Florence Nightingale, 1820-1910, “The Lady with the Lamp”
AM Psalm 102 • PM Psalm 107:1-32
Judges 14:20-15:20 • Acts 7:17-29 • John 4:43-54
When I was little, I don’t remember thinking much about what I wanted to be when I grew up, but, unlike most of my girlfriends, the one thing I knew I didn’t want to be was a nurse. An honorable vocation, open for women, yes, but it hadn’t always been that way. Until the mid-1800’s, nursing had been considered the menial work of only the lower, uneducated classes. That attitude was changed dramatically by one person, Florence Nightingale, memorialized today in the Episcopal Church calendar.
Born into an affluent British family, from a very young age Nightingale believed nursing to be her divine calling. Her parents did not support her choice, considering marriage and motherhood the proper work of a woman of her social standing. Despite their displeasure and the restrictive social code for wealthy young English women, Nightingale began ministering to the ill and poor of the village which neighbored her family’s estate in her teen years. At age twenty-four she enrolled as a nursing student at a Lutheran hospital in Germany. Through her experiences there, she was confirmed in her belief that God was calling her to the nursing profession.
Nightingale’s foundational work in health care reform during the Crimean War and later in England’s hospitals is well-documented, both in fact and fiction. Songs, plays, and poems—by as notable a poet as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—were written in her honor. But one fascinating aspect of her life was totally new to me, that of religious mystic and theologian.
A life-long Anglican, Nightingale was known to give spiritual as well as medical aid to dying prostitutes who feared they would be committed to everlasting punishment because of their way of life. Reminding them that they themselves were merciful, she told them God's mercy stretched beyond that of any human creature or any human imagining. Nightingale eventually wrote her own theological work, “Suggestions for Thought,” in which she described her belief in universal salvation, a view far from mainstream in the Church of England at the time. In it she wrote, “Certainly the worst man would hardly torture his enemy, if he could, forever. Unless God has a scheme that every man is to be saved forever, it is hard to say in what He is not worse than man. For all good men would save others if they could.” (1)
I was particularly struck by the similarity of thought to that of Charlotte Bronte, another woman of the same period who held compassionate, though heterodox and largely unpopular, religious beliefs. Bronte quietly worked out her doctrine of universalism through the guise of Gothicism in her novel Jane Eyre. More vehemently in later life she expressed her by then total belief in universal reconciliation in a letter to a friend, “Who that seriously anticipates an Eternity of Torment for half his race—can keep sane?” (2)
I am thankful for Florence Nightingale as the founder of modern nursing and for these two women of faith who uncompromisingly insisted on the all-encompassing, never-failing love of our Creator God.
O God, who gave grace to your servant Florence Nightingale to bear your healing love into the shadow of death: Grant to all who heal, the same virtues of patience, mercy, and steadfast love, that your saving health may be revealed to all; through Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.
Written by Kay DuVal
…who somewhere along the way chose to teach college English literature and language but who is thankful for those who put themselves into harm's way by showing patience, mercy, and love to the sick.
(1) Florence Nightingale's Theology: Essays, Letters and Journal Notes, Lynn McDonald, ed., 21 April 1816 – 31 March 1855, e-book obtainable through the University of Arkansas Libraries.
(2) DuVal, Katherine (Kay) Niell. Doctoral Dissertation. The Quiet Heretics: Religion and the Craft of the Bronte Sisters. pp.114-5. Available at University of Arkansas Main Library Annex and in Special Collections PR 4167.J5 D88 1991.