Florence Nightingale: The Woman and her Legend

Abstract

When Cecil Woodham Smith wrote the last comprehensive biography of Nightingale in 1950, authors did not have to reference their sources. She took advantage of this, altering quotations or relocating them to portray a family-induced neurosis that was becoming fashionable. She also copied too much from Edward Cook's evasive 1913 biography, perpetuating Cook's censorship of Nightingale's conflicts with Queen Victoria and the medical establishment. There is plenty of work for a new biographer to do besides correcting such defects; access to Nightingale's archive has improved, and there is new specialist literature to be summarised on her work for India or workhouse reform, for example. Mark Bostridge has admirably laid out the hard facts about her achievements in these and other areas, replacing the woolly admiration of earlier biographies. He also gives a more objective assessment of her relationship with her family, and an original and moving depiction of the loneliness and depression that she endured during her most productive years. Bostridge is also the first to demonstrate the origin of the popular myth that Nightingale did not believe in germs—her opposition was to ‘contagionism’, an idea which preceded germ theory and which maintained that disease was transmitted only by physical contact with a sick individual, not through the environment. She wrote influentially and relatively early of the need to kill germs, although she was never very keen on microbiology—she promoted grass-roots behavioural change rather than scientific research or high-profile projects. This choice, and her belief that she could ‘work better for others off the stage than on it’ makes it harder to evaluate her impact, but Bostridge's extensive research supports the theory that in the fifty years after the Crimean War she contributed to an unprecedented increase in life expectancy.