence Nightingale effect, after which time I shall be rendered utterly inept.

Florence Nightingale was a nurse in the UK, in case you ever knew.

Unnecessary noise is the most cruel absence of care that can be inflicted on the sick or the well. —FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE

Anna Kelly was sitting beside Emmet’s bed. She wore a white cardigan over a pale blue dress. Her blonde hair, like Clio’s, was shiny and the colour of corn. Stevie hadn’t realised that she was such an attractive little thing. ‘Well, well. Lucky Emmet. His own little Florence Nightingale,’ he said admiringly.

I attribute my success to this - I never gave or took an excuse.

brain, as men did. Cassandra was, of course, Florence Nightingale. She wrote: Why have women passion, intellect, moral activity, and a place in society where no one of the three can be exercised?…Now, why is it more ridiculous for a man than for a woman to do worsted work and drive out every day in the carriage? Why should we laugh if we were to see a panel of men sitting around a drawing room table in the morning, and think it all right if they were women? Is man’s time more valuable than women’s?…Women

The very first element for having control over others is, of course, to have control over oneself. If I cannot take charge of myself, I cannot take charge of others. The next, perhaps, is—not to try to "seem" anything, but to be what we would seem. A person in charge must be felt more than she is heard—not heard more than she is felt. She must fulfil her charge without noisy disputes, by the silent power of a consistent life, in which there is no seeming, and no hiding, but plenty of discretion. She must exercise authority without appearing to exercise it.

Their 108-year wait for another title was the longest championship drought in sports. The last time they did win the World Series, in 1908, occurred in the lifetimes of Mark Twain, Florence Nightingale, Geronimo, Winslow Homer, and Joshua Chamberlain, and in a world when the Ottoman Empire still existed but the 19th Amendment, talking motion pictures, electrified traffic lights, and world wars did not.

You have the most revolting Florence Nightingale complex,” said Mrs Smiling.

A few decades earlier, Florence Nightingale had written that orphanhood was a woman’s prerequisite to an interesting life, that a woman’s mother, father, siblings — often, her entire family — needed to be dead so that she might be spared the obligations of a dutiful relation.

Kafka had his flies.

1. It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very first requirement in a hospital that it should do the sick no harm. 2. Were there none who were discontented with what they have, the world would never reach anything better. 3. The world is put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality. 4. Women have no sympathy and my experience of women is almost as large as Europe.

glory, at the Science Museum of London. Charles Babbage was a well-known scientist and inventor of the time. He had spent years working on his Difference Engine, a revolutionary mechanical calculator. Babbage was also known for his extravagant parties, which he called “gatherings of the mind” and hosted for the upper class, the well-known, and the very intelligent.4 Many of the most famous people from Victorian England would be there—from Charles Darwin to Florence Nightingale to Charles Dickens. It was at one of these parties in 1833 that Ada glimpsed Babbage’s half-built Difference Engine. The teenager’s mathematical mind buzzed with possibilities, and Babbage recognized her genius immediately. They became fast friends. The US Department of Defense uses a computer language named Ada in her honor. Babbage sent Ada home with thirty of his lab books filled with notes on his next invention: the Analytic Engine. It would be much faster and more accurate than the Difference Engine, and Ada was thrilled to learn of this more advanced calculating machine. She understood that it could solve even harder, more complex problems and could even make decisions by itself. It was a true “thinking machine.”5 It had memory, a processor, and hardware and software just like computers today—but it was made from cogs and levers, and powered by steam. For months, Ada worked furiously creating algorithms (math instructions) for Babbage’s not-yet-built machine. She wrote countless lines of computations that would instruct the machine in how to solve complex math problems. These algorithms were the world’s first computer program. In 1840, Babbage gave a lecture in Italy about the Analytic Engine, which was written up in French. Ada translated the lecture, adding a set of her own notes to explain how the machine worked and including her own computations for it. These notes took Ada nine months to write and were three times longer than the article itself! Ada had some awesome nicknames. She called herself “the Bride of Science” because of her desire to devote her life to science; Babbage called her “the Enchantress of Numbers” because of her seemingly magical math

Have you discussed it with Lady Helen yet?” Rhys asked. “Is that why she played Florence Nightingale while I had fever? To soften me in preparation for bargaining?” “Hardly,” Devon said with a snort. “Helen is above that sort of manipulation. She helped you because she’s naturally compassionate. No, she has no inkling that I’ve considered arranging a match for her.” Rhys decided to be blunt. “What makes you think she would be willing to marry the likes of me?” Devon answered frankly. “She has few options at present.

As the daughter of an earl, she would keep her title, even after she became your wife. Lady Helen Winterborne.” Devon was wily enough to understand how the sound of that would affect him. Lady Helen Winterborne…yes, Rhys bloody-fucking-well loved that. He had never dreamed of marrying a respectable woman, much less a daughter of the peerage. But he wasn’t fit for her. He was a Welshman with a rough accent and a foul mouth, and vulgar origins. A merchant. No matter how he dressed or improved his manners, his nature would always be coarse and competitive. People would whisper, seeing the two of them together…They would agree that marrying him had debased her. Helen would be the object of pity and perhaps contempt. She would secretly hate him for it. Rhys didn’t give a damn. He had no illusions of course, that Devon was offering him Lady Helen’s hand without conditions. There would be a hefty price: The Ravenels’ need for money was dire. But Helen was worth whatever he would have to pay. His fortune was even vaster than people suspected; he could have purchased a small country if he so desired. “Have you discussed it with Lady Helen yet?” Rhys asked. “Is that why she played Florence Nightingale while I had fever? To soften me in preparation for bargaining?” “Hardly,” Devon said with a snort. “Helen is above that sort of manipulation. She helped you because she’s naturally compassionate. No, she has no inkling that I’ve considered arranging a match for her.” Rhys decided to be blunt. “What makes you think she would be willing to marry the likes of me?” Devon answered frankly. “She has few options at present.

Have you discussed it with Lady Helen yet?” Rhys asked. “Is that why she played Florence Nightingale while I had fever? To soften me in preparation for bargaining?” “Hardly,” Devon said with a snort. “Helen is above that sort of manipulation. She helped you because she’s naturally compassionate. No, she has no inkling that I’ve considered arranging a match for her.” Rhys decided to be blunt. “What makes you think she would be willing to marry the likes of me?” Devon answered frankly. “She has few options at present. There is no occupation fit for a gentlewoman that would afford her a decent living, and she would never lower herself to harlotry. Furthermore, Helen’s conscience won’t allow her to be a burden on someone else, which means that she’ll have to take a husband. Without a dowry, either she’ll be forced to wed some feeble old dotard who can’t work up a cock-stand or someone’s inbred fourth son. Or…she’ll have to marry out of her class.” Devon shrugged and smiled pleasantly. It was the smile of a man who held a good hand of cards. “You’re under no obligation, of course: I could always introduce her to Severin.” Rhys was too experienced a negotiator to show any reaction, even though a burst of outrage filled him at the suggestion. Staying outwardly relaxed, he murmured, “Perhaps you should. Severin would take her at once. Whereas I would probably be better off marrying the kind of woman I deserve.” He paused, contemplating his wineglass, turning it so one last tiny red drop rolled across the inside. “However,” he said, “I always want better than I deserve.” All his ambition and determination had converged into a single desire…to marry Lady Helen Ravenel. She would bear his children, handsome blue-blooded children. He would see that they were educated and raised in luxury, and he would lay the world at their feet. Someday, by God, people would beg to marry Winterbornes.

..what Raymie thought as they rose to the surface together was that it was the easiest thing in the world to save somebody. For the first time, she understood Florence Nightingale and her lantern and the bright and shining path... For just a minute, she understood everything in the whole world.

To attempt to keep a ward warm at the expense of making the sick repeatedly breathe their own hot, humid, putrescing atmosphere is a certain way to delay recovery or to destroy life.

Every woman, or at least almost every woman, in England has, at one time or another of her life, charge of the personal health of somebody, whether child or invalid,—in other words, every woman is a nurse.

[Florence Nightingale's] sister's condition was all too common among many a well-off spinster, 'condemned to spend her days in a meaningless round of trivial occupations, which ate away at her vital strength.' Parthenope's illness, Florence thought, was simply caused by boredom, 'by the conventional life of the present phase of civilisation, which fritters away all that is spiritual in women.' Watching Parthenope lose her sanity, her strength, even the ability to walk, had left Florence aghast. She observed that all around her women were 'going mad for the want of something to do'. She was determined to avoid this fate for herself.

Muzeul Florence Nightingale, aflat în incinta unui spital din Londra,

You are so self-righteous, you think you’re better than the rest of us just because you’re Florence Nightingale.” “Florence Nightingale was a nurse. I am a doctor.” “See what I mean? One little degree from Cambridge and you think you’re god’s gift.